Tired and brittle, this already feels like a caretaker administration

The Tories could reach the next election scarcely more advanced than Labour in the race to the win voters’ trust .

By Rafael Behr Published 18 July 2012

Cameron and Clegg look "painful and unnatural". Photograph: Getty Images.

Cameron and Clegg's partnership looks "painful and unnatural". Photograph: Getty Images.

No political relaunch is ever entirely successful. As with cosmetic surgery, the surface facsimile of lost vitality indicates a deeper inadequacy. Usually it looks painful and unnatural.

So it seems when David Cameron and Nick Clegg reaffirm their commitment to power-sharing. The Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders held a joint press conference on 16 July to prove that they can get over their recent tiff over House of Lords reform and to remind everyone that fixing the economy remains the unifying and overarching purpose of their government. That it has to be said at all is a sign of how badly the coalition has lost focus.

The event outside Birmingham was a retread of an event on 8 May, when the Prime Minister and his deputy rededicated themselves to the cause in an Essex tractor factory. This time, as a visual aid to prompt “back on track” metaphors (and because there was an announcement about rail infrastructure spending), they stood in front of a train. The routine looks more strained every time, like the umpteenth sequel in a hackneyed Hollywood franchise – Rose Garden III: Electrification of the Cardiff Line.

One of Ed Miliband’s closest advisers talks about the “half-life” of the coalition – a reference to the pattern of decay seen in radioactive
material. The Labour leader has been working on two strategic calculations. First, Clegg and Cameron will manage to keep their partnership alive for most of a full parliamentary term. Second, the exhausting process of foisting vile compromise on reluctant MPs will age the project prematurely so it looks haggard and beaten by polling day. Both assumptions look sound.

Loveless marriage

One measure of the government’s depleted vigour is the extent to which the civil service is said to be running the show. Many Tories see the departure from Downing Street in May of Steve Hilton, Cameron’s former chief strategist, as the point at which momentum ran out. The official line is that Hilton is on a one-year sabbatical in California but the reality is that he went to war against Whitehall over drastic reforms to the way government works – and lost. “It was a defeat,” says a No 10 insider. “There’s no other way to view it.”

People inside and outside the government who used to feed policy ideas to Hilton say that they must now be routed through the office of Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood. I thought Westminster chatter about the omnipotent head of the civil service was extreme until I mentioned it to a top Treasury official and got the reply: “That stuff you hear about Heywood really running the government – all true.”

Partly the triumph of the administrative apparatus is a function of coalition. Managing relations between two parties requires more committees, minutes and memos, less stitching up deals on the sofa. That shift has empowered the Mandarinate. There was also complacency about how easy it would be to make the transition from opposition to government.

Many officials reported swaggering Tories striding into their departments in 2010 as if they owned the place (whereas Labour ministers cowered as if squatting someone else’s patch, even after a decade in power). Yet, of the many policy revolutions unleashed in the early months of the government, only Michael Gove’s proliferation of new schools and Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare changes come close to looking like political victories. Even in IDS’s department, there is mounting anxiety that the universal credit, the ambitious refit of the benefits system, will be sunk by IT problems.

The government’s biggest project is epic NHS reform, which promises to yield a steady flow of poisonous headlines about closures, cuts and chaos. That debacle has emboldened the civil service to reassert its authority over policymaking.

It is against this background that senior figures in the coalition are planning a “midterm review” in September. Once upon a time, this was envisaged as Coalition 2.0 – a snazzy upgrade to the governing blueprint agreed in 2010. That ambition was shelved last year and instead a modest audit will be conducted of what from the original plan has been achieved and what tasks remain.

If there is to be a more profound renewal of coalition vows, it will happen not this autumn but the following one, when the next round of public spending decisions is due. If the Coalition Agreement was the marriage contract, the October 2010 spending review, containing the timetable for austerity, was the consummation, locking the two partners together in irreversible fiscal intimacy.

But George Osborne’s repair job on the public finances has been bodged. Deeper cuts or new tax rises are needed but there is none of the 2010 spirit of solidarity to lubricate negotiations over where the axe should fall. It is one thing putting on a public show of conjugal harmony, quite another thing climbing back into a loveless bed.

Living in the interregnum

Another spending review poses multiple dangers for Labour, too. It will force Miliband to clarify what in the public sector should be preserved, what sacrificed and what reformed for the sake of long-term fiscal rectitude. Fumbling that challenge would be punished by voters as proof of unreadiness for government.

The usual attack on Labour is that the party cannot imagine governing without spending money, of which there is none spare. The same can be said of the coalition. A series of Budget U-turns, all abandoned tax rises, has left a trail of unfunded policies. The new infrastructure projects now being vaunted as part of the coalition’s grand economic plan will be underwritten by the taxpayer. This is borrowing to invest in growth (albeit with the debt hidden from the government’s balance sheet), which is what Ed Balls has long been advocating. Tory MPs fret that Labour is no longer shut out of the debate about how to rescue the economy, as it appeared to be a year ago.

On its current trajectory, the government can only look more stale and brittle. Already it feels like a caretaker administration, a quasi-civil-service technocracy holding the fort pending the outcome of ideological manoeuvring within parties and between them. The coalition is not an incumbent; it is an interregnum. That means the Tories could reach the next election scarcely more advanced than Labour in the race to the win voters’ trust and their permission to govern.

