One difference between opposition and government for Liberal Democrats has been that, before coalition, no one noticed what they said; now, no one notices what they do.
Many people will have first learned that there was a Lib Dem at the Home Office from the news that he had resigned. But Norman Baker is no more obscure than any other politician below cabinet rank, nor any less effective. In a brief stint at a hostile department he shaped the agenda a bit. He campaigned to stop female genital mutilation. He insisted on the publication of a report into UK drug laws that advanced the cause of rational reform.
Institutional resistance led Baker to conclude he had reached the limit of permitted liberalism in a department run by Theresa May, and so he quit. “The goodwill to work collegiately to take forward rational, evidence-based policy has been in somewhat short supply,” he said in his resignation statement. No doubt he was also mindful of the situation in his Lewes constituency, an enclave of Sussex nonconformity where a spirit of bourgeois-bohemian dissent makes all the difference in holding back the Tory tide.
In that respect Baker’s pyrotechnic resignation, just in time for Lewes’s famously extravagant bonfire night celebrations, is consistent with the logic of his appointment last year. Nick Clegg had concluded that May was allergic to power-sharing. She had already sidelined Jeremy Browne, whom some Tories saw as an ideological fellow traveller. No one says that of Baker – notorious in Westminster as an indulger of wacky conspiracy theories and performer of bizarre folk ballads on YouTube; a model of his party’s unruly, pre-coalition, sandal-clad style. The switch signalled that the rose-scented spirit of 2010 coalition intimacy was souring. Baker’s job was to let off Lib Dem stink bombs under May’s desk.
That dynamic says more about the Home Office than it does about the coalition more widely. Conservatives who worked with Baker at the Department for Transport speak highly of him as an adept minister. And it isn’t only Lib Dems who find it hard to work with May. Even Tories who admire her handling of the department complain that it is accompanied by an icy manner. Downing Street sees the Home Office as a hostile citadel whose high walls guard leadership ambitions. When May had to make an apologetic statement to the Commons on Monday over delays to a child abuse inquiry, the PM’s diary turned out to be full of constituency appointments, meaning he could not be present to support his home secretary.
In less chilly Whitehall climes, the coalition survives at a level of tepid functionality as its two most senior figures see no reason to call it off. Clegg is determined that his party will not prematurely surrender power, and David Cameron wants to boast of having overseen a full term of relatively stable government in unstable times. Although the approach of an election should raise tensions, the arrangement is in some ways easier to sustain now. Both sides have given up on a shared policy platform and the flow of government business has dried to a trickle. The Lib Dems are free to denounce Tory proposals as authoritarian and callous without the humiliation of then voting for them in parliament, and the Tories are free not to care. “We find the best approach with the Lib Dems is just to ignore them,” one senior Conservative adviser says.
Many Tory backbenchers struggle to achieve such indifference when they see the Lib Dems as the architects of their ruin . To that audience, May’s potential leadership credentials are burnished by her proven intolerance of Cleggery – a test of ideological purity that she passes and the incumbent prime minister fails.
It is true that the Lib Dems have inflicted serious damage on the Tories, but not in the way many of them seem to think. The habitual complaint is that Clegg has held the government back from the path of authentic Tory radicalism, diluting its programme with welfarist sentimentality, constitutional navel-gazing, green mania and craven Europhilia. Of course, Labour says the Lib Dems have failed to defend any of those positions.But regardless of what Clegg’s ministers may have achieved, their very presence has shunted the Tories off liberal terrain to which Cameron once laid claim. They have squatted offices that might have been filled by moderate Conservatives. They have upset hardliners, who then needed placating with jobs and policy concessions.
In the eyes of many Conservatives, the Lib Dems have contaminated a whole set of attitudes that, while never likely to dominate a Tory agenda or deliver Cameron a landslide election victory, still ought to be in the repertoire of a large governing party: respect for human rights law; pragmatic diplomacy in Brussels; urgency about climate change. Without those leavening elements, the Tory focus becomes ever narrower and angrier, which is a reason why it doesn’t have a majority in parliament now and a factor restricting its appeal next May.
There are plenty of reasons why former Lib Dem voters might feel disappointed with Clegg for joining forces with Cameron, propping up a Tory government they thought they were voting to avoid. Their consolation is that the Lib Dems have made majority Conservative rule in Britain less likely for perhaps a generation. With Clegg in government, the liberal wing of the Conservative party has atrophied. It was a weak limb in 2010; now it has withered away almost entirely, and without it Cameron’s march towards the next election looks horribly lopsided. Voters may not notice much of what Lib Dems say or do; they will notice the change in a Conservative party twisted by hatred of people they once called partners.
