Last winter, the surest way to get a Lib Dem to ring you back was to mention the words ‘boundary changes’. Better still to write a piece criticising the party’s decision to scupper the reforms as a revenge for the collapse of Lords reform, and no matter whether it was late at night or early on a Saturday morning when all normal people are still hiding under their duvets or sitting self-consciously in independent coffee shops, the Lib Dems would ring very quickly indeed. The same thing is happening now over the plan to relax childcare ratios. This morning I wrote as a throwaway comment that the party was blocking a reform that it had initially given the nod to. Oh no, came the very swift Lib Dem response. This was Tory spin: ‘We agreed to a consultation and made it clear our support would be based on the result of that,’ says one source close to Nick Clegg.
The Tories think this exchange of letters leaked to James Landale proves that Clegg did give the policy the nod. I also understand that there were significant negotiations that took place between the two parties on this issue before it was even announced which resulted in considerable watering-down of certain proposals to ensure the Lib Dem sign-off on the announcement.
The policy is now out of the hands of the Education department and has become a David Cameron vs Nick Clegg issue. Whether it survives could depend on whether one man wants a concession on something else from the other.
It will also be a key test of how healthy the Coalition is. But all indications around Whitehall are that the plans are dead. At the moment, the way the two parties are behaving over this makes the government look a little like an old couple pootling through a shopping centre, bickering about whose fault it is that they’ve run out of onions. Which is a little sad, given we’ve just reached the third anniversary of the formation of this noble government in the national interest.
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