The Liberal Democrat triumph-to-disaster: coalition government 2010-15
A two-party coalition with a formal "programme for government" should have been the Lib Dems' dream come true, but it nearly destroyed them inside five years
As the 2024 general election draws closer—Jeremy Hunt dropped a hint this week that it could be 17 October—there has been a lot of analysis of Labour’s commanding poll lead, perhaps as large as 20 points, and a huge amount of debate over the size of the threat posed to the Conservatives by Reform UK, which is now consistently polling in double figures, its absolute peak so far being 15 per cent. Relatively speaking, there has been less focus on how the Liberal Democrats, for so long the third party of UK politics, will perform.
The Liberal Democrats have won four seats from the Conservatives at by-elections during this parliament: Chesham and Amersham, North Shropshire, Tiverton and Honiton and Somerton and Frome. All have seen huge swings to the Liberal Democrats, the lowest a titanic 25 points. If you’re my age, it harks back to the early and mid-1990s, when the party pounced on traditionally safe Conservative seats like Newbury, Christchurch and Eastleigh, but one could think even further back to expected Liberal revivals after victories at Torrington (1958), Orpington (1962) and Berwick-upon-Tweed (1973).
However, we have to remind ourselves that the Liberal Democrats are rebuilding from a low base. As matters stand now, they have 15 Members of Parliament (behind the Conservatives with 348, Labour with 200 and the Scottish National Party with 43), and at the last general election in 2019 they won only 11.5 per cent of the vote, their leader, Jo Swinson, losing her own seat in East Dunbartonshire after less than five months in post. She had given an enormous hostage to fortune during the campaign by saying that she was a “candidate to be prime minister” and that the Liberal Democrats could win a majority. But it had been worse: in 2015, the party had scraped eight seats and 7.9 per cent of the vote, then 12 seats and 7.4 per cent of the vote in 2017.
The Liberal Democrat annus horribilis of 2015, when the party lost 49 seats and dropped to fourth behind the SNP in the newly elected House of Commons, was, as we know, a result of the party’s five-year coalition with the Conservatives. It had been a slow death before the sudden final blow: at the local elections in 2011, the Liberal Democrats lost 748 seats; in 2012, they lost another 336 seats; in 2013, they lost another 124 councillors; and in 2014, 307 council seats were lost along with 10 of their 11 Members of the European Parliament. The received wisdom is that the party was blamed for effectively enabling a Conservative government. There was particular fury at the fact that every Liberal Democrat MP before the 2010 election, and many prospective parliamentary candidates, had signed the National Union of Students’ “Vote for Students” pledge against tuition fees, yet the coalition government went on to increase fees within months of taking office. Clegg and other senior party figures later apologised, the deputy prime minister’s contrition forming the basis of a song, but it was not accepted by the voting public.
The Liberal Democrats went into 2015 hoping for another hung parliament in which they could maintain their influence. They promised to “bring a heart to a Conservative Government and a brain to a Labour one”, a smug and self-satisfied slogan, but the truth was they had little to show for their five years in partnership with the Conservatives. Plans for reform of the House of Lords had been withdrawn in 2012, a year after a referendum on changing the voting system for the House of Commons to the alternative vote had seen the idea rejected by a margin of two to one on a turnout of only 42.2 per cent. A nebulous sense that their participation had somehow ameliorated austerity and spending cuts failed to convince. The Conservatives performed unexpectedly strongly in the 2015 general election and were able to form a government on their own with a majority of 10, and the Liberal Democrats were pushed to the very margins of national politics. The 7.9 per cent vote share they achieved was the worst performance by them or their predecessor the Liberal Party since 1970.
There is, for me, a powerful irony in the collapse of the Liberal Democrats, because 2010 provided exactly the sort of circumstances for which their style of politics was supposed to be designed. The Liberal Party has supported electoral reform since 1923 at least, when Earl Beauchamp, former cabinet minister and model for the Marquess of Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, introduced the Parliamentary Elections (Alternative Vote) Bill [Lords]. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Liberals had been supplanted as the second party in the House of Commons by Labour for the first time at the general election four months previously. Electoral reform of the sort they had therefore championed for nearly 90 years by 2010 would make coalition governments the norm: this was supposed to be the case in the Scottish Parliament, though the SNP defied the system and won a majority in 2011, and there have been coalitions in the devolved government in Wales from 2000 to 2003, 2007 to 2011 and 2016 to 2021.
