Speak up, Nick, or we'll think the worst
Sunday Times, The (London, England) - Sunday, August 29, 2010
Author: JENNI RUSSELL
When I was at university one of the geekiest boys in the year was suddenly adopted by the floppy-haired and glamorous English set. For nine months this particular boy - let's call him Thomas - glowed with pride at being allowed to host parties, go punting and share essay crises with a group of people whose confidence and style he couldn't match.
At the start of year two, Thomas came back from a summer in America and cut them all off, brutally. I asked him why he'd done it. Nothing about them had changed, he said. It was just that he'd realised that, far from conferring a reflective glamour on him, the group eclipsed him. Nobody paid him much attention, took his conversation seriously or found him desirable while he was with such a bunch of alpha males. It didn't matter whether the essays he lent the others were brilliant, or his parties diligently catered for; he never got the credit for his contributions.
Merging with the group had made him almost invisible.
The danger for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats is that they're going to suffer the Thomas effect. They have been catapulted from obscurity to astonishing prominence. The difference they're making to this government is substantial. They're part of a revolution in the way it's being organised. But because we know almost nothing about the battles they're fighting, or the arguments they're making inside government, their contribution is not being recognised by the rest of us. Next to the star wattage of David Cameron, and the sheer weight of numbers of Tory MPs and ministers, the Lib Dems risk being seen as nothing more than sidekicks to the dominant party.
This may seem an odd judgment to make in the month when a Liberal is acting as the most senior politician in the country for the first time in threequarters of a century. This time last year the Lib Dem leader couldn't persuade newspaper editors to come to his party conference; now he stands in for the prime minister at the dispatch box and gets Sky News broadcasting live from his question-and-answer session in Croydon town hall. Yet being in power hasn't helped his party's reputation.
While most who voted Tory are still happy with their choice, the Lib Dems' support has fallen sharply. It is down from 23% in May to 12% this month. That suggests a lot of confusion or disillusionment with what the party is doing with its new-found power.
Part of that fall is due to the fact that many people who voted for the Lib Dems had no idea what the party stood for." They thought we were either nicer Tories, or some kind of pet of the Labour party's. They hadn't read our proposals," one activist said to me, scornfully. But part of it is due to our ignorance about how the coalition is working, and what it is realistic to expect of a minority party in government.
The Lib Dems have come under sustained attack from the left, and from some of the Labour leadership candidates, for selling out by working with the Conservatives. That criticism reveals a misunderstanding of what the party thinks it's for. Its leadership knows that it is never likely to rule on its own account. The most it can hope for is to inject liberalising policies into whichever government is in power.
"It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," one Lib Dem insider told me. "Of course we'd rather have come in at a time when there was lots of money to spend, and not so many difficult decisions to make, but you don't get to choose when you take power. And we're achieving a massive amount, liberalising schooling, health, the police. We're pushing decentralisation, diversity of provision, fairness." On some issues, such as ID cards, detention without trial and the need to spend much more on the education of the poorest children, there is already agreement between the parties, but on others policy is being made through continual compromise. That's where the Lib Dems claim they are making a difference.
"I don't think that people understand what a joint venture this government now is," the insider said. "Every single decision that's made has to be agreed." In that process the Lib Dems are not being treated as inferiors. Their junior ministers are, unusually, given access to everything that's going on within their departments, because they are acting as the party's representatives.
"This isn't a Tory government with 3Å Lib Dems on the side," said another adviser. "We're not just winning little battles for fairness at the margins, we're pushing it everywhere. We're curbing the worst excesses of whatever the Tories might have done. We've stopped new faith schools from selecting more than half their intake, we're giving local authorities back a role in co-ordinating health and social care that the Tories wanted to take away from them, and we've insisted on a local policing panel to oversee the elected police commissioners to stop them being some kind of populist Robocop nightmare."
The party's dilemma is summed up by that comment. For the electorate to understand what the Lib Dems are achieving, they need to know what's being fought over, and what the results have been. Yet the minute each side starts publicising their disagreements, the harder it will be to reach compromises.
The concept of collective responsibility will dissolve as people defend their positions and the media leap on splits. The united front will fracture.
LibDem strategists, including Richard Reeves, Clegg 's new adviser, are acutely aware of the problem. It's their job to think about the impression the party is creating, and where it will be as a political force in three to five years' time. They have concluded that nothing would be more destructive than to keep bragging about its victories.
They argue that there are two more fundamental points that the Lib Dems have to prove if they are to become powerful players. The first is to demonstrate that coalition governments not only work, but are preferable. The second is to show that the party can be disciplined and credible in government. The party's private polling has shown that a principal reason for the evaporation of the Clegg surge in the final two days of the election campaign was that voters had no faith in the party's ability to govern. The Lib Dems were seen as likable but unreliable amateurs.
The Lib Dems' strategy for popularity turns out to be remarkably simple: ensuring the government delivers. They hope that by 2015 the economic gamble will have been won, the economy will be expanding and the electorate will reward them because Britain will be fairer, more socially mobile and more clearly liberal. Danny Alexander, the chief secretary to the Treasury, says that "our task is to show that over five years the country benefited, and that Lib Dem ministers were doing a good job".
I'm all for idealism, but politics doesn't work like that. If the Tories are seen to be dominating government, they'll get all the credit if the policies succeed, while their junior partners won't escape the blame if things go wrong. We're not accustomed to the subtleties of coalitions, and we won't bother to analyse what really went on. So if the Lib Dems want this novel administration to be the first of many, they had better stop being so highminded and start educating us in the realities of coalition politics. That doesn't mean betraying confidences, or encouraging talks of splits. It does mean consistently explaining the principles and compromises that underpin this way of governing.
This experiment in a more collegiate, thoughtful politics is brave, and deserves the chance to demonstrate whether it can work. It would be a shame if the party that has risked the most were to end up losing most.
