Next week’s election may well bring Conservatism to a crossroads.
Next week’s election may well bring Conservatism to a crossroads. If David Cameron fails to secure a majority, he will have a choice: should he seek to enter a deal with the Liberal Democrats as the flailing Ted Heath tried (and failed) to do in February 1974? If so, would he agree to voting reform which could change the nature of our politics forever? Or would he carry on in a minority government until it is necessary to call the inevitable second election? The latter is the riskier path. It is also the only acceptable one.
Much rot has been spoken about hung parliaments — or, as the BBC has started to call them, ‘balanced’ parliaments. History shows they do not work in Westminster. Of the four hung parliaments in the last century, only one (1929-31) lasted more than a year. The rest collapsed fairly quickly because Westminster’s confrontational politics does not lend itself to cross-party stitch-ups. The present voting system allows for strong, decisive and radical governments (such as that which transformed Britain in the 1980s). To lose it is to lose Britain’s capacity to renew itself.
Mr Cameron does not need the Lib Dems. If they threaten to join with Gordon Brown and let Labour cheat political death, then so be it. But the marriage would not last, and the public would pass judgment in the election that would follow when their axis collapses. By spurning Mr Clegg’s advances, Mr Cameron can still govern — he only needs a parliamentary majority to pass laws, and there is reassuringly little in his manifesto that requires new primary legislation.
The Lib Dems could, of course, join Labour in a vote of confidence to bring down the government. But it is Mr Clegg, not Mr Cameron, who should live in fear of a second election. Mr Clegg is enjoying a freak political event: a Lib Dem bubble, produced by the televised leaders’ debates. He enjoys the novelty factor: voters do not (yet) know him well enough to distrust him. This will pass. Next week, he may well see his 63-strong group of MPs swell to 80 or 100. He will be in no rush for a new election which would reverse this. As Sir Samuel Brittan argued in these pages recently, if the Lib Dems brought down the government they would pay a price for it in the subsequent election.
And if Mr Cameron were to do a deal, who is to say that his party would accept it? He would be advised not to test his personal authority within the party straight after an election in which he would have (to use his definition) failed. He says that his party has been surprisingly well-behaved, yet this is a case of people biting their tongues, rather than being satisfied. Many Tories signed up to the Cameron project on a deal: they would sacrifice various issues such as immigration and Europe; in return, they would be led by a winner.
But if Mr Cameron is left bartering Tory principles to the Liberal Democrats, he will cease to look like a winner. He would have failed to deliver on his 2005 leadership slogan — ‘change to win’. The party would believe that they had fulfilled their part of the deal, and would expect him to pay a price for not fulfilling his.
Without a majority, Mr Cameron will be back on the election trail soon — probably within a year. He should ask himself: how does he want to spend that year? Governing on his own terms? Or in a never-ending series of principles-for-power compromises with Nick Clegg’s divided party? Worst of all, if he agrees to electoral reform, the Conservatives — as we know them — might never find themselves in a position to govern again.
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