The brutality of the coalition’s austerity programme has now reached the Commons itself. There on the front bench was a 42- year-old man called Danny who had spent the past five years rolling up his sleeves and trying to do the right thing. Danny had worked hard to provide for his family and had even taken on two jobs to give them a good start in life. But now Danny was a broken man. Within weeks Danny faced losing not just one job but both of them, and being left to get by as best he could with only the hope of a peerage or a City directorship to sustain him.
The opinion polls in his own constituency of Inverness are far from reassuring for Danny Alexander, and the chief secretary to the Treasury is likely to have a great deal of free time on his hands come 8 May.
He looks as if he might appreciate the time off; not even a sharp new haircut can disguise his obvious sense of despair. The swagger that came from being a member of the Osborne in-crowd has vanished: he has been dumped by the Tories and he now knows he is about to get dumped on by the electorate.
Just when Danny had imagined life couldn’t get much worse, the chancellor gave him yet another kick by choosing to throw a sickie. Normally Osborne gives the opposition plenty of notice if he is planning on giving Treasury questions a swerve; for the final departmental questions of this parliament the chancellor made a last-minute decision to go to a meeting of European finance ministers in Brussels that he usually finds entirely missable.
To be charitable to Osborne, it could have been he wanted to give Danny a last starring role at the despatch box and not just a way of avoiding any difficult questions about HSBC and Lord Green.
Danny let his own junior, economic secretary Andrea Leadsom, take the first HSBC hit. In time-honoured fashion she answered all questions about tax evasion evasively, but Labour wasn’t going to give Danny a free ride.
“I am going to give him a chance,” said Dennis Skinner in a question that was meant to relate to investment in infrastructure. “Will he now answer the question about meeting Lord Green. Now is the opportunity to make a name for himself. Come on.”
Wearily, Danny staggered to his feet and started leafing through his briefing file for inspiration. His P45 fell out and fluttered to the floor. Danny was too depressed to pick it up.
“I do not recall ever having had any conversations about investment in infrastructure with Lord Green,” he improvised. And that was about it; naturally he was personally against tax evasion but to be honest it was all above his pay grade now.
If Labour still had issues with Lord Green, and he wouldn’t blame them if they did, they could take it up with the prime minister or chancellor. He was out of here. Sayonara.
The effort of all this had left Danny utterly exhausted and he navigated the rest of the hour on autopilot. He wound down the clock by mumbling about the government building all sorts of roads and tunnels and Swiss cheese before waking himself up for one last effortette.
“I would say that his party has got it wrong,” he monotoned to Labour’s Andrew Gwynne. “And the Conservative party has got it wrong, but the Liberal Democrats have got it right.” That might have come as news to a handful of Lib Dems in the chamber, had they been listening. Danny’s ministerial career had ended not with a bang but a whimper.
