CONDEMMED

A hundred days of coalition government. Have you had enough yet?

It occurs to me that we get the worst of all worlds by having the Liberal Democrats shacked up with the Tories and pretending that everything’s entirely civilised and efficient. Had the Lib Dems thrown in their lot with Labour, even with the asking price that Gordon Brown stand down, there would have been considerably more credible agreement between the coalition partners. Indeed, there might have been some actual liberal policies in the government’s programme. Had the Tories formed a minority government, the combination of Labour and Liberal Democrats in opposition would have forced David Cameron to trim to the left in order at least to establish a platform upon which to go to the country in the autumn, by which time Labour would have a new leader and the circumstances would have been very different.

But as it stands, Nick Clegg is obliged to pretend to accept a programme almost the whole of which he and his party opposed up until May 7th. By any objective assessment, the Lib Dems have precious little to show for their decision to join the Conservatives in government, save the diminishing returns of the thrill of actually being in government. Wholly predictably, support for them in the opinion polls has slumped and, when the shine comes off the government as a whole, it will surely dribble away further. Perhaps next month’s party conference will be too soon for the rumbles of disillusion among the rank and file to break into open revolt. The conference in thirteen months’ time might be a different story.

There is discontent among the Tories too, particularly among those who never bought the Cameron philosophy in the first place and who see their leader’s easy camaraderie with Clegg as conclusive evidence that he is no son of Thatcher, rather that he is wet, wet, wet. Once the results of the spending review begin to kick in, the Tories will lose all hope of holding onto the support they won in May from the working classes and other erstwhile but disaffected Labour supporters. And the cuts will have a discernible effect on the Tory grass roots, sufficient perhaps to stimulate protest.






The many and varied self-satisfied smirks of Jeremy Hunt

There is no question that the cuts in services and benefits will affect those least able to bear them disproportionately hard. Cameron has begun to try to drive a wedge between the dependent society and that part of the public that subscribes to the views promulgated by the Daily Mail by declaring war on so-called “benefit cheats”. It’s a soft target lined up to play to the gallery and Cameron knows full well – if he doesn’t, he should do – that he could make far greater savings by waging war on the inefficiencies of the benefit system and far more still by plugging the gaps that allow the higher earners to evade their full taxation duties. He and the Mail may think that saying that everyone knows somebody who’s fiddling their benefits strikes a chord but pretty soon everyone will know somebody who genuinely can’t work but whose benefit has been stopped. Expect a huge increase in the numbers of people living on the streets, many of them suffering from disabilities.

George Osborne’s refrain that “we’re all in this together” will come back to haunt him as the perception spreads that real hardship is settling across millions who were already struggling to make ends meet, while city slickers are still paying themselves multi-million bonuses and managing to avoid paying proper tax on them.

Moreover, as the spending review begins to express itself in thousands of job losses, the government’s priorities will begin to seem to run against the grain of what the electorate believes is needed. Cameron has already committed an additional expenditure of £67million to the unwinnable war in Afghanistan. The grimly reiterated rationale for this – that it protects British people against terrorist attacks at home – will seem to increasing numbers the unproved theory that it is, especially if, as can hardly be ruled out, there is another outrage on British soil. Meanwhile, British troops and, in far greater numbers, innocent Afghani civilians die for no discernible gain. Those of us who always opposed the invasion of Afghanistan have far more recruits to their position than does any other view of the conflict. The conviction is taking root that Cameron is willing to destroy livelihoods at home in order to be able to destroy lives abroad.


Wouldn't it be fun if the Royal Court were owned by the Telegraph?

Come the winter, with prices strongly up, benefits strongly down, unemployment figures skyrocketing, government agencies closing down, unanticipated holes opening in provision, strikes breaking out and Cameron’s “big society” dwindling by the day, the chances of the Con-Dem coalition still commanding public support look pretty slim. And that’s assuming we don’t fall into the widely feared double-dip recession. By the time winter’s depression arrives, the government’s preferred explanation for every imposed hardship – “it’s all Labour’s fault” – will be falling on stony ground.

An unexpectedly key figure in the government’s determination to rebalance the books at whatever cost is the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt. Like all ministers, he has been instructed to find a minimum 25percent cut in the funds his department disburses and to posit how, if required, he would deploy a 40percent cut. Hunt has gone at it with indecent relish. He has already despatched the UK Film Council, to cries of anguish from across the movie industry, even from Clint Eastwood himself. He has told the arts nexus that it ought to reconfigure itself on the American model of private and corporate sponsorship and donation. Unfortunately, there is in Britain neither a tradition nor a community of idle multi-millionaires who imagine that they buy respectability by supporting galleries and theatres and orchestras. Long before such a community and tradition can grow here – even if there is the private wealth to make it feasible – many galleries, theatres and orchestras will have gone.

And what sort of a culture will we foster if, say, Telegraph Media Group buys the Royal Court Theatre in order to make a permanent home for rotating productions of the work of its favourite playwright, Ronald Harwood, knighted by the government at the earliest opportunity in this year’s Birthday Honours list? Or what if the Victoria & Albert Museum is sponsored by and obliged to carry the identity of that faux heritage brand, Crabtree & Evelyn? It’s naïve to imagine that every benefactor has only benevolence in his heart. Look at the visual disfigurement of sport by advertising. Do we really want the London Symphony Orchestra to give concerts in teeshirts bearing the logo of some far-east electronics company? And what will that sponsor tell the orchestra when it wants to commission a new work from, say, Mark-Anthony Turnage or Thomas Adès? Won’t he ask “what’s wrong with that nice piece by Vivaldi? The Four Seasons, is it? That was very popular last month. And the month before”.


How the sponsored V & A might look, with a crab-apple tree in the street outside

The outlook is gloomy, my old friend, right across the landscape. Cameron is credited in some quarters with hitting the ground running, with slipping quickly into his role as premier, with making the coalition work better for his party than anyone could have anticipated. It’s all very reminiscent of the first days of Tony Blair and we know where that led us. But the period before the spending review was always going to be the calm before the storm.

And meanwhile the somewhat unexpected evidence that Cameron knows a lot less than he pretends and speaks without preparation hardly makes for confidence. I’m referring to the examples of what Downing Street is pleased to call his “misspeaking” when, for instance, he essayed that Britain was the junior partner to the US in 1940 – that absolutely outraged anyone over 75 – and that Iran is a nuclear power (though perhaps he knows something that we don’t). His disobliging words about Pakistan shortly before the visit of that nation’s president were hardly taken from the short primer to diplomacy that any in-coming prime minister needs to have read. If Cameron means to persist in shooting from the hip, he’s likely to get gunned down himself.