Nick Clegg may not have all that many friends, but he has always been rather lucky with his foes. His greatest stroke of fortune was to become the leader of the Lib Dems at a time when the competition was a deeply unpopular Labour prime minister and an unconvincing Tory party. Given the chance to shine in the election TV debates, a gift to him that Conservatives have bitterly regretted ever since, the Lib Dem seized his moment, his party had sufficient lift to leave parliament hanging and they secured a place in government.
It has been downhill electorally, at any rate, ever since. Defeat after defeat at the ballot box culminated in an abject performance in the European elections: A 7 per cent vote share, fifth place behind the Greens and representation in the European Parliament reduced from 12 MEPs (Members of European Parliament) to just one. It used to be joked of the old Liberal party that all its MPs could be accommodated in one taxi. It can now be joked that all its MEPs can be comfortably fitted on to one unicycle. That is a terrible blow to the most pro-European of parties and especially so when it made a big point of its pro-Europeanism during the campaign, a strategy insisted upon by Clegg against the reservations of some of his colleagues.
As I suggested a few weeks ago, this was always likely to be the moment of maximum danger for his leadership, the point on the calendar when Lib Dem angst could metastasise into a coup attempt on the leader. If his party wanted to rise up and kill him, 12 months out from the general election was the time to do it. Yet, once again, Clegg has been lucky in his enemies. He was particularly fortunate that a scheme to depose him revolved around Matthew Oakeshott, the Lib Dem peer and friend of Vince Cable, who is now an ex-Lib Dem peer after his self-destructive scheming. Naked plotting has the virtue of being honest. It looked shabbily underhand to commission “private” opinion polls to prove that the Lib Dems face oblivion, the findings of which then mysteriously materialise in the Guardian.
The Tory peer Michael Ashcroft lavishes a lot of cash on polling that often sends messages David Cameron does not want to hear, but they do not get into the public domain by a “leak”. He sticks them up on his website. Lord Oakeshott might have looked a little more noble in his intentions had he taken his stab openly rather than try to play murder in the dark. Presumably, he did so because he was conscious that he was a poor standard bearer for any coup because he was already so well known as an implacable critic of Clegg. Cable was compelled to disown and denounce both his mate and his botched scheme. A vitriolic Lord Oakeshott then retaliated by saying he had told Dr Cable all about it weeks ago, contaminating the business secretary with the whiff of treachery. Only in the Lib Dems. In the Rennard affair, they have given us a sex scandal without any actual sex. In the Oakeshott plot, they entertain us with an assassin whose bullet blows off his own head, deals a flesh wound to its target before ricocheting into the plot’s intended beneficiary.
It has suited Clegg loyalists to portray the hapless lordship as a rogue and malevolent operator, but he is hardly alone in fearing that the party can never recover without a change at the top. One of those who have had their doubts about whether Clegg should carry on is Clegg himself. A while ago, he sought the view of a leading Tory pollster about his terrible personal ratings and wondered whether there was any realistic hope of improvement. The pollster liked Clegg, but decided that he should not be spared what he saw as the brutal truth. He told the Lib Dem leader that the public view of him was so toxic that it was “irretrievable”. The Lib Dem leader did not say much in response. In his darker moments of the soul over the past four years, Clegg has more than once asked himself whether he should quit.
There is some continuing agitation in some constituencies. The Social Liberal Forum, a grouping on the left of the party, is calling for an emergency conference that may be presented with a no-confidence motion. But it is fast losing momentum because no further MPs are adding their voices to the few that have called on Clegg to go. A key component of successful leadership coups is for the insurrectionists to have a credible champion. With all Clegg’s potential replacements swearing loyalty oaths, there is not such a person. One senior Lib Dem says: “The snipers may still be firing, but I think the war is over.”
It is Cable who is looking most damaged — another example of how Clegg is lucky with his rivals. The irony is that the Oakeshott polling did not prove that Cable would have a transformative effect on his party’s fortunes and he has not really behaved as if he burns with hunger for the job. As one of his colleagues puts it: “In the end, Vince is always completely unwilling to stick in the assassin’s knife.” His real unrequited ambition is to be chancellor of the exchequer. Clegg also owes his survival to Ed Miliband and Cameron. If either of them were better placed, the Lib Dem leader might be in more serious danger. All politics being relative, the pressure on him is reduced because his competitors are not faring well either. Labour produced an underwhelming performance in the local elections and a worse one in the Euros. Having started the campaign with some confidence that they would top the poll, they ended up just scraping past the Tories to secure a deeply unimpressive second place. Labour has since started to fall out with itself about all the things a political party can quarrel about: Its strategy, its policies, its communications, its campaign team and its leader.
The Conservatives came third in a nationwide election for the first time since the party was founded. These elections confirmed that the ceiling on Tory potential support is low because they are so unattractive to key voter groups and so uncompetitive across large swaths of the country. Downing Street is breathing a sigh of relief that the Tory party has not gone into meltdown, but its fundamental structural weaknesses have not changed. It remains hard to see a path to a Tory parliamentary majority at the next election and nigh impossible to find a route to a solid Tory parliamentary majority.
That helps Clegg. He would be in much deeper trouble with his party if it looked obvious that Labour or the Tories were striding confidently towards a general election victory guaranteed to thrust the Lib Dems back into the margins. So long as there is a decent chance of the next election producing another hung parliament, Lib Dems can be tantalised with the possibility that they could still be in the game. They have also taken some solace from projections based on the local elections that indicate they could hold 35 to 40 of their parliamentary seats, a lot better than the headline polls are suggesting.
One further thing saves Clegg’s neck from the chopper. His strategy, which tries to project the Lib Dems as a moderating force in the centre, may not be winning many votes at the moment, but no one in his party has come up with a plausible alternative. The former minister, Jeremy Browne, recently published a book arguing that the Lib Dems should abandon the Clegg approach, advocate an “unbridled, unambiguous, authentic liberalism” and reinvent themselves as a pro-globalisation, low-tax, small-state, freedom-loving, pro-immigration party.
It is a distinctive prospectus and an intellectually coherent one and there is not a chance it will be embraced. It is not going to be adopted because most Lib Dem MPs and members think it would be electoral suicide. The main body of Clegg’s internal critics essentially argue for the party to tilt leftwards to distance themselves from the Tories and try to recover some of those voters who have been lost to Labour. It is true that they did prosper for a while under Charles Kennedy by pitching to the left of New Labour, but that was before they went into government with the Conservatives. It would look comically incredible for the Lib Dems to now turn around and suddenly try to present themselves as Miliband-lite. That small band of voters who have stuck with them this far presumably do so because they broadly accept the argument that coalition is a decent form of government and nod along with Clegg when he contends that the Lib Dems have played a creditable role in the current one. Disposing of the deputy prime minister who made that happen would risk alienating them without actually attracting much, if any, fresh support from elsewhere.
So the Lib Dems cling on to Clegg for fear of something worse — and because they cannot think of anything or anyone that would really do any better.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
