LOSS of POWER

The faintly ludicrous figure of Norman Lamont, these days known as Baron Lamont of Lerwick, does not swim into my consciousness very often. When he does, it is as likely as not in the context of Julian Clary’s notorious and outrageous joke at his expense. Otherwise, there was the debonair dismissal of political misfortune – “je ne regrette rien” – and the somewhat enigmatic story of his letting a flat to a Miss Whiplash. Oh, and there was Black Wednesday.

It’s another quote from John Mayor’s Chancellor that occurs to me now, the most quoted line from his resignation speech to the Commons after he had been offered a demotion that he found insulting. Lamont described Major as “giving the impression of being in office but not in power”. It was one of those “ouch” moments that the House relishes forever afterwards.

Lamont and Major back in the day

The coalition is having a lamentable – or, if you prefer, a lamontable – year that just seems to get worse. And some of the damage begins to look irreparable, particularly that self-inflicted by David Cameron himself. He is being increasingly seen – in his own party quite as much as outside it – as inept. At Prime Minister’s Questions, Ed Miliband has found how to get under his skin and – what Cameron maybe does not realise – it shows in the PM’s heightened colour, barely concealed anger and tendency to bluster. Moreover, Cameron’s notorious impatience with detail and procedure is dangerously prompting him to make policy on the hoof, as in his remarks about energy that were news to the department charged with that rather important subject.

The PM of the red face

The Andrew Mitchell debacle – inevitably dubbed Plebgate – has done far-reaching damage, not least in allowing Tory backbenchers a month largely free of being kept in line by the whips. Cameron ought to have been able to see at once that Mitchell’s authority – the only quality that a chief whip really needs – had been fatally undermined by the man’s inability to mount a coherent and convincing account of the exchange with the Downing Street police officer. When a party leader’s instincts – in this case to tough it out – leave him stuck in a corner, the followers inevitably begin to wonder if the game is up.

What with Boris Johnson capering merrily in the wings and the certainty that the coalition parties will be brushed aside in the imminent by-election in Tory marginal Corby, Cameron indeed starts to give the impression of being in office but not in power. I suspect that it is many weeks since Downing Street discounted the potential appeal of Ed Miliband under the scrutiny of a general election; even Fleet Street has reluctantly begun to acknowledge that Miliband has been playing it very long and very shrewd.

Ed Miliband projects

But my sense of it is that, although his backbenchers are palpably growing more critical if not openly mutinous, encouraged by such insider savagery as Lord Tebbitt directed at the government this weekend, Cameron’s main worry for the prospects both before and after the election concerns the Liberal Democrats.

Consider the bind in which Nick Clegg finds himself. What can he and his party offer at the 2015 general election? That they ameliorated the grosser effects of the Tories? Who will swallow that? That they achieved some of their cherished long-term aims? Which were those? That they surrendered their independence in the national interest and made common cause with the hated Tories to save the economy? Figures to be released this week may suggest that the longest double-dip recession Britain has ever experienced – which, moreover, only began on the coalition’s watch – is coming to an end, but who can believe that any but the richest voters will go to the polls next time with a good feeling about their own finances?

The reality is that, even if the statistics can be massaged to look promising, the broad mass of the electorate will still be hurting and will still not believe that “we are all in it together” in the risibly untrue phrase that the fare-diddling Chancellor had the gall to dredge up again in conference. What’s more, the Tories will be fighting the Lib Dems for every vote. Tory backbenchers will heap all perceived unpopularity onto the coalition’s “weak sister”.

Andrew Mitchell leaves office

Of the Lib Dems’ 57 seats, 28 (virtually half) are held with majorities below 5,000 votes, all of which must be feeling vulnerable. Don’t expect Sarah Teather, John Hemming, Jo Swinson, Chris Huhne or even that old warhorse Sir Alan Beith to return at the next election.

Nine Lib Dems have majorities above 10,000, which might be thought to be relatively safe. Interestingly, all the past leaders still in the Commons number among those nine – Paddy Ashdown, Charles Kennedy, Sir Menzies Campbell – along with the present leader, Nick Clegg, and the mooted future leader, Vince Cable. But you wouldn’t want to put folding money on Clegg retaining his Sheffield Hallam seat, especially as students have long been moving into the area in order to punish him over tuition fees.

But the support for the Lib Dems as measured by opinion polls is so low and so half-hearted that they will be lucky even to retain eight of the nine purportedly “safest”. I habitually discount the “evidence” of those pseudo-scientists the pollsters, but I confidently predict (based simply on what my waters tell me) that the Lib Dem candidate in Corby will be beaten by both the Green and the UKIP candidates and consequently will lose her deposit. She may even be overtaken by the anti-wind-farms independent (the journalist and prize ass James Delingpole) and by the Monster Raving Loony Party representative, a Mr Toby Jug.

Nick Clegg: things can only get ... um ...

Contemplating annihilation, the Lib Dems surely must be considering their options. A number of statements lately by Clegg and others – statements, mind; not actions – tend to suggest that the Lib Dems are beginning to see the need to let light become visible between them and their coalition partners. But surely something more dramatic and far-reaching is required.

If I were Clegg, I would be looking as a matter of urgency for the issue on which I could credibly and creditably lead my party out of power. To do so would certainly bring down the government. Cameron would have no choice but to try and soldier on with a minority administration. Labour, promptly unveiling its hitherto mysterious plan for government, would take the first opportunity to seek a vote of confidence, which the Tories would lose. Then Clegg could fight a general election not as the ineffectual junior partner of a reviled and blundering coalition but as the leader who had the “courage” to bring down the coalition on “a point of principle”. Believe me, it’s the only scenario that will save his party from electoral annihilation.

Elsewhere in the wild wood that is coalition government, some of the forest creatures lollop along as if without a care in the world. Here’s a story that reveals more about the Tory hegemony than might appear on the surface. That egregious twit Jeremy Hunt was recently present at a Buckingham Palace reception, clearly still basking in the Olympic glow that he erroneously believes may redeem his disgraceful stint as Secretary of State for Media, Culture & Sport. When he and the monarch duly came to face to face, little Hunt was ready with his anecdote, delivered, we may be certain, with all the toe-curling brightness of a shiny-faced Vth-former.

Jeremy Hunt: please like me

He related how a Japanese diplomat had assured him that the Emperor would never have been so game and public-spirited as to (pretend to) leap from a helicopter for the entertainment of the viewers of the Olympiad ceremony. The Queen, who obviously would have immediately tuned him out on the words “Japanese diplomat”, shrugged and moved on (the authenticity of this story is underlined by how absolutely convincing the account of the monarch’s demeanour contrives to be).

Hunt had barely begun to choke back his gush when the Duke loomed over him and barked “who are you?” How we all wish we had been eye-witnesses to this double whammy of vertiginous rebuffs. But really: if the public school millionaires in the cabinet don’t know how to make small talk with royalty, what earthly use are they?