Publicly the Liberal Democrats insist they are committed to the coalition, but with recent comments from Chris Huhne and now fresh comments from Vince Cable that commitment looks to be in doubt. If only they could do something about it, but they can’t.
The Telegraph reports this morning on comments the business secretary made on BBC Radio 4 calling the Conservatives “ruthless, calculating and thoroughly tribal” and then in the next breath saying that the coalition would continue in a more “businesslike” format in the wake of the dire Lib Deb performance in local council elections and the overwhelming defeat of the Yes Alternative Vote campaign (yesterday’s results post here).
Cable told Radio 4’s Today programme: “Some of us never had many illusions about the Conservatives, but they have emerged as ruthless, calculating and thoroughly tribal. But that doesn’t mean to say we can’t work with them. I think they have always been that way, but you have to be businesslike and professional and you have to work with people who aren’t your natural bedfellows and that is being grown-up in politics. We are going to continue to do that.”
It is not only Cable and Huhne, Norman Baker, the transport minister, said Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, had been “let down” by David Cameron.
The comments from senior Lib Dems will hardly make for business like relations. More like frosty and difficult ones and I’m not sure what kind of coalition government that will make for. It reads like a marriage on the rocks. The irony is, however, this is a marriage that the Lib Dems can not walk out of. Only Cameron has the strength and the political capital to leave and he can do that at a time of his choosing.
In the light of the party’s worst performance at the polls in decades, which at least locally had nothing to do with AV attacks on Clegg, Cable said that the Lib Dems would now not accept policies that go beyond last year’s coalition agreement (“such as controversial proposals for NHS reform”).
His comments give the impression that if the Lib Dems had not taking such an electoral beating they would not now be taking such a stand, would not be opposing right wing Conservative policy, but would rather keep their ministerial toys in the pram and play contentedly on without histrionics.
But while Cable might talk big what power do the Lib Dems have in reality? They are a diminished force. Jonathan Freedland hits the nail on the head today when he says today that while conventional wisdom says Clegg will now demand a consolation prize for his defeated party he has no leverage. Worse still he can not walk out as that will lead to an immediate election and we’ve seen what will happen to the Lib Dems should that happen. Many of those Lib Dem MPs would be unseated.
“For what leverage does Clegg have? He can’t threaten to walk out, knowing that in an early general election only annihilation awaits. The Lib Dems are now hostages in this coalition, chained to the cabinet table, fated merely to hope that something turns up between now and 2015,” Freedland writes.
With no power to talk of, and no threats worth spit, the words we hear from disgruntled Lib Dems is nothing more than sabre rattling. They are in the coalition for the long-term or for as long as the Conservatives will have them. With Labour not showing itself currently able to break through, and the Lib Dems electoral chances shot to bits, will Cameron really wait until 2015 to go to the country or will he go early instead as Gordon Brown once had the chance to do in 2007.