Nick Clegg was phoning around his most senior colleagues yesterday after he was reported to have listed their faults out loud on a crowded aircraft.

The Liberal Democrat leader described as “almost complete fiction” an account of his private conversation on a flight to Inverness. But the partial denial is unlikely to spare Mr Clegg severe embarrassment caused by the report in the Sunday Mirror.

According to the newspaper’s reporter — who was in the seat in front of Mr Clegg and his aide, Danny Alexander — the party supremo spent the journey plotting a reshuffle.

“Webb must go,” he is alleged to have said of Steve Webb, his climate change and energy spokesman. “He’s a problem. I can’t stand the man. We need a new spokesman. We have to move him.

“We need someone with good ideas. At the moment, they just don’t add up.”

Mr Clegg is said to have then added: “But we need to keep him in the Cabinet. As a backbencher, he’d be a pain in the a***, a voice for the Left. And we can’t move him before the spring.” Mr Clegg also discussed demoting Chris Huhne, the man whom he beat for the top job, and said that Julia Goldsworthy was “being patronised” in her current job covering communities and local government, according to the reporter’s account.

David Laws was praised as having a “forensic intelligence” but Mr Clegg is said to have revealed that his political ally was “not enjoying” his current brief as education spokesman.

More damaging, Mr Clegg was reported to have said that he would consider entering a coalition after the next election. “I would think about it,” he is reported to have told Mr Alexander. “But only if the Tories lose. And I can’t imagine that.”

The conversation is alleged to have taken place on a 9.30am flybe flight from Gatwick to Inverness last week. Asked about it yesterday, Mr Clegg said that it was “almost complete fiction”.

His spokeswoman later said that the Lib Dem leader would not be drawn on which elements of the report he accepted were accurate.

“If someone wants to take titbits they think they overheard on a noisy plane and turn it into a story, good for them,” she said.

Mr Clegg phoned Mr Webb and other senior Lib Dems yesterday in an attempt to limit the fallout from the article.

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