By Janan Ganesh janan.ganesh@ft.com July 15, 2013 5:48 pmhttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/72f0a4fa-ed3a-11e2-ad6e-00144feabdc0.html
A hung parliament might leave the Lib Dems in power once again
As parliament demobilises for the summer, only one British party leader has much cause for contentment. Perversely, he is the least popular. Nick Clegg’s personal ratings are unrecoverably bad. In some polls, his Liberal Democrats straggle behind the fringe tub-thumpers of the UK Independence party. Voters see the deputy prime minister as the guileless patsy of his Conservative coalition government partners and a fraud who broke his word on university tuition fees. To be damned a knave and a fool takes some doing.
Yet the fundamentals of British politics favour him more and more. Three years after an indecisive general election, the public’s view of Labour and the Tories continues to echo Henry Kissinger’s alleged take on the Iran-Iraq war:
what a pity, the American diplomat said, they both cannot lose. (The two countries did, of course.)
This could have been the year Labour pulled unassailably away from the Conservatives. Instead, misjudgments on welfare and other issues – exploited by a newly tenacious Tory machine – have eroded the opposition’s lead, without ever making an outright Conservative victory look probable.
The ultimate winners of this disillusion with the main parties are not, as the hype has it, Ukip, whose vaunted flowering is unlikely to end with many, if any, parliamentary seats. It is the Lib Dems. If the next election yields a hung parliament, they might again end up in power and choose who to share it with.
Of course, this assumes the party still has meaningful parliamentary representation by then. A bald reading of the polls, which gives it half the 23 per cent support it won in 2010, suggests it will lose most of its 56 MPs. But few believe that will happen. Even if voters do not gradually return to the third party as they size up the two bigger alternatives they do not much like, the Lib Dems’ aptitude for local campaigning will help them defy the national swing. The real lesson of the last election – which threw up wildly uneven constituency results, even within regions – was the growing primacy of the local factor. It was confirmed by the party’s retention of the Eastleigh seat in a by-election in February, which has rightly perked up its expectations for the next election. Mr Clegg can feel slightly moreconfident of being in government after 2015 than David Cameron, the prime minister, or Ed Miliband, the Labour leader.
Remarkably, this should be only his second most cheering thought this summer. When the Lib Dems took office in 2010, their greatest strategic goal was to prove that coalition – the only form of administration in which they can feasibly partake – is a workable form of government. That prize is worth more to them than any one election, for it gives them a reason for existing in the long term.
Only the meanest churl would deny they have achieved that aim resoundingly. The early bonhomie between Tories and Lib Dems has curdled into grudging coexistence, and yet still they take big decisions together. Last month they agreed £11bn of spending cuts with less rancour than expected. When the government announced its intention to opt out of myriad EU policies on justice and home affairs last week, voters saw only the parliamentary statement by Theresa May, the home secretary. But it was preceded by the most intense backroom negotiations of the coalition’s three-year life, according to one cabinet member, with the Tory Oliver Letwin and the Lib Dems’ Danny Alexander haggling over each item in excruciating detail. A deal was done. If Mr Clegg’s career can be reduced to one achievement, it is that nobody any more believes multi-party governments are necessarily indecisive and unstable.
He is also less menaced by his own party than Mr Cameron, whose backbenchers nurse the fantastic idea that a government overseeing the most sustained austerity since the war and multiple simultaneous public service reforms could be much more conservative than it already is. Mr Clegg once seemed certain to be cashiered by his party before 2015 but appears to have seen off his most plausible usurpers: Chris Huhne, the former energy secretary jailed for perverting the course of justice; andVince Cable, the business secretary who is too old to be anything more than a stopgap for the party. A rare veteran in the cabinet identifies Mr Clegg as one of the two most resilient politicians he has encountered (George Osborne, the similarly reviled chancellor, is the other).
The hostility provoked by a mere mention of Mr Clegg’s name – from other members of the political class, not just the public – is classic psychological displacement. For the left, it is more comforting to believe that it was his personal whim rather than cold parliamentary arithmetic that nixed a Labour-Lib Dem coalition last time. For Tories, cursing Mr Clegg is easier than examining why they have not won an election since he was a student.
He is not helped by his otherness. Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband belong to identifiable British tribes: home counties Tory and north London progressive. Mr Clegg, trans-European and ideologically ambiguous, is a man from nowhere in particular. But he may decide the country’s next government. As consolations go, it is not bad.
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