Dem Libs are not going away, you know

What about those Liberal Democrats, eh? (This is, I realise, a high-risk start to a piece, but please give me a couple more minutes.)

Yesterday we learned that David Laws is furious – FURIOUS! – with Michael Gove for the way that Baroness (Sally) Morgan has been shoved out of her chairmanship of Ofsted.

If the former chief secretary – you know, the one who made Liam Byrne’s private and clearly non-serious welcoming note public – is now prepared to attack his former Tory buddy in this way then something is up. And what is up is the beginning of the formal disentanglement of the LibDems from their coalition partners.

Nothing the LibDems do should ever surprise us. In fairness, circumstances force them to adopt a range of more or less slippery tactics. A 23% share of the vote won them 57 seats at the last general election, while Labour won 258 seats with a share of the vote that was only 7 percentage points higher.

The LibDems have long had to campaign…flexibly. They have presented themselves as a different political animal in different parts of the country. They are one thing in Scotland, another in the north, another in the west country, and another in London and the south east. For years wise heads in the lobby told Charles Kennedy that his party lacked definition and precision. He cheerfully ignored the experts and saw LibDem support rise on the back of “creative ambiguity”.

The “five days in May” that followed the 2010 election, brilliantly described in Andrew Adonis’ book, were shocking to those Labour supporters who presumed the LibDems remained a progressive force. Labour people who had tactically lent their vote to the LibDems to keep a Tory out declared noisily that they would never vote LibDem again. They felt betrayed, and hurt. And you can see why. With less than a week to go to the election Nick Clegg had said that the sort of excessive spending cuts envisaged by the Conservatives would be a terrible mistake:

“My eight-year-old (son) ought to be able to work this out – you shouldn’t start slamming on the brakes when the economy is barely growing… If you do that you create more joblessness, you create heavier costs on the state, the deficit goes up even further and the pain with dealing with it is even greater. So it is completely irrational.”

But just days after the election Clegg was to sign up to cuts every bit as severe as those he had rubbished a few days earlier. That sort of behaviour is hard to take. The polls currently suggest that LibDem support has collapsed, and that no amount of repositioning in the next 14 months will save the party from a catastrophe in May 2015.

And yet. Will Labour supporters living in LibDem/Con marignals really allow a Tory to win a seat that might otherwise be denied them? It’s quite an important question. In 38 out of the LibDems’ 57 seats the Tories are in second place. Half of the Tories’ top 40 target seats are held by the LibDems.

And now consider Labour’s list of 106 target seats. It is an overwhelmingly blue document.

Sure, there are some key Lab/LibDem targets – Norwich South, Brent Central, Burnley, Manchester Withington, Bradford East, with Redcar and Hornsey and Wood Green also clearly in play – but to gain a majority Labour will have to win at least another 50 seats back from the Tories.

In fact, as Vince Cable has supposedly hinted in private, success for both Labour and the LibDems may involve recreating the anti-Tory pincer that served both parties well in 1997. How easily Liberal Democrats can do that, effectively disowning whole parts of the legislative programme they have made possible, is not obvious. So there is probably a lowish ceiling on how well the LibDems can do next time. Nonetheless, as Stephen Tall
and Lewis Baston have argued, it is possible to see the LibDems holding on to as many as 40 seats next time around. Incumbency, and a “stop the Tories” mood, can help.

Whatever you may say or think about the LibDems, they haven’t gone away, you know, and aren’t likely to any time soon. A complete Lib Dem implosion would mainly help only one of the major parties. And it isn’t Labour. Do not be surprised to see Nick Clegg and his colleagues suddenly warming up to the idea of an anti-Tory front just over a year from now.