After a year in power, Conservatives are happy and Liberal Democrats are downcast, but the British coalition parties still need each other, writes MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
THE LOUD BANGING of tables in committee room 14 at the House of Commons on Wednesday evening told its own story. The Conservative backbenchers’ 1922 committee was in contented mood.
One year on, last May’s optimistic talk of new politics during the coalition’s “glad confident morning” (to borrow from the poet Robert Browning) has been shelved. Instead, the pragmatic need to survive is paramount. But the Conservatives are having by far the better of the bargain, even if UK opinion polls show the government sliding in popularity.
In English council elections the Conservatives made gains (extraordinary for a party in power) while the alternative-vote (AV) referendum saw electoral reform for Westminster ruthlessly killed off. In Scotland the party held its own, while the results in the Welsh assembly elections were good.
For their junior coalition partners, on the other hand, life is appalling. The Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, has become a political hate figure, and many of his party’s hard-won council gains, built up over years, have been snatched away. The party has also retreated in Scotland and Wales.
Since the elections Clegg has been forced to adopt a more vigorous role in coalition, promising “muscular liberalism” and claiming credit for things he has stopped the Conservatives doing while emphasising the need for the government to continue.
And continue it will, despite the more hysterical recent commentary. Liberal Democrat ministers may want to push for an advantage over their Tory colleagues, but they don’t want to give up their ministerial red boxes.
Dangers exist, however, on every front. Late on Wednesday Liberal Democrat peers in the House of Lords vetoed Conservative plans for elected police commissioners – a high priority, bizarrely, for Cameron. On health reforms in England, the Liberal Democrats want major changes. Many Conservatives, too, want the same, as long as the core elements of the reforms are kept, but they do not want the junior coalition partners to claim credit.
In the longer term the issue is whether, as the constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor puts it, the coalition “rots from the ground up”, with the Liberal Democrats seeing grassroots membership drift away. There are already signs of this happening, with the defection of some of the Liberal Democrat councillors elected last week and Labour attempting to pick off low-hanging fruit in the third party’s ranks.
Clegg’s options are limited. He must press the Liberal Democrat agenda in power and ensure that the party does not remain a human shield for the Conservatives, but he also needs to convince voters that coalitions work.
Presentationally, Clegg is performing disastrously, looking tired and occasionally petulant. Half of all voters polled say that the deputy prime minister is out of his depth; more than a third judge that he is weak; and his reputation is unlikely ever to recover from his abandonment of his opposition to tuition fees, regardless of his reasons for doing so.
Equally, Cameron has been lucky. Initially he was minded to steer clear of campaigning in the AV referendum, the Liberal Democrats’ prize for entry to the coalition. Conservative backbenchers, however, firmly told him otherwise. The Liberal Democrats will never forgive Cameron for his subsequent determined opposition to AV, but there is little doubt that he had no choice. The atmosphere in committee room 14 would have been entirely different if the result had been other than it was.
But dangers lurk for Cameron too. He is not trusted by many in his own ranks, who rightly believe that he opted for coalition not just because the numbers made sense but also because he wanted to tie the hands of his right-wingers.
Although AV is no more, some MPs give Cameron little credit for this, believing that they forced him to campaign. But they admit that he did it well in the end. “He was told: ‘You lose AV, you are f***ing gone,’ ” says one Conservative backbencher.
For now, however, Cameron needs Clegg, and vice versa. Under the coalition deal they agreed that this parliament would last for five years, though the legislation necessary to enforce that has not yet gone through the House of Lords.
Neither man wants an election, even if a crisis should occur before the fixed term becomes law. Whatever the timing, the Liberal Democrats look set to suffer major losses. Cameron, at least, can hope for better days if the economic figures come right in time.
