Nick Clegg described the photograph tweeted last week by the former shadow attorney general as “drippingly patronising and jaw-droppingly condescending”.
Emily Thornberry resigned on Wednesday night after she tweeted an image of a house decked with St George flags, and with a white van in the driveway.
The tweet was taken as a sign that Labour frontbench was out of touch with working-class voters, but some claimed the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, had panicked in his reaction when faced with criticism from the Conservative press and some his MPs.
Clegg said the tweet was a “drippingly patronising thing to do – maybe it is what happens when you become MP for Islington. I just thought it was a jaw-droppingly condescending way of treating someone who is just proudly hanging some flags outside their home. What is wrong with that ?”
The deputy prime minister also revealed he will never serve in a coalition government cabinet that included the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, adding: “The feeling is probably pretty mutual.”
He said what Farage represented was “the politics of fear, the politics of blame, the politics of vilifying foreigners and the politics of self harm by pulling the drawbridge up and driving the economy into recession is just a politics that the Liberal Democrats could ever compromise with.
“Compromising with a party that wants to turn the clock back to the 1950s; has a very regressive attitude towards women; that has at best a very ambivalent attitude to the NHS. I just cannot see the Liberal Democrats and Ukip in the same political space.”
He argued that despite the recent disappointing byelection results for the Lib Dems there was still a big political space in the centre of British politics that his party could occupy.
He disclosed he would be travelling to Germany on Wednesday to discuss Europe-wide action to restrict access to benefits for EU migrants. “I think we can go further in concert with our EU partners,” he said.
