Compromise is fine, but walk away from NHS reform completely and the government puts at risk pride and confidence in its entire programme for public services
The coalition shimmy is easy to learn but awkward to dance: two steps forward, one step back, always moving forward. Get it wrong and you end up in a heap on the floor. All governments adjust their plans. The trick is to judge when to do this and how. Give in too often and the public will call you feeble and unprincipled; stick to your plans unbendingly and you'll appear isolated, heartless, "arrogant and out of touch".
Somewhere in between lies the balance successful governments must seek: a sort of forceful open-mindedness, ready to bend, never to snap. The coalition just about got away with backtracking on forests. It cannot be sure of doing so with its NHS revolution.
The politics of health secretary Andrew Lansley's scheme are awful, and some ministers have begun to go weak-kneed – but that does not make abandoning the scheme right. The legislation is halfway through the Commons, and ideologically it sits well with much else the coalition is doing: breaking up bureaucracies and passing the power to make decisions and spend money to the people who should know most how to do it. Walk away from this and the government puts at risk not just its pride but philosophical self-confidence in its entire programme for public services.
On Monday, Ed Miliband will enter, stage left; a false friend delivering a speech on public services urging caution and co-operation. It's the right tactical move for him, but no help to the coalition, already torn between defiance and retreat on the NHS, its only certainty that something about the plans must be seen to change. Some Liberal Democrats are boasting about their private demands: "The first issue where there has been a bit more assertiveness on the Lib Dem side," says one. Irked by the Tory anti-AV campaign and worried about the May elections, they are tempted to play up a story about their leader's determination to enforce the will of his party, a steadying hand on a headstrong government.
"True virtue hath ever been thought a Trimmer, and to have its dwelling in the middle between two extremes," said the 17th-century politician George Savile, who wove the concept of compromise into an entire ideology, and wrote a book about it. But Savile was distrusted for it – and anyway did not have to explain himself daily to a party or the press. David Cameron and Nick Clegg do. Cameron's instinct will be to dig in, seeing the consequences of retreat as worse than those of pressing on. But he also knows that the health of the coalition is the imperative.
The art of trimming is to protect the core of a project, without being so bloody-minded as to harden opposition or so pliable that you invite contempt and lose your project, too. It is not something the government can be certain of achieving this time. On the NHS there are obvious compromises now being chewed over in Downing Street. But nothing is settled except the sense that something must be done soon.
The plans could be delayed – but that would be awkward now that primary care trusts are already sacking staff and GPs forming consortiums in anticipation of the law. They could be made optional, at least to begin with – but that only would add to confusion and cost. The definition of competition could be widened so that commissioning takes more account of quality and less of cost. And finally, there is the accountability of the new GP groups, lacking in the plans as they stand. GPs could be made to answer for conflicts of interest or poor performance – but the Lib Dems want to involve councillors, hardly well-placed to make clinical judgements.
The last two of these options are the likely basis for compromise. They might also ease opposition in the Lords, where Lib Dem peers are at present minded to vote the bill down. Ministers can point out that the British Medical Association and the Lib Dem spring conference both raised particular difficulties, and it has addressed them. But until the government decides what kind of problem it is trying to solve, it is stuck.
On Tuesday, meanwhile, Clegg will explain his new big thing: plans to drive social mobility and a scheme for monitoring it, which if nothing else will send the Porterhouse Blue type of Oxbridge don spluttering into his port. This is supposed to be a sign that the government is brave, liberal and still unbowed: determined to use its time to reshape the nation, undeterred by yelps from the forces of conservatism.
But on the NHS he must avoid becoming one of those forces himself. The idea that the coalition can proceed by a cunning sort of hard-cop, soft-cop routine, each using the other as a foil, is mistaken. For both to make a virtue of internal tensions invites the nation to see them as two weasels in a sack. On the NHS, as (for instance) on education, two steps forward and one step back is fine, so long as momentum and direction remain clear. But if the whole programme seems to lose coherence or heart, it will not be a question of one or another the coalition partners having won. Both will lose.
Does the government think its reforms are right but unpopular, in which case there must be a sticking point past which it will not retreat? Or is it losing its nerve on the substance? To do the latter now would not only be feeble, it would not even win popularity.