The furious posturing of the Liberal Democrats following their refusal to join Gordon Brown’s first administration is risible.
Their shouting about snubbing Brown because he supposedly acted duplicitously by going over Ming Campbell’s head straight to Paddy Ashdown is an attempt to spin their way out of the fact that they have spurned an opportunity that might have kept the Conservatives (and that dangerous bastard Cameron) out of power indefinitely.
Mouthing weakly from the back of the Commons chamber will not win the Liberal Democrats any General Election anytime soon: getting some Liberal Democrat bums on ministerial seats might at least have helped deflect the accusation that they had never experienced power and could not be trusted in office.
To see their increasingly right-wing frontbenchers doing the rounds of television news studios proclaiming the independence of their party and their refusal to deal with any of the SNP, Conservatives or Labour is pathetic. The party has spent the 25+ years I’ve followed British politics rightly decrying this country’s party tribalism and the yah-boo-sucks approach to politics it engenders. So the biggest hypocrites tonight are the ones who have just wallowed in 24 hours of pointlessly partisan nose-thumbing themselves. Sad buffoons.
By refusing to countenance the offer, Campbell has also demonstrated his lack of understanding of the way British voters feel. For all his other faults, the criticism of being out of touch could never be levelled against Charlie Kennedy. This is an opportunity for change that he would not have missed. By taking up the offer, the LibDems had nothing to lose and an enormous amount of credibility to gain. It speaks volumes for an increasingly directionless party that it managed to shoot itself in the foot so spectacularly.
In damaging themselves, they have also made Brown look like a benevolent uncle – quite some feat. If Brown’s got any fucking sense at all he should tonight be asking Portillo or Letwin or some other not-entirely-despicable Tory if they want the Lib Dems’ proposed briefs instead to rub in the fact that he’s the first Prime Minister (in all but name) to demonstrate any true bipartisanship instinct since VE Day. (Pedants please note that the Lib-Lab Pact of 1977-8 had fuck all to do with bipartisanship and everything to do with practical political expediency.)
This episode has demonstrated everything that is wrong with British politics and British politicians.
I agree wholeheartedly with this and whilst I understand the public objections of Lib Dems (they don’t subscribe to policy in too many areas so could not adopt collective cabinet responsibility) and the private objections (we’d be puppy dogs, marginalised, ridiculed and in the firing line without overall control of policy) but I think both could be got around if the people in question backed themselves.
On the one hand, there are plenty of eminent (and less eminent) examples of ministers who don’t toe the party line. Lib Dems in government would have a tailor made excuse not to – it isn’t their party and it wasn’t their manifesto. They will have more or less free reign, if they have the political skill to balance the demands of the job with the attendant publicity for their own ideologies, to use it as a platform for the way in which the Lib Dems would govern. If it all goes too far and you get sacked, (or better still, you have to resign) then where’s the shame in that? You’ve got the spotlight for a parting blow at the government. A really skilled operator would have taken up that challenge.
Better still, there’s one approach to accepting a cabinet job which is so devastatingly cynical and devious, so calculating in its political expediency and just about guaranteed to provide maximum positive exposure with little downside, that it doesn’t surprise me that no Lib Dem was flint-hearted enough to try it…just do a fantastic job!
Eh?
Oh.
I’ve been told that’s just silly.