Wrong kind of snow - or wrong kind of government?

IN last week's column, I wrote that the coalition government's key political success since taking office was to have pinned the blame for the savage spending cuts it is implementing on Labour.

It is no small matter. On the question of who takes the rap for the country's current economic plight will hang much of the politics of the next five years.

If the government can hold the line all the way to the next election, it is inconceivable that the electorate would let Labour back in after just one term in opposition to atone for its economic sins.

But this, in turn, depends utterly on how the economy actually performs – and whether Chancellor George Osborne is proved right in his strategy of putting deficit reduction before economic growth.

Up until now, the country has by and large been prepared to give Mr Osborne the benefit of the doubt on this point.

Whenever Labour politicians – notably Ed Balls –have tried to argue the opposing point of view, they have been swiftly condemned as "deficit deniers."

But this week came the first sign of a chink in the Coalition's economic armour – a 0.5pc fall in GDP during the final quarter of 2010, following two preceding quarters in which the economy grew.

Could it be that Mr Balls was right after all, and that far from providing a springboard for recovery, the Coalition's deficit reduction strategy is actually strangling it?

Timing is everything in politics and in one respect, the GDP figures could not have come at a better time for Mr Balls, newly-installed as Shadow Chancellor following Alan Johnson's surprise resignation last week.

He certainly made the most of the opportunity, tearing into Mr Osborne with a self-assuredness that made the Chancellor look like the new kid on the block.

"My message to George Osborne is – get a Plan B, get a policy for jobs and growth and do it quick," he said, winning the war of the soundbites with some ease.

Mr Osborne's cause was not helped by the fact that he tried to blame the fall in output on the weather, which, as one union leader put it, sounded "a bit like a rail boss blaming delays on leaves on the line."

Whether this week's exchanges will turn out to be of lasting significance will of course depend on where the economy goes from here.

The risk factors for the government are obvious. This month’s VAT rise seems hardly likely to encourage a resumption in the growth trend, while there remains the risk of another cold snap.

Some observers have argued that having clamped down on spending in last year’s comprehensive spending review, Mr Osborne would use his March Budget to shift to a more pro-growth strategy.

Had this week's figures turned out positive, he could have done that from a position of strength - but to do so now would look more like a panic-induced U-turn.

Either way, if the next set of figures in April show the growth trend resuming, Mr Osborne will be off the hook and Mr Balls and Labour will be back at square one.

But if on the other hand they show another fall, then the UK will officially be back in recession and the dreaded "double-dip" will have become a reality.

Not only would that give Mr Balls the whip-hand in the economic debate, it would start to shatter the current consensus that the cuts are (a) necessary, and (b) Labour’s fault.

And the voters might then start to conclude that not only did we have the wrong kind of snow last month, but that we also have the wrong kind of government.

Why 2011 is the Coalition's make-or-break year

Two weeks ago I concluded my review of the political year 2010 by posing a question which will, in my view, determine how the next 12 months in British politics ultimately pan out.

It was: can the Coalition government as a whole withstand the dramatic loss in popularity suffered by the Liberal Democrats since their decision to go into partnership with David Cameron’s Tories.

As Ricky Ponting can no doubt testify, a team is only as good as its weakest link, and with public support for the Lib Dems now barely registering in double figures, Nick Clegg’s party are clearly the weakest link in this government.

The big question for Mr Clegg is how much lower he can afford to allow that support to drop before continuing membership of the Coalition simply becomes politically unsustainable.

If any further proof were needed of the Coalition’s inherent instability, then the Vince Cable affair in the run-up to Christmas surely provided it.

There were several ironies about this episode, not least that a newspaper which shared Dr Cable’s hostility to Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of BSkyB managed to shoot itself so comprehensively in the foot.

But surely the biggest irony of all is that, for all the humiliation he heaped upon himself, Dr Cable turned out to be correct in his estimation that he was, in effect, unsackable.

Whatever you think of the methods used to ‘entrap’ him, any other minister who displayed such appalling naivety and lack of judgement would surely have been out of the door.

But because Mr Cameron dare not weaken the Lib Dem element of the Coalition for fear that the whole edifice will collapse, he survived - thought not without having his wings severely clipped.

So much for the events of the week before Christmas. What of the year ahead?

Well, since this is traditionally the time of year for crystal ball gazing, I’ll make a prediction. If the Coalition gets through the next 12 months, it will more than likely achieve its ambition of serving a full five-year parliamentary term.

Why is 2011 likely to prove the Coalition’s make-or-break year? Well, for starters, it is likely to become significantly more unpopular as the cuts bite, unemployment continues to rise, and the full implications of some of its more radical experiments become clear.

I have in mind here Andrew Lansley’s NHS reforms and Michael Gove’s de-municipalisation of schools, neither of which can claim much of a popular mandate.

But the biggest single threat to the Coalition’s survival is the time-bomb that is due to detonate underneath it on Thursday 5 May – the referendum on the alternative voting system.

If, as many now expect, the referendum is lost, it will remove the Lib Dems’ main incentive for having entered the partnership in the first place.

For Labour leader Ed Miliband, too, this will be a critical 12 months, as he seeks to demonstrate to a sceptical public why he, and not his elder brother, is the right man for the job.

At least he now has a clearer opposition strategy, seeking to brand this a Conservative-led government supported by reluctant Liberal Democrats rather than the marriage of true minds Messrs Clegg and Cameron would like to portray.

