Out of date opinion (1) - Nick Clegg

I should have posted this around the time of the Lib Dem conference, but for various reasons (mainly that I couldn't be bothered) I didn't get around to it.
I'm wondering why Nick Clegg is so unpopular. After the election, he was faced with a near impossible situation. The Lib Dems' preferred partners for a coalition would be Labour, but there were two main reasons why they could not embark on this course.
Firstly, Labour had clearly lost the election and Gordon Brown had been rejected by the electorate. Propping up Labour as the government and Brown as PM would be a kick in the teeth for democracy.
Secondly, the numbers didn't add up anyway. Even the combined total of Labour and Lib Dem MP's would not have constituted a majority in the House of Commons. Any coalition with Labour would also have required other parties to join, such as Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, and Northern Ireland MP's which would have created a very unwieldy and unstable coalition at the mercy of factions even smaller than the Lib Dems themselves - and still with a very small majority in the Commons.
The second course of action open to Clegg was to refuse to join a coalition at all which would mean leaving the Tories to govern with a minority government, or force a second election. If there was a second election (at great cost to the taxpayer), the result would have been a Conservative majority, so we'd have waited longer, at greater cost, for roughly the same scenario (only without the Lib Dems having any opportunity at all to influence government actions whatsoever).
The Lib Dems may not like the current electoral system, but at least they are playing by the rules. Out of the coalition's 363 MP's, they have 57 - approximately 16 percent. So 16 percent of the coalition's policies should be Lib Dem policy, which seems about right so far. Which leaves 84%  as Conservative policy, the major part of which is the spending review and associated cuts. Quite why Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems are being blamed for these is unclear - and unfair.