Was the Coalition a Mistake?

Tim Montgomerie is a bonnie fighter but his essay in this week’s magazine (Subscribe from as little as £1 a week!) is a splendid example of the pundit’s fallacy: if matters were arranged as I think they should be everything would be for the best and David Cameron would have a thumping majority. Well, maybe even if past experience suggests the kind of “Mainstream” Conservatism (has that label been ditched, yet?) Tim favours had a limited electoral appeal. That was then, however, and this is now. (It’s also fair to note that Tim accepts a good deal of the Cameron Project).

Tim complains that “The Cameroons’ mistake was to combine a moderate leader with a milk-and-water agenda”. Nevermind that milk and water might be deemed appropriate given the austerity of the age or that it’s not even obvious, given that austerity, the public – not to be confused with Tory members – have an appetite for what one might term the kind of “firewater” approach favoured by the Tory right. No, remember instead that many voters think this really is a rather radical government. The squeeze on public spending, necessary and proper thought it is, disconcerts many people. Combine that perception with the genuine progress being made – as, to be fair, Tim notes – on education and welfare and you have more than enough for a reforming government to be getting on with.

Yes, you can find plenty of polling to support “tougher” measures on matters such as Europe. But what vexes voters ought not to be confused with what is urgent. Government is a triage exercise and fiscal policy, education and welfare is a good start. Besides, you need to leave something for a second term…

Tim’s suspicion that the coalition is hopelessly compromised and, consequently, a feeble beast appears to have hardened so thoroughly that he now believes it shouldn’t have been born at all. Here’s how he puts it:

The Tory leader should have listened to his members at the time of the coalition negotiations. He should have formed a minority government, governed for a few months, laid out his programme and then asked the people to vote again. It would not have been a course without risk, but the party had the money, the leader and the sense of national emergency that should have allowed it to defeat a demoralised Labour party second time around.

Well, perhaps that would have happened. But “not have been a course without risk” seems a trifle glib since it’s equally possible that a second – and unecessary – election would have produced a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition led by David Miliband. Clearly that’s a matter of conjecture too but it seems one possible alternative outcome. I’m not sure the markets would have been reassured by the inherent weakness of a minority government, nor that Cameron and Osborne could have made much of a start on anything before calling their snap election.

Again, the public may accept the need for public spending cuts but by and large they show little sign of welcoming them and I’m not sure that they’d necessarily have welcomed a second, wholly voluntary, election far less reward the man who called it. Perhaps I’m wrong and Tim is right that a more “robust” approach to europe, energy policy, crime and immigration would have tided the coalition through it’s mid-term unpopularity but there seem several obvious weaknesses to that approach, not the least of them being that they might well have cost Cameron the personal popularity which has been one of his and the Tories’ greatest strengths.

Much of Tim’s piece is a rebuke to Matthew Parris who asked last week:

Suppose the item had appeared in the Guardian during Tony Blair’s prime-ministership, had been headlined ‘Top ten mistakes of Tony Blair’ and had described what Labour party activists thought were Mr Blair’s mistakes. After wondering why Labour’s core supporters had been given the role of nominating the PM’s mistakes, you’d have read on, muttering ‘No doubt they think he’s not left-wing enough. Let’s hope he takes no notice of them.’

This seems broadly correct. And so is this:

Tim wants the party to return to the stockade. He is not so stupid as to call this a ‘core vote strategy’, which might suggest a paring down of support. Instead, he seems to believe the rest of the country would be hammering on the stockade’s walls to get in, too, if only Cameron and his colleagues returned there.

I concede that it must aggravate True Believers that the public remains immune to their charms but there it is. They are.

Finally, and on a minor point, may I suggest that it’s absurd for Tim Montgomerie – former Chief of Staff to a Tory leader, founder of the Conservative Christian Fellowship and the Centre for Social Justice and now editor of a considerably influential Tory website bankrolled by a former chairman of the Conservative Party – to rail against “elite” opinion when by any sensible definition he’s a fully-paid up member of the political elite himself!

Nevertheless, there’s lots to chew on in Time’s piece so you should purchase the magazine and read it.