The coalition of 2010 was arranged with extraordinary speed, coming into being on 11 May after the election of 6 May, but it was constructed on the basis of a detailed Programme for Government subtitled “Freedom, Fairness, Responsibility”, which laid out policies on 31 separate areas of government. Nick Clegg became deputy prime minister in to David Cameron in a cabinet of 16 Conservatives and five Liberal Democrats (eight additional Conservative ministers and one Liberal Democrat “attended” cabinet but were not full members). The decision-making heart of the administration was the so-called Quad, consisting of Cameron and Clegg, chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and the chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, who replaced fellow Liberal Democrat David Laws when the latter resigned after just 17 days in post.
The Queen’s Speech, delivered on 25 May 2010, set the tone for the coalition. Collective responsibility was to be observed on most matters, though some issues like nuclear power were to be excepted. Importantly, the agreement was for “five years of partnership government driven by those values”, and the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 regulated the intervals between elections which had previously been determined by the prime minister through exercise of the royal prerogative (it was repealed in March 2022). Both leaders emphasised that it was “coalition in the national interest”, between “two parties with some policies in common and a shared desire to work in the national interest”, and the idea of stability and regularity were embedded in its structure.
It is a political truism that all parties are coalitions, and I wrote in The Critic in January this year that it is both inevitable and healthy that our parties are broad churches. But formal coalition governments are founded on the idea of compromise, of give and take, of the inevitability that partners will not achieve everything they want and will have to accept some policies which they might in principle have preferred not to support. All of this is supposedly secondary to the sense of a broad-based administration which works in the “national interest” (that phrase was nearly worn out in the summer of 2010).
I have long believed that the establishment of the coalition government was substantially an achievement of David Cameron’s natural flair for politics. I wrote about politicians with an innate gift a few months ago—I always come back to the German term Fingerspitzengefühl, or “fingertip sensitivity”—and Cameron possesses this in some ways. It is uneven in him, I freely confess, but there have been times when a man who is, I suspect, by nature quite conservative has displayed a sudden, audacious sense of what is possible but is not perceived by others. This was the case with the coalition; rather than form a minority government or seek a confidence-and-supply arrangement, Cameron surprised Westminster by making a “big, open and comprehensive offer” to the Liberal Democrats of the country’s first formal coalition since 1945.
I want us to work together in tackling our country’s big and urgent problems—the debt crisis, our deep social problems and our broken political system… I think we have a strong basis for a strong government. Inevitably the negotiations we’re about to start will involve compromise. That is what working together in the national interest means.
This must have been unexpected but delicious and enticing music to Nick Clegg’s ears. No Liberal leader had held government office since Sir Archibald Sinclair had returned his seals of office as secretary of state for air on 23 May 1945, although Gwilym Lloyd-George, a Liberal MP from 1923 to 1931 and since 1935 stayed on in Churchill’s Conservative-dominated caretaker ministry of May to July 1945 as minister of fuel and power. (He would later serve in the Conservative government of the 1950s, ultimately as home secretary 1954-57, though formally he was a “National Liberal”.)
Here, though, is the irony to which I referred. The Liberal Democrats in 2010 were presented with almost ideal circumstances: full ministerial participation in a formal coalition government of the kind which, presumably, they hoped would become habitual through the introduction of a proportional system of election to the House of Commons, making majoritarian almost impossible. In Germany, for example, since the Federal Republic was established in 1949, there has always been a coalition of one kind or another with the exception of the period between July 1960, when the tiny German Party left the government, and November 1961, when the Free Democratic Party joined the Christian Democratic Union in a new coalition after elections to the Bundestag.
(Even then, Konrad Adenauer’s government of 1960-61 was a coalition of a kind, since the CDU has always governed in harness with the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, the CSU. They are known in parliamentary terms as the Union Faction, die Unionsfraktion, but each has a high degree of autonomy and slightly different policy approaches.)
It was this very set of circumstances, however, which led to the Liberal Democrats’ shattering defeat in 2015. The fact of their coalition partnership meant they had to allow tuition fees to be increased, and failed to achieve significant constitutional reform apart from the now-repealed Fixed-term Parliaments Act, and were not able to show that they had been a moderating influence on the Conservative Party in any meaningful way. The electorate, it seems, simply did not want to adapt to a more European style of politics marked by compromise and accommodation, and judged the Liberal Democrats extremely harshly.
In it is a significant postscript that when Theresa May’s gamble of an early election in June 2017, designed to capitalise on enormous opinion poll leads and a Labour opposition apparently in disarray, went badly wrong, there was no renewed coalition. The Conservatives, although winning their highest share of the vote since 1983, lost 13 seats overall and were left in a minority, with 317 MPs in a House of Commons of 650. An alliance with the 12 Liberal Democrats now led by Tim Farron would, in theory, have delivered a wafer-thin majority, but a great deal had changed since 2010: Farron was stinging in his criticism of May, on whom he called to resign if she had “an ounce of self-respect”, describing her as “arrogant and vain”. He demanded that negotiations over the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union be put on hold “until the Government has reassessed its priorities and set them out to the British public”. That would never have been acceptable to the Conservative Party in Parliament.
