THE European Union last night agreed a multi-billion pound bailout of Nick Clegg’s storm-tossed emotions.

European finance ministers said the rescue package would prevent the deputy prime minister from staring out the window for hours or turning up to Parliament in his underpants with ‘help me’ scrawled across his chest in blackcurrant jam.

Under the plan each student in Britain will be paid £9000 a year to be Mr Clegg’s best friend, with bonus payments for singing him to sleep or entertaining him with a puppet show.

Britain’s newspapers will receive multi-million pound EU grants for training their journalists not to ask Mr Clegg unfriendly questions about the prime minister’s affair with News International.

And more than £300m will be spent filling the Lib Dem leader’s iPod with remastered versions of the entire Funkadelic back catalogue as a direct replacement for whatever is making him cry.

An EU spokesman said: “It’s not an exact science and we won’t know if the fiscal medicine is working until he talks to his nine year-old son.

“If the child tells him about a painting he did at school it means the situation is stabilising. But if he says ‘papa, why is a dreadlocked, middle class white man squeezing dog jobbies through the letter box?’ then it may need a second tranche of emergency funding.”

Meanwhile critics have stressed that Mr Clegg’s £135,000 salary, chauffeur-driven Jaguar and rent free 115-room mansion in Kent should be more than enough to help him cope with being called a dick by some fucking students.