Nick Clegg’s weird war with a former Gove adviser

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[/audioplayer]We’ve come to expect strange things from coalition government, but the events of the last few days have been particularly odd. On Saturday, several newspapers contacted the Department of Education about a story claiming that its budget was in chaos. Officials set about drafting a clear rebuttal. But this was vetoed by David Laws, the Liberal Democrat schools minister, preventing his department from denying a damaging story.

This act of self-harm was just the latest twist in the spat between the Liberal Democrats and Michael Gove’s former adviser, Dominic Cummings. Following Cummings’s revelations about the shambolic state of the Liberal Democrat programme to give every five- and six-year-old a free school meal, the Lib Dems responded by briefing that the rest of the Education budget was being raided to bail out Gove’s free schools project. It makes one wonder what state the coalition will be in by the time its gets to March next year.

The past few weeks have been dire for coalition comity. Senior Liberal Democrats are still smarting over a Cabinet home affairs committee meeting in which they felt that the Tories tried to steamroller Clegg on the issue of knife crime. The Lib Dems accuse the Tories of caucusing beforehand to agree a joint line, mobbing Clegg in the meeting, and then leaking Cabinet correspondence when they didn’t get their way.

These Tory tactics were, in fact, the highest form of flattery: an imitation of the approach the Liberal Democrats have used at various times in the coalition. But things are more tense inside government than they have been for a while, hence the furious reaction.

Those close to Clegg are aware that the days after the European and local elections promise to be the most testing for him since the loss of the referendum on the alternative vote in 2011.