Laws’s resignation is a disaster for the coalition in all but one respect

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics

Straight after David Cameron had announced his final offer to the Liberal Democrats — a referendum on Westminster’s voting system in exchange for entering into coalition — I bumped into a member of the Tory Cabinet. I asked him if he thought that the offer was unnecessary seeing as a ‘coalition of the losers’ between the Labour and the Liberal Democrats was so unlikely to succeed. This Tory disagreed. He argued that the reward — the reunification of the right — was well worth the risk.

My companion soon warmed to his theme. He set about explaining how a Liberal-Tory coalition is what Churchill would have wanted, that it would bring together the two strands of right-wing thinking in this country that had been separated by quarrels over social issues. Look, he said, at David Laws. He was an economic liberal but was not a Tory because of ‘Section 28 and all that stuff’. Section 28 was the part of the 1988 Local Government Act that banned the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ in schools — many classical liberals have never forgiven the Tories for it.

Ever since becoming leader, Cameron has attempted to show that the Tories have changed, that it is no longer the party of Section 28. There has been an apology for Section 28 and in his first conference speech as party leader, Cameron talked about how marriage should be supported whether it was between a man and a woman, a woman and a woman or a man and a man. But it is still the intersection of politics and sexuality that is endangering the success of this project.

David Laws resigned because he broke the rules on claiming expenses.