The week in politics: Picking up the pieces
With a palpable sense of betrayal, the Lib Dems turn against their partner.
By Ian Dunt
It was the day after the night before. On Saturday morning Liberal Democrat MPs woke up to find their hopes in tatters. Wiped out in local elections, ruined in Scotland and Wales, the electoral reform cause lost for a generation, their coalition partners suddenly revealed as untrustworthy monsters and their own careers now set to time out in 2015.
Vince Cable kicked things off by branding the Conservatives “ruthless, calculating and thoroughly tribal”. The business secretary is criticised for many things, but it was the first time anyone called him naive. Anyone tiring of his complaints on television could open the papers to find that former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown was accusing the prime minister of authorising a campaign of “outright lies” against AV.
Bluster aside, it genuinely was the end of the romance of the coalition. Cameron had tolerated the attacks on Clegg because he was scared of losing the vote. Feelings hardened and faces grimaced. What was once a civil partnership had become a business arrangement.
And how they arranged their business. Clegg emerged on Sunday to promise a “bigger” voice for the Lib Dems. Lib Dem MPs, suddenly panicked, began popping out the wood work with their principled opposition to NHS reform. The airing of public disagreement was clearly a central part of their survival strategy, but it went both ways: Tory MPs, irate at the idea of having to make more policy concessions because they actually did well in elections, hit the airwaves with some pretty stern, you’re-not-getting-your-pocketmoney rhetoric.
Meanwhile, Ed Miliband tried to lure disgruntles Lib Dems away from the coalition, to little avail. An opposition motion on NHS reforms, designed primarily to capitalise on coalition discomfort, was defeated by the government but it brought the issue back onto the front pages, where it stayed for most of the week.
By the time PMQs came about, Cameron let it slip that he thought only the Conservatives can be trusted with the NHS much to Clegg’s evident discomfort. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. Just hours earlier, the deputy prime minister was promising more “muscular liberalism”. Nope, no-one else was very impressed either.
Lib Dems were even struggling to prevent splits within the party, as Cable and energy secretary Chris Huhne found themselves at odds over plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50%.
But the key moment of the week did not come in a TV interview or a Commons slip up. It was a Lords vote, where several Lib Dem peers conspired to shoot down the government’s plans for elected police commissioners, in response to the attacks on Clegg during the AV campaign. It showed that Lib Dems were starting to flex their muscles at all levels and in ways that aimed to unsettle the government’s policy agenda rather than just affect public perception.
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