There is no serious move against Nick Clegg's leadership so far – but he is under pressure to make his party stand out again
Nick Clegg has moved to reassure shattered Liberal Democrats that he could engineer a political recovery by the time of the next election, and that the current mood of anger at his "betrayal" would dissipate over two to three years.
As the economy recovers, voters will slowly and grudgingly recognise the party's difficult role in saving the country from crisis, he feels.
Senior party figures were predicting the Lib Dems would suffer at least two more years in the doldrums. Despite the loss of more than 500 English council seats, 13 Scottish parliament seats and one in the Welsh assembly, there is no sign of any half-serious move against Clegg's leadership. The judgment across the party remains that Clegg had no choice but to form a coalition with the Tories last May.
But the pressure he has been under from within his party for months to highlight the party's distinctiveness is now increasing. It will be a key test of Clegg's still developing leadership how he balances these competing demands.
In the first sign that Clegg understands he needs to do more to distance his party from its coalition partners, he argued in a change of tone that one role for his party would be protect the country from a return to the unfairness of Thatcherism. He is implying that the ideology of an unalloyed majority Conservative administration would be well to the right.
The Lib Dem federal committee will meet shortly to set out the specific ways in which it expects the party to do more to differentiate itself from the Tories in line with a lengthy motion passed at the party's spring conference in Sheffield.
Senior party figures almost universally predicted the party was now entering "a transactional business relationship" with its coalition partners – a phrase first urged on the deputy prime minister by Vince Cable, the business secretary, last autumn.
Many Lib Dem activists have been demanding distinctiveness and a willingness by their leadership to spell out what they have stopped, as well as what they have achieved, by being in coalition. Clegg will explain more about his approach to coalition politics in a speech next week.
Cable warned at his party conference in the autumn that "to hold our own we need to maintain our party's identity and our authentic voice".
That point was echoed strongly by Evan Harris, the former MP and vice-chairman of the party's federal policy committee and the authentic voice of the social liberal left in the party.
He said no one was turning on Clegg inside the party, but his approach had to be less "collegiate" towards the prime minister, David Cameron. "He has got to deliver a strategy change, which is to do more than point out what we have achieved but also point out what bits of the programme come from a Conservative philosophy that we do not share," Harris said.
Disgruntled senior Lib Dems, knowing the beating was coming, were privately spitting at what they regard as an ill-judged attempt by some in Clegg's circle to project the coalition as some kind of new ideological fusion of JS Mill and Friedrich Hayek.
One Clegg aide said: " We are not going to behave like an opposition in the government, but we will have greater latitude to talk about when we disagree, as we already have over multiculturalism. That set the template. We are not going suddenly to Defcon 2 [a reference to the US armed forces expression for a defence ready condition], or have poisonous rubbish briefed into the papers.
"We cannot play silly buggers or spring surprises on the Tories. It has to be managed and agreed. Nor can you have a German system where ministers from different sides of the coalition go on television to set out their differences. We are not ready for that culturally."
But it was being argued that too many Lib Dem ministers in departments of state have been happy, in the words of the former leader Sir Menzies Campbell, to give the impression that "they get on like a house on fire with their Tory secretaries of state".
One Lib Dem official admitted the "power dynamics" of the coalition had changed after Thursday's vote. "I guess people that voted Tory last time sort of knew what they were getting. They were hardly surprised by what Cameron did, and did not feel the need to punish him," the official said.
"If you had to say on the basis of these results which party is going to form an overall majority at the next election, it is the Conservatives."
For the moment, Clegg will just have to go through the grind of government as it undertakes plans to shake up health, the police, welfare and the House of Lords and introduces a more radical form of recall for MPs guilty of wrongdoing than previously envisaged.
There is a deeper malaise for his party, however. The battle wounds of the alternative vote referendum campaign are going to lead permanent scars. For some, the anger is directed at Cameron for implicitly endorsing attacks by the NOtoAV campaign that trashed Clegg's leadership.
Neil O'Brien, director of right-leaning thinktank Policy Exchange, said: "The real threat is that the coalition will be crippled inside. When trust and goodwill flow, the coalition can make real progress. Each partner is prepared to swallow decisions that are unpalatable, knowing that, in the not too distant future, the favour will be returned. That could get harder now."
There is a deeper disappointment for some. One wing of the Tory party and the Liberal Democrats had been harbouring hopes that Cameron could actually have embraced the alternative vote, as Michael Gove, his education secretary, intended to do. In 1911, the Tory party had split on Lords reform between the hedgers and ditchers. There was optimistic talk in some circles that Cameron would prove to be a hedger.
If AV went through, it would have been possible for the Tories and Lib Dems to come to second preference arrangements at the next election. Cameron would then have achieved a realignment of politics. He chose to retain the existing divisions.