The Tories and Lib Dems

Commentators, without Parliament sitting, find it harder to run stories about strains between the coalition partners as a decamped Westminster village scatters its rumour mill to the four winds. Attention has again turned to whether the Lib Dems, with very low poll ratings, are going to disappear into the Conservatives, as the National Liberals did in the thirties and forties. This is an interesting question.

From the point of view of those who like power in the Lib Dems and that is by no means all of them, the ideal would be something akin to the German Free Democrats, who have been a moderating influence as a junior coalition partner in a good many German governments led by both the main opposing parties, in the years since the war. There are others who see power as tainting the purity of their idealism, because of the compromises the reality of government requires. There is also the rump of the old SDP tradition which was closer to Labour. It was, after all, the Social Democratic Party.

The Tories are in part composed of pragmatists who see their party as the natural grouping of efficient government, charged with sorting out the excesses of radical interludes. However Thatcher was a radical and a fiery one at that. Under her, the party became radical and right wing, pulling Labour across to the centre, which it eventually seized. The modern Conservative party is therefore a somewhat disparate coalition of its own. It has not only a right, centre and left;  it  has also pragmatic and radical wings. Mixed up in all of it, is a rather effete grouping of scholarly elders steeped in Disraeli, Peel and Trollope. 

Cameron has, with a brilliance history alone will be able truly to savour, turned his electoral weakness (the Tories should have won outright) into not only a remarkable government, but also a programme of re-engineering the Tory party back to the pragmatic grouping of sensible national leadership which served so well under Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill and Macmillan. Taken together these four leaders (including the short reign of the discredited Eden) held power for twenty-seven of the thirty-three years between 1931 and 1964. During this period the old Liberal party declined steadily from fifty-nine members as the country went to the polls in 1931, to just six by 1964.

What happens this time to the Lib Dems depends on how successful Cameron is, in welding the power seekers among them into the new more liberal Conservative party. He has spotted that this is the route to extended power. So has his closest political ally, Nick Clegg.  Barring the way is a combination of right wingers, left wingers and serial consciences who value purity above power. Nevertheless these two young men of near identical appearence, education and wealth, but not of manner or blood, form a combination so determined that it may be unstoppable.

Viewed in the round, the prospects for the Lib Dems as an independent entity of significance do not look good. If the Conservative led coalition is a success, but the junior partner refuses to join an electoral pact, it will lose heavily as the country votes for the organ grinder not the monkey. If it joins a pact, it will be absorbed, as before. If the government fails, the Lib Dems will be massacred by Labour under its new, as yet unknown, leader, likely to be one or other Milliband. 

The only route of continued independence at the centre of power may be to dump the Tories in favour of Labour when the going ahead gets tough and the public get angry. Pretty ruthless stuff that. Not very Lib Dem. But then they have Clegg, and he demonstrated in May that he was the most ruthless politician around.