A little under a year ago, David Cameron held a party at Downing Street to thank all of those who had helped the Tory general election campaign.
A little under a year ago, David Cameron held a party at Downing Street to thank all of those who had helped the Tory general election campaign. It was a bittersweet occasion: although Cameron was Prime Minister, the Tories had failed to win a majority. In his speech, Cameron told them that coalition was actually better than a small Tory majority. For the people who had worked tirelessly for the election of a Tory government, these words left a sour taste. But in those heady, early months of the coalition, with the scent of the rose garden hanging in the Downing Street air, most observers could see what Cameron meant. The coalition was planning to address the deficit, free schools from local authority control and fundamentally reform welfare. Crucially, the Liberal Democrats were acting not as a brake against this radicalism but as a catalyst for it.
A year on, Cameron would not make the same speech. Over the past 12 months, he and his circle have begun to see the pitfalls of coalition. They have realised the extent to which sharing power prevents them from dealing with the country’s problems. Now, their aim above all else is to win the next election outright and dump the Lib Dems.
In the coalition’s first few months, the normal laws of politics seemed to have been suspended. At the centre of government, Tories and Liberal Democrats worked seamlessly together. They gushed about how they believed in the same things, but gave them different names. The two parties even held joint political cabinets together. For one meeting they travelled out on a minibus to Chequers to discuss how best to scupper Labour. The Cameroons were so keen on the coalition that one Cabinet minister told me that the Lib Dems would be invited to stay in government even if the Tories won a small majority at the next election. One got the impression that a large Tory majority would be an inconvenience, as it would have stood in the way of keeping their new friends in office.
Perhaps the most significant example of the Tory high command’s initial love of coalition was how they began to get interested in that old Lib Dem hobby-horse, electoral reform. A referendum on the alternative vote, a system that would boost the number of Liberal Democrat MPs, had been Cameron’s compromise to Clegg to get the Liberal Democrats into government. Yet as the coalition worked so well in those first few months, the Cameroons began to wonder if they should actively support AV, or at least not oppose it. They began to see it as an easy way of forging an electoral pact and an anti-Labour alliance with their new friends.
The machine swung into action. Cameron told Clegg that he wouldn’t do much campaigning during the AV referendum. One Conservative intellectual was asked to start making the Conservative case for AV. Meanwhile, Michael Gove, one of the Cabinet ministers closest to Cameron, was ready to back AV publicly. But by New Year all this had changed. The Cameroons were throwing everything into defeating AV and were happy to let the No campaign trash Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems in the process.
The Tory shift is the result of fear and frustration. The fear is over what the party would do to Cameron if he lost the AV referendum. The frustration is with how the presence of the Lib Dems makes achieving radical reform in government — overcoming the legislative obstacles of Brussels, Strasbourg and the equality act — even more difficult.
The AV referendum was always going to force Cameron to choose between his party and his coalition. He has plumped decisively for the former. The coalition will now never be the same again.
For their part, the Lib Dems are furious at what they see as Cameron’s betrayal. They complain that Cameron gave Clegg his word that he wouldn’t campaign hard against AV and that it will now be almost impossible for them to trust the Prime Minister again. They also stress that Cameron’s behaviour has strengthened anti-coalition sentiment within their ranks. As a result, Clegg has had to put more and more distance between himself and Cameron. They are now reassessing their whole approach to the coalition. For instance, co-ordinated assaults on Labour are now off the agenda.
Some Liberal Democrats have gone further and started attacking the Conservatives directly. Two Cabinet ministers, Vince Cable and Chris Huhne, have urged people to vote for AV to keep the Tories out of power in future: a far cry from the discussions last summer about how best to keep Labour out of power for a generation.
The Tories are confident that such Lib Dem whinging will come to nothing. They point out that they have nowhere to go, that to bring down the coalition and spark a general election would lead to at least half of all Lib Dem MPs losing their seats. One Tory MP close to the leadership jokes that ‘we’ve got them by the balls and now we’re squeezing them a bit’.
But this assumes that the Liberal Democrats will act in their own best interests, when they are notorious for not doing so. There is also a growing chance that a Liberal Democrat will challenge Clegg for the leadership. Certainly Chris Huhne appears to be doing everything necessary to prepare for a leadership bid. He shocked colleagues this week by launching a verbal assault on the Prime Minister and the Chancellor at a Cabinet meeting. He brusquely demanded that they justify various claims by the No campaign. Osborne’s response was sharp: ‘this is a Cabinet meeting, not some sub-Jeremy Paxman interview’. As one Tory minister said afterwards, ‘it is hard to see how Huhne can stay in the Cabinet having behaved like this.’
In No. 10, they have had discussions about what they would do if Clegg were deposed by his own party. One option under consideration would be simply to keep him on as Deputy Prime Minister: there is, they claim, no constitutional requirement that the leader of the minority coalition party should be offered that job title. But such a course of action would surely bring the government’s problems to boiling point.
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