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. His motivation, he said, was not greed but a desire to keep his sexuality secret. He did not want to admit to the Commons authorities that he and his male landlord had become an item, which technically disqualified him from claiming his rent against expenses. Laws was so determined to maintain his privacy that when he had a car picking him up for an interview, he arranged for it to meet him at Lib Dem HQ in Westminster rather than at his south London home.
Gay Tories have mused that if Laws was one of them, he might well have come out. They say that the party hierarchy has been so keen to rid the Tories of their ‘nasty party’ image on these issues that they have been positively encouraging to any Tory who wants to come out. The Liberal Democrats, who don’t have the same baggage, have not put these structures in place. In addition, they were not prepared for the scrutiny that major party politicians have to endure. The Laws story demonstrates that the Liberal Democrats did not do the research on their own front bench that the Tories did once the Telegraph started printing off the expenses data. This lack of internal vetting suggests there may be some other unwelcome headlines in store.
With Laws in charge of the cuts as Chief Secretary, the coalition was more likely than not to succeed. Without him, this is far less certain. That is why the coalition is determined to let Laws act as an informal adviser to his far less experienced successor, Danny Alexander. After all, some Laws is better than no Laws. Some Tories argue that Laws should offer guidance behind the scenes before returning to the Cabinet in six months’ time.
The belief that one great man is essential to the success of an enterprise might seem as Victorian as the Gladstonian Liberalism that Laws was seen to represent. But he really was the lynchpin of this government. George Osborne believed that a Lib Dem Chief Secretary was essential so that both sides were bound into the cuts that will be necessary to bring down the deficit. In the coalition negotiations, Osborne pushed hard for a Lib Dem to take on this role. Laws was uniquely well-suited to the task. Not only did he have a fluency with numbers, but he also believed that the biggest challenge for the Liberal Democrats was to prove that they were capable of taking tough decisions. There was no danger that the Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary would act as a brake on deficit reduction. When officials mentioned to Laws that borrowing was lower than expected and tax revenues higher, he didn’t treat this as an opportunity to go slow on cuts.
He also reassured Tory MPs. Many of them worried that the coalition meant the Tory party was in office but not in power. But Laws’s readiness to make cuts and defend them against all comers was persuading many of them of the benefits of coalition. On Thursday night, one senior Tory backbencher told me that Laws’s performance so far had made him rethink his view that minority government would have been better than coalition.
Crucially, Laws was also shifting the Liberal Democrats towards a more market-liberal position; making them more natural allies for the Conservatives. Up until the election, Vince Cable had sole dominion over Lib Dem economic policy. But since 7 May, Laws had been usurping him. Laws had persuaded the Lib Dem negotiating team — which did not include Cable — to demand that Labour agree to immediate cuts as a condition of coalition, reversing one of Cable’s signature policies.
As Chief Secretary, Laws was defining what was and what was not acceptable to his party. If things had carried on as they were, Laws would have been the man dictating the economics section of the next Lib Dem manifesto. Any economic policy devised by Laws would have been essentially compatible with the Tory one, as both would be based on the principles of market liberalism. With Laws gone, one cannot be certain of this. A Cable- or Huhne-inspired economic policy would differ far more fundamentally from Tory thinking.
There is, though, another argument: that the experience of losing Laws has brought the coalition parties closer together. As one Tory Cabinet minister put it to me, ‘families come together through bereavements’. The experience of Tories and Lib Dems standing side by side to try to defend Laws has bolstered the relationships between Tory and Lib Dem ministers and staff.
This fits a pattern, that the adversarial nature of British politics is driving the coalition partners closer together rather than apart. They are bonding under fire.
Comments