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Tags: Coalition David Cameron Nick Clegg Conservatives

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14 comments

Sat, 2012-11-10 08:50 — Owerrylem (not verified)

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Tue, 2012-07-24 08:37 — Colin Sloss (not verified)

This seems to be the thread for weirdoes, must be why I'm on it!

Sun, 2012-07-22 16:04 — Eddy S (not verified)

it was always to be. there is no money left as our friend liam byrne told us, however note to future government there never will be as much money as there was in the noughties !

Sat, 2012-07-21 12:27 — Sean Gallen (not verified)

Автодамаски

Автомобилни стелки

Sat, 2012-07-21 09:52 — WAKEY, WAKEY! (not verified)

Yes, they're just actors on the national, if not world, stage. Bought and paid for by the banks, for the banksters. They're all gangsters, hijacking our true democracy by their evil collusion. I guess it earns them their ticket to the underground city of choice when the holocaust descends. Notice how they keep up this pitiful charade to keep us distracted while the plot for our deaths goes on behind closed doors? Yep, you read right. Here's how it is, in case it's missed your attention:

A bunch of the richest crooks in the Western world who privately own Federal Reserve, control Central banks, control IMF, control world leaders, control UN, control military, control big Pharmas, control big corporations, control Agriculture, control fuel industries, control water supplies, control distribution of resources, control the Media -and more. Now they want to control us, individually, that is, by taking away our rights, tightening the noose around our necks. They're pumping new money into the system to deflate the dollar, the pound. Notice the rising cost of everything? That's the power of your money dwindling by the week, if not daily. Why are they doing this? because they think there's too many people in the world, they want us to die. They had an American Stonehenge erected in Georgia, USA stipulating that the world population would be maintained at or under 500million. There's 7billion people in the world at present. You do the Maths. Near TOTAL WIPE OUT. Think: am I dispensible to these evil ba*tards, or am I indispensible to them? You're only indispensible while you're working for them, then you're dispensible.
Are these people running the world? Is there anyone higher than them? Yes, the crap ba*tard sitting in his wealth in the Vatican runs the show. Who's higher than that? God. Allah. The Creator. Say your prayers.

Fri, 2012-07-20 18:29 — hugh markey (not verified)

Racking our brains we've decided that the comedy duo of John Fortune and John Bird would be perfect representations of Cameron PM and his Deputy, Clegg in harness.
They wouldn't ever need to write a script - it's all there.

And this is the summer of foul-ups( to put it politely)!
Yes, it's time to lob a political comedy cluster- bomb in the general direction of the coalition.
We're all in the thick of it and it's time for a Laff-in! Don't do the obvious - the three-legged race.

LOL

Sat, 2012-07-21 05:01 — James99 (not verified)

You would have thought that after Bliar, Prescott, Mandelson, Kinnock et al this bunch would have at least been able to present a more believable picture. But, they havent. They lied about EU referendums, they seemed to be as large a group of thieves with expenses as Labour, they have done nothing to address pensioner poverty, worker poverty, child poverty, failing NHS, uncontrolled immigration, failing schools. They have said words, some PR spin, but actually done nothing. I am guessing that when this bunch of liars and crooks along with the 'leaders' of the financial sector have hit the road and retired on huge unearned pensions and riches, maybe there will be an opportunity for some decent, humane politicians to get into power. But I doubt it.

Sun, 2012-07-22 06:49 — GladysH (not verified)

I for one, am sick of the whole brigade. What have we come to, when we allow the appalling injustices to carry on unheeded? I'm talking about the rich getter richer, the poor getting poorer. This government is doing NOTHING to tackle the insiduous takeover of big corporations, the lack of jobs for school leavers and indeed, for all those out of work. Except punish. They're good at that. Punish and squeeze, when they should be thinking creatively how to raise standards. I think the British people have shown gross misjudgement when they voted these shysters into government. But we can learn from the mistake of thinking anyone with charm, good looks and private wealth must be suitable - here lies the vanity of the British public! We have only ourselves to blame! Always aspiring towards the richest echelons of society, missing the point in life, that is: to be safe, secure and have meaningful work in a thriving environment. People have climbed on the back of corporate greed, been sucked in by the promise of further riches for themselves at the expense of others, and now can weep in bitterness in the realisation that souls have been sold to the devil. Hollow men with hollow souls ruling over us are the reward for stupidity and vanity.

Tue, 2012-07-24 19:29 — R (not verified)

Please be aware that millions of British voters did not vote for the current Government and NONE of them voted for a Coalition.

Mon, 2012-07-23 04:03 — ZomtoEarthHumanoids (not verified)

Right, some idiot wrote about vaccinating teenage girls for cancer, I mean, where do the vaccines come from? Made in USA? What's in them? We don't really know. We can't trust the pharmaceutical companies anymore. They're just in it to make money. Look up: *POISON VACCINES on YouTube.

Also the food. Big corporations dominating the ownership of seed through patents. It's disgusting pretending GM crops are the answer to third world countries. Monsanto in USA are even sueing farmers who don't use their seed, just because some got blown onto the farmers' land. Look up on YouTube:

*DAVID Versus MONSANTO (The Globalist Slow Kill Bio Weapons Division)
*GM Crops Farmer to Farmer
*How GMO FOODS alter organ function and pose a very real health threat to humans
*INDIAN Farmer Beats up MONSANTO REP for failed GM Cotton