After five days suspended in a dream world where anything seemed possible, Tuesday night brought a cold, hard slap of reality.
The fantasy of a multicoloured, progressive coalition evaporated. And in its place the image many feared last Friday: David Cameron entering Downing Street, the first Conservative to eject a Labour prime minister since Margaret Thatcher in 1979.
For Labour voters, and many Liberal Democrats, this will be a morning of sorrow. Whatever their tactical calculations, they were clear on one thing: they did not want a Tory government.
That will matter most to those who depend on a Labour government to protect them. The victim is not Gordon Brown, despite the poignancy of his farewell, but the pensioner who relies on Meals on Wheels. But the left-leaning voter can find some consolation — starting with the fate of the Conservatives.
Cameron has achieved his aching ambition, but he did not thunder through the winner’s tape. He limped across the finishing line, clinging to the Lib Dems’ shoulder.
He has had to make enormous concessions — not just the five Cabinet posts for the Lib Dems he announced on Wednesday, including Cabinet jobs, but also policy retreats that will test Conservative unity to destruction.
The Tory faithful and the right-wing press will struggle to stomach a promised referendum on the voting system, tinkering with a first-past-the-post machine that has served them so well. They will surely baulk at the dropping of the Tory tax break for married couples and the inheritance tax gift Cameron promised Britain’s 3000 richest families.
The Lib Dems will celebrate the end of a seven-decade drought of power — but at a gargantuan cost. Even if party members and activists are not howling with rage, many Britons always believed a Lib Dem vote was a safe way to oppose the Tories. They will never believe that again. And that could cost the Lib Dems millions of votes.
There is a further price. For a long time the Lib Dems were positioned as the good guys of British politics. Nick Clegg sought to personify that quality, posing as Mr Clean, who promised a new way of doing business. Now, after five days of closed-door deals and double-deals — the phone-in shows buzzed on Tuesday with denunciations of Clegg for talking to Labour behind the Tories’ backs — that lies in tatters.
It doesn’t damage the Tories or Labour: everyone knew they were grubby practitioners of politics’ black arts. But such an image does not fit with the Lib Dems’ brand. Besides, they will never again have the leverage they enjoyed this past week. Once they have signed they will be at the mercy of their Tory masters.
They cannot threaten to walk away: if they do, they risk triggering a general election at which they stand to be crushed. To use an idiom both these public schoolboys will recognise, Clegg has become Cameron’s fag.
Labour’s mood will be grim. The longest spell in power in the party’s history, made possible by three successive poll victories, is over. Supporters will be thinking of that pensioner waiting for her meals on wheels. They fear the Tories’ scalpel.
But they fear too for themselves. Those pushing for a rainbow coalition did so partly because of a deep dread of opposition. They recalled the spirit of 1979, when many Labourites thought a brief spell out of power might be refreshing.
“They learned that when you walk into the wilderness, it’s a one-way street,” said Neal Lawson, founder of the Compass pressure group. This is what haunts Labour: that the Tories’ fingernail grasp on power, once entrenched, will become a grip.
Yet for the Labour tribe there’s some upside. Bank of England governor Mervyn King has warned the next government will have to make such painful cuts that whoever wields the knife will be “out of power for a generation”. Just as victory in 1992 undid the Tories, 2010 may prove to have been an election to lose.
The counterattack has already begun. One Labour official said he never thought talks with the Lib Dems would bear fruit, but were always worth pursuing “to destabilise the Tories”.
Look at the results: Cameron denied his 1997-style flag-waving coronation in the sunshine, the party forced to embrace policies it despises and drop ideas it likes. Not bad for five days’ work.
Labour bigwigs who warned of the dangers of Lib-Labbery believe the party has spared itself great damage. There will be no accusations now of Labour clinging to power, of unelected prime ministers or perilous parliamentary instability.
What was striking on Tuesday was how many Labour arch pluralists were opposed to a deal. They feared a backroom arrangement would discredit “the new politics” forever. These optimists sense an opportunity. Surely Labour can go into the next election as the sole progressive party, winning over voters who will forever regard the Lib Dems as pink-hued Tories.
In the short run Labour needs its version of why talks broke down to prevail. According to one negotiator, the deal-breaker was the Lib Dem demand that Labour cut the deficit faster, implementing spending cuts this year. But in the longer term Labour will have to change itself, moving into Lib Dem space on, for example, civil liberties.
The age of Tony Blair’s New Labour is over. Now begins a Conservative-Liberal era full of unknown risks.
Rocky future for ‘new Disraeli’
Styling himself as the new Benjamin Disraeli, David Cameron has pulled off a remarkable political coup. But his centre-right alliance with the Liberal Democrats is only the start of a volatile year in British politics.
The most likely outcome will be an early return to the ballot box.
If Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg fails to discipline his parliamentary backbenchers, Cameron can call an election and massacre his party at the polls for bringing down a coalition government at a time of national emergency.
Clegg has trapped his parliamentary party between the rock of his coalition promise and the hard place of his MPs’ possible rebellion. If the architecture of coalition collapses, he will be blamed up and down the hustings. The simple Lib Dem dream that somehow a hung Parliament would produce the golden chance of securing a path to power was not going to happen. There was never a majority at the polls, however counted, for the sort of proportional representation that would enable the party to move into a governing position.
If the party wants that, it must still do what Labour did in the early 20th century and overtake one of the two big parties in far more constituencies.
Labour and the Tories have always been unhappy about conceding proportionality. It was only the undignified bid to defy the election and cling to power that led Labour Party leader Gordon Brown to contemplate changing his party’s mind last weekend.
The famous Lib-Lab “progressive coalition” might have been politically plausible had it made arithmetical sense, but it never did. The four horsemen of mischief, Lords Mandelson and Adonis, Alastair Campbell and Ed Balls, could never remotely secure Commons backing for a deal.
It would have required the inconceivable from the Lib Dems — a lasting, whipped subservience to a losing party that many of them cordially loathed. This hardly met the test of stability and security, let alone principle.
Perhaps the most interesting outcome of the coalition deal is that the shackled Lib Dems will be just vocal enough to enable Cameron to keep his own right wing under control. Clegg appears to have considerably diluted Cameron’s manifesto, including on taxation and possibly education. Cameron’s hope must be that the same discipline Clegg will have to exert over his own MPs will be matched by his whips’ discipline over the wilder spirits on his right.
Coalition should make that job easier. He need worry less about his right, for instance on Europe, defence cuts or immigration.
But all this could hardly be more fragile. Cameron clearly hopes to derive strength from being in a position to call another election when he chooses.
But it will not be that easy. He must deliver a country that is at present lukewarm towards his party. He must show superhuman, Disraelian powers of parliamentary diplomacy.
Cameron must know that at any turn his partner might fail him and he will have to go to the country. He cannot let his guard drop. Today’s ally may be tomorrow’s election foe. — Simon Jenkins