A game of coalition twister anyone?

Diary of a Benefit Scrounger

By Sue Marsh

Following up on Coalition Stew I bring you Coalition Twister. It took a while, but I’ve finally deduced their cunning plan. They will short-circuit our brains with a left-right spectrum so jumbled, that we feel disoriented, unsure and confused.

Let’s play a little game. Cast your minds back to the spring of 2010 and arrange these names, left to right in order of political positioning:

William Hague
David Cameron
George Osborne
Boris Johnson
Nick Clegg
Vince Cable
Simon Hughes
Ed Miliband
Jon Cruddas
David Miliband

My list would have looked something like this:

Cruddas, Miliband E, Hughes, St Vince of Cable, Miliband D, Clegg, Cameron, Osborne, Hague, Boris.

However, since then, we’ve seen Cruddas the Blairite, “Red” Ed turning decidedly blueish whilst his brother David chose to talk rather surprisingly and repeatedly of co-operatives and mutuals.

Clegg has lurched so far to the right that he’s become invisible to the human eye. (Rumour has it that only dogs can hear him speak now.) Vince has become a monetarist, while Hughes rumbles rather a lot, but generally votes with the whip more than the Tory’s own backbenchers.

As for Cameron, he certainly seems to the left of Clegg, Hague has been a surprisingly dove-like Foreign Secretary and Boris has described his own government’s policy of a Housing Benefit cap as being akin to “Kosovo style social cleansing” – a quote I imagine even most leftie Labour politicians would shy away from.

Osborne is the lone ranger, Tory as ever, the only one behaving as I expected.

My list would today, look something like this:

Boris Johnson
Jon Cruddas
David Miliband
Simon Hughes
David Cameron
Vince Cable
Ed Miliband
William Hague
George Osborne and
Nick Clegg

That old doorstep refrain of “they’re all the same” seems to be becoming more apt by the day. More worryingly, as a plan for Conservative re-election, it’s in danger of being rather effective.

To rather strangle the Twister analogy, we might say that Ed M’s right foot is on Blue, Boris has a left hand on Red and Clegg has disappeared right up Cameron’s…