ALL HE HAS TO DO IS LOOK AT THE EXAMPLES OF BILL CLINTON AND W...:

Why Cameron prefers coalition to being alone with his own party: The prime minister is happily centred with the Lib Dems on one wing and the Tory right on the other (Andrew Rawnsley, 5/23/10, The Observer)

David Cameron even went so far as to remark that he was happier to be ruling in coalition with the Lib Dems than he would have been leading a Conservative government with a small majority. Many voters will find that attractive, the Tory leader saying he's more delighted to be working with another party than ruling in splendid isolation. That is one of the reasons he says it. Much of his own party will find that sentiment both incredible and reprehensible. Conservative MPs grasped the logic of entering coalition with the Lib Dems in preference to forming a Tory minority government vulnerable to having the rug pulled from underneath it at any time. It is something else for their leader to declare publicly that, even if the Tories had won a majority, he'd rather be power-sharing with the Lib Dems. Here is their leader saying that he is actually glad that 20 Tory MPs are not drawing a ministerial salary because Lib Dems are sitting behind the desks they expected to occupy. Here is their leader telling his party that he's not that bothered to have binned large chunks of the policies that they fought for at the election.

To David Cameron, the merits of coalition start with hard electoral calculation. Beginning tomorrow, when George Osborne unveils the first tranche of spending cuts in tandem with his Lib Dem deputy David Laws, this government will be making decisions with a high potential to make it screamingly unpopular. Sharing the burden of responsibility between two parties makes cold electoral sense, which is why the chancellor was just as signed up to the idea of a coalition as the prime minister. The two men assume that they will need the span of a full parliament to get through the financial pain. They will have to trudge through the dark valley of cuts for a long time before they reach sunnier pastures where they can start to offer sweeter things to the voters. During the coalition negotiations, it was the Tories who pressed for a five-year deal rather than the four-year compact initially preferred by the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems' other important concession in those talks was to fall in with the Tory plan, also formed with an eye on the electoral clock, to start those cuts this year rather than next.

In return, the Tories have surrendered a lot on policy. When he was being interviewed during the election campaign, David Cameron never seemed entirely comfortable defending either his tax break for marriage or the inheritance tax reductions which were going to favour the most affluent. Well, now we know he never really was that enthusiastic about those policies. They were sacrificed at a very early stage in the coalition negotiations.People on the Lib Dem side of the talks say that they were almost embarrassed by how readily their Tory counterparts were ready to scuttle what were supposed to be Conservative flagships. The Tory leader has also shunted the repeal of the Human Rights Act and disengaged from the idea of starting a struggle with the European Union to try to repatriate powers from Brussels.

The beauty of the coalition, from David Cameron's point of view, is that it has given him the perfect excuse to ditch commitments which he had come to regret because they were dated, unaffordable, distracting from the central economic challenges facing this government or just plain stupid.

He knows he has to tread a little carefully with his own side where there is already a toxic build-up of resentment about what he has done and suspicion about where he might try to take them next. So he reassures the Daily Mail that Britain "still has a Conservative prime minister. My Conservative beliefs will not change". Yes, of course he is still a Tory. What he did not say in that article was that his beliefs about Conservatism are just not the same as those of the Daily Mail or a lot of his backbenchers.

...to see the advantages of being "forced" to compromise with the other party, or at Clinton '93-'94 and W '05-'06 to see the disadvantages of one's own party emboldened into self-destruction.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 23, 2010 8:02 AM