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Paper Monitor

11:16 UK time, Monday, 11 March 2013

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

On a slow Monday morning, the choice in today's papers is not so much about the lead stories, which are - to use celebrity magazine parlance - "worryingly thin, but the lead pictures.

Readers can take their pick from the following portraits: Paul Gascoigne, Vicky Pryce or Nick Clegg.

Firstly in the Sun and the Mirror, Paul Gascoigne is pictured just out of rehab, and looking a lot better than he did a month or so ago. SIR ALEX PLEA SAVED MY LIFE reads the Sun's headline. The Mirror - in a tacit and sad acknowledgement that it's been here before - says: "It''s all down to you now, mate."

Then there's Vicky Pryce. The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail features snaps of the economist - who's due to be sentenced today - buying cheap-looking bin bags, as if this somehow encapsulates the pathos of her situation.

PRYCE STOCKS UP IN CASE OF LONG STAY AWAY reads the Telegraph headline, as though she was getting ready for a five-year stretch.

Finally, Nick Clegg. Why is he pictured in the Mail? Not because he has any connection to the paper's main political story - a riposte to church criticism of government welfare reforms by the "devout Roman Catholic" minister Ian Duncan Smith.

Have you noticed how, in the newspaper lexicon, Roman Catholics are always "devout", and protestants "staunch" in the same way that mining communities are always "close-knit"? (With kudos to Fritz Spiegl.)

No, Mr Clegg is pictured, because he's making an arm movement that looks a bit like (but isn't) dancing Gangnam style.

This rather makes Paper Monitor wonder if the Lib Dems are out of touch. After all, as any 11-year-old knows, Gangnam Style is sooo two months ago.

If Clegg were really down with the kids, he'd be doing the Harlem Shake.

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