Norman Baker has resigned from the Home Office. Nobody cares. We’d all forgotten Baker was even at the Home Office until he popped up last week, declaring that he was about to revolutionise drug policy in the UK. Rightly or wrongly, not a lot of people care terribly much about that, either.
We’re all more interested in dog poo, apparently. Lorely Burt, newly promoted to the whips’ office in the wake of Baker’s Great Resignation, reckons that campaigning on local issues such as dog fouling is what will bring disenchanted voters back to the Lib Dems.
This seems a far cry from Nick Clegg’s immediate ambition after the coalition agreement had been struck – to educate the British public about coalitions and how well they can work. Sadly, Clegg doesn’t appear to have managed to educate his cabinet colleagues in the Conservative Party about this.
That’s the thrust of Baker’s argument, anyway. He did his best to advertise the idea that his resignation was significant and principled. Working with Theresa May, he said, had been like “walking through mud”. “Poor Theresa,” one thinks, “having to walk through mud with Norman. Poor Theresa’s faux-leopard kitten heels.”
The home secretary’s problem, Baker further explained, is that “she believes she is running a Conservative department and a Conservative government … and that didn’t make for good coalition relations”.
Baker’s complaints reek of self-importance – and highly misplaced self-importance at that. The saddest thing is that this has been the hallmark of all Lib Dem dealings with the Conservatives from the start. The belief of the Lib Dems in their own significance has always undermined any possibility that they might be proved right.
Take that claim about coalition relations, for a start. In fact, Baker was appointed, just over a year ago, without any consultation with May. Surely Baker’s appointment was entirely about making “coalition relations” look less good? Jeremy Browne, the Lib Dem he replaced, was considered so far to the right that the Tories courted him with great hope after he was sacked from the government.
Baker isn’t standing down, though. The small huddle of people who are paying attention tend to think that Baker’s resignation is largely about scooping poop in his Lewes constituency in the run-up to the next election in May. Disastrously, however, Baker has said it’ll give him more time to concentrate on his music. It transpires that Baker is the frontman and lyricist of the Reform Club, a popular beat combo about to release its second album. Which makes Baker the nation’s most embarrassing dad-dancer. Quite something, in a highly contested field.
Yet, there’s so much more to snigger at, all of it dutifully reported in the aftermath of Baker’s Great Resignation. He wants the government to take UFOs more seriously. He thinks David Kelly was knocked off by the state, and he’s worried about how Robin Cook died, too. He projects, in short, everything that the rubbing of shoulders with real power was supposed to excise from the Lib Dem image. Who likes walking through mud in sandals? It ruins your socks.
All Baker has drawn attention to, I’m afraid, is the Lib Dems’ painful lack of self-awareness. Even his slagging off of May is a bit suspect, now that everyone has noticed the Lib Dems don’t seem very female-friendly.
It’s not just that only seven of their 57 MPS are women and none of those are in the cabinet. It’s also the fact that the party seems to think it’s fine for Chris Rennard to continue hanging around because the testimony of four women about his allegedly inappropriate behaviour doesn’t seem to count for much. No wonder Lynne Featherstone has been ushered back to the Home Office, saying she’s pleased to be working with May again, especially on women’s issues.
The Lib Dems seem relaxed about the Baker resignation because they’re so keen now to differentiate themselves from their coalition partners. But instead of asking why May didn’t take Baker seriously, ask why the Lib Dems did. Why, especially, did they let him believe, as he told his local paper, that his Home Office job was to be “the Lib Dem home secretary”?
It’s a particularly poignant line, because he’s far from the only member of his party who seems to have delusions of grandeur. Nick Clegg is surely the only person in Britain who still believes that this government has a deputy prime minister at all. Danny Alexander’s nerdy pride in being George Osborne’s chief purveyor of Stuff People Don’t Want To Hear makes people want to smash their tellies. Vince Cable will be best remembered as the man who virtually gifted the Royal Mail to the private sector. They’ve walked into it every time. Chris Huhne’s self-importance actually landed him in prison.
Senior Lib Dems are reportedly “laughing off” Burt’s remarks last month in Glasgow about the Lib Dems and dog poo. They are wrong to. The Lib Dems thought the electorate would see them strolling the corridors of power and be filled with admiration and gratitude. Instead, we saw Anglo-Saxon men who would sell their gran for a place at the cabinet table. Now, as Burt says, they need to start again, rebuilding their party from the constituency pavement up. The irony? We need a party whose priority is electoral reform like we’ve never needed one before. And that party is in tatters.