Many felt that May should resign. A survey of Conservative Party members found two-thirds wanted the prime minister to quit, while polls by YouGov and Survation found that half of all voters thought she should give up her office. George Osborne, by then editor of The Evening Standard, called her a “dead woman walking”. May, however, looked to the Democratic Unionist Party, with 10 seats, as a potential solution to her parliamentary arithmetic. The government’s chief whip, Gavin Williamson, led negotiations with his DUP counterpart, Jeffrey Donaldson, and the two parties agreed a formal confidence-and-supply arrangement: as well as on financial matters, the DUP would vote with the Conservatives on “legislation pertaining to the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union; and legislation pertaining to national security”. Other matters would be judged on their individual merits.
There would, however, be no ministerial posts for DUP leaders. A co-ordination committee, on which the secretary of state for Northern Ireland—James Brokenshire, succeeded in January 2018 by Karen Bradley—would not sit, would oversee the details of the two parties’ co-operation. There was pious criticism from the Labour Party, with Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition, asserting that the deal was “clearly not in the national interest”. It later transpired that Labour had explored the possibility of an agreement with the DUP in 2010 and 2015, which undercut its argument somewhat. But there was no big, open or comprehensive offer on the table from Theresa May.
I don’t like coalitions. I don’t have a sense that compromise is inherently virtuous, an idea I think is on a continuum with the centrist devotion to citizens’ assemblies, and the example of the Liberal Democrats demonstrates that the enforced accommodations of a coalition government can leave parties living with policies they had explicitly opposed, like tuition fees. I simply don’t see how that is beneficial for public trust. If a single-party government clearly and openly reneges on a promise, it must live with the consequences, while Clegg and his Liberal Democrat colleagues attempted to plead necessity and “the national interest” to evade responsibility.
My suspicion is that we have seen the back of coalitions for a while. The indications are that Labour will win comfortably at the next election; although the party conference in 2022 convincingly backed a motion in favour of introducing proportional representation at general elections, it is unlikely to be high on a Labour government’s agenda. Lucy Powell, the shadow leader of the House, has said that, while she is “personally for, kind of, looking at electoral reform-type stuff”, it is “a bit of a distraction” from other priorities. If Sir Keir Starmer leads Labour to a substantial victory, perhaps with a three-figure majority, he will have no practical impetus to pursue electoral reform, nor will there be any constituency to apply pressure to him.
If there is no hung parliament and no influential pressure for electoral reform, there seems no impending prospect of a coalition at a UK level. How will the Liberal Democrats perform at the election? Their polling numbers have not moved significantly from around 10 per cent for a year or more, but predictions of the number of seats they might win have fluctuated wildly, from as low as five in a Survation poll in February 2023 to as high as 53 a month ago. I posed the question without preconceptions on Twitter on Saturday, one Liberal Democrat councillor predicting between 35 and 50. My hunch is that it will be much lower: although the party is strong in local government and has achieved dramatic by-election wins, I suspect they will be squeezed as the election approaches and many voters come to regard it as a decision either for or against a Labour government. But I could be wrong.
Benjamin Disraeli famously said “coalitions, although successful, have always found this, that their triumph has been brief. This too I know, that England does not love coalitions”. It is true that when he said this, during his 1852 Budget speech as chancellor of the Exchequer, he was engaged in mockery of his opponents, but our political history at least since the Second World War suggests he had a point. Certainly any party leader faced with an invitation to join a formal coalition government would do well to think deeply about the Liberal Democrat experience of 2010-15, but I can’t foresee circumstances in the next few years in which we will be faced with a likely combination of parties. It would be a deep irony indeed if the Liberal Democrats had not only inflicted a grievous wound on themselves, but had taken coalitions out of the mainstream for a generation too.
Nick Clegg showed astonishing naivety in allowing himself to be rushed into negotiations for a full coalition with the Tories in 2010, rather than playing hard to get and forcing the two big parties to woo him. He could have insisted on a firm commitment to bring forward legislation for at least the Alternative Vote system as the price of his support. This might well have resulted in a second election in which the Liberal Democrats lost seats but they would hardly have been reduced to 8 seats as they were in 2015. Undoubtedly, Clegg was influenced by the currency uncertainty at the time and the danger that political instability might lead to a Sterling crisis. I suspect that, if the First Past the Post lottery ever again gives the Liberal Democrats the balance of power position, the party leader of the day will profit from this experience.
Ed Davey did interview with Nick Robinson on his politics pod. Not my cuppa tea, but seemed sane, sensible and humane. Obvious issue is brexit. Libs remain stance ends the possibility of voting for them.