Liberal democrats

Coalition is a tricky business, full of compromise and connivance. Emblazoned across the front page of the Sunday Times (£) is the news that Control Orders are to be scrapped. A victory for Nick Clegg, we are told, won to nurture wounded Liberal Democrats and preserve the coalition. The Liberal Democrat 2010 manifesto maintained that Control Orders would be abolished and many senior Liberal Democrats have been volubly opposed to Lord Carlisle’s report into Control Orders, which was understood to propose their retention. Certainly, Nick Clegg needs an outright victory on policy. The Oldham East by-election draws near, whilst the tuition fees debacle remains clear in the memory, harsh austerity

The Lib Dem manifesto committed the party to a fully elected House of Lords. The Tory manifesto talked about a ‘mainly-elected’ second chamber and in 2007 David Cameron voted for ‘the other place’ to be 80 percent elected (interestingly, George Osborne voted for a fully elected Lords). The coalition agreement committed the government to a ‘wholly or mainly elected upper chamber’. So it is hard to see how a Lords that retained a twenty percent appointed element could be portrayed as a major Lib Dem triumph as, according to today’s Guardian, the coalition wants. There has been talk in Westminster that Clegg’s consolation prize if the AV referendum is defeated

A few weeks ago Ed Miliband was the leader under pressure. There was, absurdly, talk of leadership challenges if things did not improve. But now all the pressure is on Nick Clegg, he’s the one facing stories about whether he can cope. Whether the unforgiving media spotlight stays on Clegg or not will be determined by the re-run of the election in Oldham East and Saddleworth. The result of this contest will frame the first quarter of the political year. If the Lib Dems take the seat from Labour, then Miliband will again be the leader under pressure. Clegg will have won the time and the space that he needs.

It’s Christmas Eve, and the Daily Telegraph have wrapped up their sting operation in time for tomorrow. The final victims are the Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne and the children’s minister Sarah Teather. As it happens, Teather gets off without blemishing her copybook: her greatest indiscretion is to claim that Michael Gove is “deeply relieved” to be in coalition, as it means more funding for schools. Browne, though, is a touch more forthright: he says that Tory immigration policy is “harsh” and “uncharitable,” but that Lib Dem involvement will provoke a “more enlightened” outcome. He adds that the Tories’ EU grouping contains parties that “are quite nutty and that’s an

Today’s Lib Dem revelations are of the embarrassing, but not explosive, variety. David Heath, the deputy leader of the House, and Norman Baker, the transport minister, hypocritically say they are against tuition fees, despite having voted to let universities charge fees of up to £9,000. Baker also, crassly, compares himself to Helen Suzman, the anti-apartheid campaigner, working from within to change the system. But, beyond that, the remarks are what you’d expect a Lib Dem MP to say to a party supporter complaining about various Tory members of the government. I suspect Nick Clegg will be slightly more worried about Adrian Sanders, the MP for Torbay, issuing a broadside against

To understand why Vince Cable survived today one has to understand the dynamics of the coalition. The Liberal Democrat rank and file have had to swallow a lot recently, but the idea that one of their Cabinet ministers was going to be moved for being rude about Rupert Murdoch would have been too much to bear. The backlash to shunting Cable sideways would have destabilised the coalition, so he stayed in place. But Cable tonight is a much diminished figure. He has been shown to be eager to be indiscrete, to be overly keen to air the coalition’s dirty laundry in public. His comments about being at ‘war’ with Rupert