‘We must turn to the Liberals’

Fraser Nelson meets the former chancellor, reborn as Cameron’s ‘ambassador for trust’, who calls for a coalition of Tories and Lib Dems

An interview with Kenneth Clarke is not for the asthmatic. His office commands arguably the best riverside views in Westminster, but sights like the London Eye and the Saatchi Gallery must compete with the smoke of his trademark cigar. It is his prop, his muse and egg-timer. When it’s over, I’m out. Luckily it’s a slow-burner and gives an hour for the man whom David Cameron has entrusted to run his Democracy Task Force to describe his remarkable vision for the party’s future. It is finally time, he believes, for the Tories to prepare for coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

On paper, it’s hard to think of a less likely candidate to be Cameron’s ‘ambassador for trust’ — leading a policy group which will find ways to re-engage a young generation of voters. In Clarke, the party has a 65-year-old director of British American Tobacco with three failed bids for the Conservative party leadership behind him. But he carries it off by being blunt, unspun and, above all, credible. He has been asked to peer into the party’s future, with a licence to say what his frontbench colleagues daren’t.

The vision which bothers him is Conservatives winning more votes than Labour in the next general election, but failing to win enough seats to form a government. It is a very real risk: Cameron can win 40 per cent of the votes at the next election to Gordon Brown’s 31 per cent — and still end up in opposition. Clarke wants to navigate the party out of it. ‘If we’re the biggest single party, then we must turn to the Liberals and try to persuade them to join us,’ he says. ‘I don’t think we’d find it impossible.’