The success of the talks to that point were underlined on Saturday evening when Conservative leader David Cameron and Clegg met face-to-face for a 70-minute private meeting.

Talks resumed on Sunday, with the Conservative team including Cameron's number 2 George Osborne, currently the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, and William Hague, former leader and current shadow foreign secretary.

The talks lasted six hours, and both parties said good progress had been made.

British General elections

Later on Sunday Clegg met Prime Minister Brown, who remains in post until a new government is agreed, for private talks.

Brown, who had returned to London for the talks from his Scottish constituency home, was clinging to the slim hope that he might yet remain in office if he could swing a coalition with the Liberal Democrats and several of the smaller parties in British politics.

His party also clung to the hope of remaining in power through this route, but media reported that senior figures were prepared to ditch Brown as leader and prime minister if that was part of the coalition demands.

The relationship between Brown and Clegg was rumored to be poor. The BBC reported a highly-placed Liberal Democrat source as saying the conversation went badly after Clegg mentioned that Brown should resign, at which point Brown was alleged to have launched into a tirade.

However, both the Liberal Democrats and a spokesman for the prime minister issued press statements on Saturday denying this, and the prime minister's spokesman described the phone conversation as "short but amicable."

The left-of-center Liberal Democrats are ideologically closer to the center-left Labor party than the right-of-centre Conservatives, and their key demand of electoral reform has some high-ranking supporters in the Labor party. Brown had also committed his party to a referendum on electoral reform.

However, it could be a bad political move for the Liberal Democrats to bolster a party and prime minister who were so comprehensively rejected by the voters, a fear which lay behind Clegg's indication on Friday that he would talk to the Conservatives first.

On Saturday Clegg outlined what his priorities for an agreement with the Conservatives were. He said: "I'm very keen the Liberal Democrats should enter into discussions with other parties as we are doing in a constructive spirit. That's precisely what we will do in the coming hours and days."

Clegg named four main priorities in talk -- schools, tax reform, economic policy and "fundamental political reform to our political system".

Electoral reform, which is a key demand of the Liberal Democrats, is strongly opposed by Cameron and most of his Conservative party.