James Forsyth
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But for all this irritation with the Lib Dems, Conservative Cabinet ministers are acutely aware that they actually need their cooperation to recover. One remarked to me recently, ‘The odd thing is we need them to go back up in the polls.’ The thinking goes like this: the Conservatives are polling better now than they did in Margaret Thatcher’s mid-terms. But Thatcher had the crucial advantage that the left-wing vote was split between Labour and the SDP. In the same way, Cameron’s Conservatives need the Liberal Democrats to take support away from Labour.
This is why some Conservative strategists are attracted to the idea of Vince Cable as Lib Dem leader. They note that all the polling shows that under his leadership, the Liberal Democrats would get a bounce at Labour’s expense. Clegg loyalists are exasperated by this talk. They argue that it is ‘too clever by half’ and that anyone in No. 10 who wants it isn’t thinking straight. They maintain that Cable would only ever do a coalition deal with one party, Labour.
There’s little doubt that Clegg now wants to lead his party into the next election. He feels he now knows how to get things done in government; his office is now properly organised and, as one insider says, he ‘regularly outthinks and outmuscles No. 10’. But it’s striking that in a recent conversation I had with a Lib Dem Cabinet minister about how his party’s 2015 campaign would play out, there was no mention of Clegg.
One of the cleverer Lib Dem tactics is to have as many policies as possible referred to the ‘Quad’, Whitehall’s name for the meetings between David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osborne and Danny Alexander. One Conservative minister complains that you can push an idea all the way through the Cabinet system only to find that it has been overruled at a Quad meeting.
Another Liberal Democrat advantage is internal communications. Conservative ministers complain that the first they know of something in their purview being discussed by the Quad is often when the other side questions them on some technical detail. When the Cabinet met in Bristol this week, the local Liberal Democrat MP Stephen Williams benefitted from a joint appearance with the schools minister David Laws. But Bristol’s Conservative MP Charlotte Leslie wasn’t blessed with any visits from ministers despite the entire Cabinet being in town.
Over the next two and a half years, the coalition parties will have to govern together while preparing to campaign against each other. This will stretch Cabinet collegiality to the limit; one secretary of state admits that he’s already compiling a list of the most electorally damaging ideas that the other party has proposed which have never become public.
But the most difficult trick for the Conservatives will be helping the Liberal Democrats prosper nationally as they plot to deprive them of parliamentary seats. Whether they can pull this off or not will go a long way to determining if they can win a majority.Also in Politics
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