James Forsyth reviews the week in politics
Coalition politics has thrown political journalists for a loop. For years we have been used to members of government claiming that there is not a cigarette paper of difference between them and their colleagues — even when the disagreements were obvious. But now Cabinet ministers happily admit that they differ. And when they disagree, the coalition partners set about resolving their differences in a civil and reasonable fashion. The lobby journalist’s bread and butter — the splits story — is in danger of disappearing.
But the old politics is not dead. There are still vicious rows going on in government, but they are blue on blue: Tory versus Tory.
This is not as odd as it might seem. The Tories and Liberal Democrats expect to disagree. No one feels betrayed when they find out that someone from another party has a different view. Vince Cable and David Willetts know that they are not of one mind on the question of how to fund higher education. But this knowledge actually liberates them; it makes it much easier for them to sit down and try to work out a mutually acceptable compromise. It is, though, quite another matter when someone who you feel should agree with you doesn’t. As one Cabinet minister puts it, ‘the emotional baggage and tension is all with your own side.’
Take the row over Trident. Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, believes that because the nuclear deterrent is a political weapon as much as a military one, the Ministry of Defence should receive extra funding to cover the capital costs of renewing Trident, as it always has. When Fox said this on television last month, however, he was quickly slapped down by the Treasury. Last week, George Osborne made it clear that, contrary to Fox’s wishes, the defence budget would have to bear the full costs of replacing Trident.
Osborne’s move creates massive pressure within the Ministry of Defence to scrap Trident — as having to shoulder that cost effectively turns the proposed 10 per cent military budget cut into a 20 per cent one. The army, which has never been keen on a weapon delivered via a submarine anyway, will argue that if Trident were cut then there would be far more money for what really matters: troops and equipment.
Some hawkish Conservatives are convinced that Osborne is making the MoD absorb the full cost of Trident because he wants to get rid of it. This is about Osborne wanting to show that the party is modern, they say, that it’s moved on from the Thatcher era. One complained to me that ‘it’s some bullshit Steve Hilton-style rebranding idea.’ In other words, they believe the Chancellor is playing politics with the nation’s security.
This suspicion is typical of how the civility that characterises discussions of policy difference between coalition partners goes out the window when the action is blue on blue.
At the Cabinet away day at Chequers, ministers were taken aback when Iain Duncan Smith, the secretary of state for work and pensions, ostentatiously started reading papers during George Osborne’s presentation. But IDS’s behaviour was a sign of how strained relations between him and the Chancellor have become over the progress of welfare reform. The pair recently had a full-on row in front of officials about the matter.
If IDS were a Liberal Democrat, the dispute between the two men would have been referred to the Coalition Committee and sorted out. But because he is a Tory, the row has festered.
What’s odd is that everyone has long known what IDS wants to do with the welfare system — to change the rules so that work pays rather than welfare. He has said that he doesn’t want the job unless he can achieve that goal. But the Treasury is still stalling on IDS’s proposals and it’s impossible to ignore the tension between civil servants at the Treasury and the DWP. The personal difficulties between IDS and Osborne do not help. Things are so bad that one Liberal Democrat in government asked me recently if Osborne’s aim was to force IDS out.
There is another important distinction between Tory infighting and a Lib-Con disagreement. When a Tory goes against the government line, discipline is doled out in the traditional manner. The Conservative Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt angered Downing Street by suggesting that the taxpayers should again start paying for parties in jail. He was, in the words of one Downing Street aide, ‘bitch-slapped’ by Number 10. But if Blunt had been a Liberal Democrat, there would have been no punishment — just a discretely negotiated settlement.
The coalition has developed a series of mechanisms for resolving differences between the two parties. On a formal level, there are the two Cabinet committees designed to keep everything running smoothly. Informally, Danny Alexander and Oliver Letwin make sure that both sides are happy with how things are going. Ed Llewellyn, Cameron’s chief of staff, sees to it that the Prime Minister knows what the Liberal Democrats need most from him.
But there is no equivalent effort to ensure that Conservative ministers are happy. This is a mistake. The two who are most irritated at the moment, Duncan Smith and Fox, are also the two most prominent right-wingers in the Cabinet. Lose them from the coalition and its right flank becomes seriously exposed. Their departure would be every bit as much of a threat to the coalition’s durability as Vince Cable’s.
It has always been a weakness of Cameron that he and his team are detached from the concerns of even his most senior colleagues. What is needed now is an intermediary — a well-respected go-between with direct access to Cameron — to take the temperature of Cameron’s Tory ministers. The absence of such a figure means that the Prime Minister is in danger of being blindsided. He lacks the sort of early warning system which could foresee and forestall cracks in the coalition’s right wing.
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