Will the government abolish control orders? Or are unconvicted terrorist suspects still going to have their movements and contacts restricted under these much-criticised ‘gag and tag’ orders?

‘Control orders cannot continue in their current form,’ insisted the deputy prime minister last week. ‘They must be replaced.’ Note that Nick Clegg said ‘replaced’, not ‘abolished’. He went on to promise a substitute that was ‘more proportionate’.

Clegg believes that ‘virtual house arrest’ is unacceptable for suspects not facing criminal charges. On the other hand, he acknowledges the ‘inescapable reality that there are a small number of people who... want to cause immense damage to us and, for some reason or other, good or bad, we are not able to get them into courts’.

Those people, it seems, will still be subject to a daily curfew – but not, perhaps, for as long as the current maximum of 16 hours.

It sounds as if we are to have a compromise that will please nobody. Suspects will be allowed to leave home for longer periods, which means they are more likely to abscond and the security services will have to spend more time following them round the streets. But control orders will remain, reminding the Liberal Democrats once again that being in government means making harsh choices.

The human rights organisation Liberty will continue to argue that there would be no need for control orders if intercepted communications could be used in evidence. And the security services will continue to insist that this would expose their methods and jeopardise their ability to disrupt future terrorist plots. The more successful they are, the more the public is lulled into a false sense of security.

According to some critics, it’s all the fault of the human rights convention – which prevents the UK from deporting jihadis to countries where they may face torture. But even if we were to denounce the convention, leave the Council of Europe and jeopardise our membership of the EU, we would still not be able to deport home-grown terrorists. And I’m not sure I’d feel much safer here in Britain if known al-Qaida operatives were freed to launch attacks from abroad.

Liberal Democrats such as Lord Carlile QC, who is soon to be succeeded as the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation by David Anderson QC, have long recognised that control orders are the least worst option. It looks as if Clegg, too, has become a ‘liberal mugged by reality’, to borrow Irving Kristol’s definition of neo-conservatives.

The deputy prime minister was on much safer ground last week when he previewed the government’s plans for libel reform. ‘Our aim is to turn English libel laws from an international laughing stock to an international blueprint,’ he said – no mean feat if he can pull it off.

‘We will be publishing a draft defamation bill in the spring,’ Clegg promised. ‘We intend to provide a new statutory defence for those speaking out in the public interest, whether they be big broadcasters or the humble blogger. And we intend to clarify the law around the existing defences of fair comment and justification.’

Clegg hinted at some sort of threshold for bringing a libel action, saying that ‘claimants should not be able to threaten claims on what are essentially trivial grounds’. Quite how this would work was not made clear, although it may be linked to new restrictions on claims brought by people from abroad against publications with only tenuous links to the UK – so-called ‘libel tourism’. He also promised to ‘address the high costs of defamation proceedings’.

These reforms are likely to be popular, and rightly so. But we must not forget that the libel courts have an honourable role in establishing the truth or otherwise of serious allegations. Thanks to Mr Justice Gray, we can justifiably describe the discredited historian David Irving as one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial. Thanks to Mr Justice Eady, we know that two nursery nurses from Newcastle, Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, had been falsely accused of abusing children in their care. In 2002, the two were ‘vindicated and recognised as innocent citizens’.

In his speech to the Institute for Government, an independent research unit, Clegg also found time to flesh out some of the government’s other plans.

‘By next month,’ he said, ‘we will be putting forward a freedom bill: legislation that will bring together a number of measures, for example: to better regulate CCTV; to properly control the way councils use surveillance powers; to limit the powers of state inspectors to enter into your house; and to end the indefinite storage of innocent people’s DNA.’

All good stuff, though legislative micro-management of this sort is not entirely consistent with the lord chancellor’s forthcoming repeals bill, which Clegg promised would ‘wipe unnecessary and obsolete laws and regulations from the statute book’.

Our final treat will be greater access to official information – though not enough to satisfy the well-respected Campaign for Freedom of Information. It is fortunate that Clegg and Cameron are too young to remember the lessons of 1997, when a fresh-faced Tony Blair signed up to Lord Irvine’s freedom of information and human rights legislation and then spent the rest of his premiership regretting it.

Still, we won’t have to wait too long to discover whether the coalition’s feet become equally cold as these reforms bed in. The 30-year rule for disclosure of government papers is soon to become a 20-year rule. Clegg must be sure he won’t be around when we find out what he really thinks in 2031.