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Rivalry is natural, but if the government wants to survive it has to show that it's big enough to handle opposing views
Why must the show go on? The leading men are bickering, the audience is restless. Any fool could pronounce this performance over, and many have. A year ago Nick Clegg and David Cameron, interviewed by Andrew Marr today, would have ended the show chatting together on a sofa, their faces beaming common endeavour. Now, Lib Dem ministers are competing to say snide things about the Tories ("animals", one told me) while the prime minister feigns surprise at the nastiness of an anti-AV campaign his party funds and directs.
It's horrible, and not (as Labour suspects) fake. This isn't anything like as bad as the Blair-Brown war, but listen to some Lib Dems and you wonder why they joined a government of Nazi pro-slavers. Listen to Tories and you hear disdain for Lib Dem yapping about nerdish constitutional causes.
Of course, many ministers in many departments are rubbing along fine. After 5 May, Cameron and Clegg will arrange a display of unity. Tempers will subside. Chris Huhne is surely too clever to think an attempt to overthrow Clegg would end well. Talk of impending divorce is overheated. The problem is more insidious. The coalition is quietly going rancid.
No bad thing, say some. People like me, they say, were dotty to get so excited by the prospect of a government of shared liberal ambition, a gathering of reformers who wanted to fragment the centralised state, did not see markets or state spending as alternative answers to every problem and who thought the "big society" meant something.
Those of us who still hold to these hopes need to accept that some things have changed, and some have not. The coalition never was, as Huhne tried to pretend, a meeting of stark opposites, forced together by electoral bad luck. It was an agreed programme, adopted with enthusiasm. Huhne does himself less than justice by implying that he approached each negotiating session flicking through a book of government art works and waiting for his limo to arrive; for him, as for others, there was hope in the chance to create something decent. The ease with which two coalition documents were agreed startled everyone – evidence not only of overlap but of ideological intent.
But Huhne is right in this: both sides now need an adult appreciation of their differences. As Clegg himself would put it, the relationship needs to shift from the blissful to the transactional.
In retrospect, the Lib Dems should have been more open with voters about what they believed. Perhaps they didn't themselves entirely know. Perhaps, too, Lib Dems were gulled by Tories who turned out to be tougher and less reformed than Clegg's side thought. Scales fell from Clegg's eyes when he saw the prime minister exploit Lib Dem concessions on spending and tuition fees on an anti-AV platform with John Reid. Lib Dems feel this backstab deeply, and Cameron (in Lib Dem eyes) is not apologetic. Today he was still spreading alarm about the cost of AV. For the first time he has found himself on the negative side of an argument, backing the past against change. Tory detoxification is in peril.
From next week, says one Lib Dem cabinet minister, "there will be a more gritty, flinty feel to the arrangement". Others go further. A Lib Dem peer argues that the party's parliamentarians should not feel bound to support the government in votes that stray beyond the strict terms of the coalition agreement – which is almost all. Such a lowest common denominator coalition is a dismal prospect, a series of battles and disguised leadership challenges of the sort so obviously being tested last week. Some Lib Dems, such as Tim Farron, the party president, may even want a retreat into oppositionalist obscurity.
I think it is simplistic to see the coalition as a game of concessions – the Lib Dems getting Lords reform – which no one agrees on or much cares about – while the Tories get cuts. If politics is to become more transactional it must not stray into obvious wheeler-dealing. A core shared purpose must persist.
The opportunity is for the Lib Dems to stop defining themselves in relation to the Conservatives, as they are beginning to do again, and show that their coalition can contain all politics. Universality made New Labour successful. If moderate debate seems to take place within governing parties, Labour will be left out (a speech last week by the shadow Treasury minister Angela Eagle, who could have been Tony Benn on a bad day in 1975, showed the dangers).
This is the reverse of asking Lib Dems to fall silent. In its early stages, the coalition came across as an intellectual monoculture. It was good when the party leaders offered opposing views on multiculturalism. If the Lib Dems make it plain that they don't want the NHS reforms, many Tories who think the plans spell political and administrative disaster will fall on them in gratitude. Clegg would be garlanded for tackling something big and brave and away from his party's esoteric policy enthusiasms.
But the terms of debate matter. The love-in has ended. The coalition must not let hate enter its soul. All governments exist as wary co-operatives, full of dislikes and rivalries, held together by some broad joint identification. The rivalry is natural. But it is the identification that counts. A government without a common purpose will soon find itself no government at all.