The Liberal Democrats are mad as hell at their coalition partners—and don’t seem to care who knows it. Their fury has been caused by what they see as the roughhouse tactics of the No campaign and the Tories’ complicity in them.
Chris Huhne’s letter to George Osborne has been written to make clear just how betrayed the Liberal Democrats’ feel by the actions of their coalition partners. Huhne writes, “I explicitly warned you that the manner of the AV campaign would be as important as the result, in terms of the effect on the coalition.” Then, he moves onto a particular Lib Dem bugbear—the claim that AV would cost £250 million more than first past the post: “Either the Treasury is misleading parliament and the public, or you, as chancellor, are misleading the voters. Which is it?”
In the Independent on Sunday, Nick Clegg also uses his most aggressive language yet about his coalition partners. He talks about making sure that ‘the Liberal Democrats don’t get rolled over’ by the Tories, accuses Cameron of “defending the indefensible” and lumps him in with Nick Griffin as one of the ‘very reactionary interests’ opposing AV.
On the Andrew Marr show this morning, the Lib Dem deputy leader claimed that the party is ‘justified in being angry’ and accused the Tory chairman Baroness Warsi of ‘inventing facts.’ He boasted that one upside of these rows is that ‘nobody will think we’re Tories any more.’
This Lib Dem rage is prompted as much by the fact that AV seems set to be defeated as much as anything else. But, dangerously, it is turning into a more general cry of pain at being in coalition with the party’s traditional enemy, the Tories. Worryingly, even the Clegg Cameron relationship, the cornerstone of the coalition, seems to be fraying with one close Clegg ally telling me, in a metaphor for the loss of trust between the two men, that the pair won’t play tennis again for a long time after this.
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