SOMETHING HAS TO BE:

Cameron’s daring will change politics for ever: A Tory partnership with the Liberal Democrats has wiped out the anti-Conservative majority at a stroke (Daniel Finkelstein, 5/12/10, Times of London)

Emerging from the cinema a few years back, having watched Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, my friend remarked that he thought it the greatest film ever made. I looked sceptical. “Well,” he said. “Something has to be.”

So in the same spirit, let me write something I have always fancied writing without appearing ridiculous. And now I can. This is a defining moment in British political history. Something has to be.

Like Robert Peel’s decision to repeal the Corn Laws, and split the Conservative Party for a generation, or Stanley Baldwin’s gentle manoeuvring to install the first Labour Government in 1924 and thus dish the Liberals, David Cameron’s generous offer to the Liberal Democrats has changed British politics for ever. Whether it succeeds or not.

On Friday morning, as he surveyed the election result, Cameron was able to see that the new arithmetic of the House of Commons represented both a huge challenge and a big opportunity. And the decision he made — to treat it as an opportunity — will be the making of him or the breaking of him. There has been, in the past 15 years, so much talk of Tony Blair’s Clause Four moment. Well, offering coalition to the Liberal Democrats on such broad terms is far more audacious than that.

There are obviously some lines he can't cross without compromising conservative principles, but the more of the Liberal Democrat agenda he adopts the less reason for it to exist as a separate party and the broader the appeal of the Tories.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2010 5:58 AM