Are the Liberal Democrat top brass forgetting their roots?

by Jennifer Painter / @jenpainter

In Harriet Harman’s response to the Queen’s Speech she quipped at the Clegg-Cameron partnership, announcing “While the happy couple are enjoying the thrill of the rose garden the in-laws are saying that they’re just not right for each other”. In tonight’s broadcast of Straight Talk with Andrew Neil, Sir Menzies Campbell will point out that, worryingly, they are simply too right for each other. He will comment:

“[Cameron and Clegg] are quite extraordinary, the extent to which their views coincide and you know that old thing about how people with dogs come to look like their dogs, well, people with coalition partners come to look like their coalition partners, I mean, they could be brothers.”

It’s a sentiment that political commentator Andrew Rawnsley shares. In The Observer last week he wrote:

It is said that people grow to look like their pets. This also seems to be true of coalition partners. The two leaders are becoming increasingly difficult to tell apart. So interchangeable are their sentences that you close your eyes and it could be either of them speaking.

Campbell’s comments this evening also reveal that he “would have found it very difficult to make the kind of arrangement with David Cameron that Nick Clegg has obviously found so easy”. He will state that he would have preferred a coalition with Labour – something that members of Labour’s negotiating team were “never really up for”:

“I know that because I talked to [Gordon Brown] on several occasions over the critical weekend. But it seemed to those who were negotiating on our behalf that Labour in many ways was accepting that perhaps a period in opposition was necessary so they could recharge their batteries and, of course, lurking at the back of all that, all the time, was the question of Labour leadership because Gordon Brown had made it clear he was going to stand down.”

Campbell will also emphasise his concerns over how the Liberal Democrat identity will withstand a term of coalition with the Conservatives, saying “We’ve got to take steps to make sure that we maintain our identity and that out of this coalition, we win the things which we think are essential.”

With Vince Cable’s resignation from the role of Deputy Leader this week, it does pose the question of whether key Lib Dem figures are placing more importance on the existence of the coalition than on their own party.