Yet for all that, Mr Miliband is probably no more keen to bring the government down right now than Dr Cable: his party is broke, he hasn’t had time to overhaul the policies that lost it the last election, and the public doesn’t really know him.

If the Coalition does manage to survive the year, it might simply be because none of the three main parties really wants to have another election just yet.

Review of the Political Year 2010

When future historians come to assess the political events of 2010, two big counterfactual questions are likely to loom large in their minds.

They are: what if Labour had ditched Gordon Brown before the General Election, and what if the Liberal Democrats had refused to go into coalition with David Cameron's Conservatives?

The second question is probably the easier one to answer. Mr Cameron would have formed a minority government, David and not Ed Miliband would have become Labour leader, and both would now be gearing up for a fresh election in the spring.

But the more tantalising question is whether Mr Cameron might never have become Prime Minister at all had Labour gone into the election under a more popular leader.

The political year 2010 began with Mr Brown's survival once again hanging in the balance.

Former Labour ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt attempted to get MPs to demand a leadership contest, but rightly or wrongly, the consensus in the party was that by then it was too late to change horses.

As it was, the election turned into a slow-motion car crash for Labour, dominated by televised debates in which Mr Brown was predictably outshone by his two younger, more charismatic opponents.

Then, in the final week of the campaign, came 'Duffygate' - the kind of incident which could have happened to any of them, but which seemed somehow fated to happen to the luckless Mr Brown.

In terms of issues, the campaign centred mainly on the question of how to deal with the country's biggest budget deficit since the 1930s.

Here Labour was on an equally sticky wicket, with voters clearly concluding that the party was 'in denial' about the extent of the problem and crediting the Tories for being at least partially honest about the scale of the forthcoming cuts.

For all that, though, the public remained largely unconvinced by Mr Cameron and his team, and the eventual result saw the Tories falling some 20 seats short of outright victory.

Days of frantic bargaining followed, but with the parliamentary maths in favour of a Lib-Lab deal failing to stack up, it was always likely that a Lib-Con coalition would be the outcome.

Faced with the task of finding a successor to Mr Brown, Labour managed to saddle itself with the lesser-known of the Miliband brothers, courtesy of a crazy electoral system which gave the unions the decisive say.

For David Miliband, brother Ed's leadership election victory came as a bitter blow and the South Shields MP stood down from his party's frontbench.

Then, in one of his first acts as leader, Ed sacked former Minister for the North-East Nick Brown from his Shadow Cabinet team, leaving the region somewhat leaderless in Whitehall.

Indeed, with the new coalition busily taking the axe to every regional institution in sight, the North-East seemed in danger of losing its political voice altogether.

Initial excitement about the coalition soon faded. The 'new politics' spoken of by Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg in the TV debates soon regressed into the old politics of broken election promises.

Chancellor George Osborne had expected that the £80bn programme of cuts unveiled in his October comprehensive spending review would swiftly make him the most unpopular man in Britain.

Instead, it was Mr Clegg who became the government's fall-guy, completing his journey from hero to zero by backing the rise in tuition fees against which he had so vehemently campaigned in April and May.

The Lib Dems' decision to trade principle for power has clearly come at a huge political cost. The key question for 2011 is whether the coalition as a whole can survive it.

Anarchy in the UK? This is not the country Cameron wants to lead

It is a moot point whether Thursday's protests over the government's decision to raise universities tuition fees to £9,000 amounted to the worst civil disturbances since the poll tax riots of 1990.

One should not forget that the fuel protests of autumn 2000 came close to bringing the country to a standstill - but they were by and large peaceful.

Measured purely in terms of street violence, this week's demonstrations almost certainly constituted the biggest outpouring of public anger seen since the days of Margaret Thatcher.

Should that be a warning sign to David Cameron and his coalition? Undoubtedly so.

The bare facts of the matter are that the government won the Commons vote on lifting the cap on fees by a majority of 21, down from its usual majority of 83.

While 28 Liberal Democrat MPs voted in support of the move, 21 defied the party leadership, including former leaders Charles Kennedy and Sir Menzies Campbell and a possible future leader, Tim Farron.

Meanwhile six Tory MPs also voted against the measure, including the former leadership contender David Davis who, like Mr Farron, appears to be positioning himself for the coalition's eventual collapse.

But while the government won the vote, the question is whether in doing so it lost the argument, as well control of the streets.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that the demonstrators have over-reached themselves, and that the ugliness of some of Thursday's scenes will turn the wider public against the students' cause.

In the short-term, it will have focused attention less on the fees issue than the question of whether security arrangements for the demo were even half way adequate.

But the debate over tuition fees is far from over. The House of Lords will certainly have a say on the matter, and there will have to be further legislation over the level and speed at which the fees are paid back.

That in turn is bound to lead to further rebellions which, if successful, could ultimately force the government to unpick the entire scheme.

So where does it leave the coalition? Well, firstly, what about the Lib Dems.

Their hope was that by getting the fees vote out of the way early on, it would enable them to move the political agenda onto other areas in which they are on firmer ground, such as political reform.

I wonder, however, whether memories will fade that easily, and whether we have not witnessed a seminal moment in terms of public perceptions of the third party.

It could well be that this will go down as the point at which the public stopped seeing the Lib Dems as a party of principle and started to see them as their opponents have always seem them – a bunch of opportunists who would break any promise for a taste of power.

Secondly, where do this week's events leave Mr Cameron? Despite his own protestations last week that he would "rather be a child of Thatcher than a son of Brown," he is not the Iron Lady.

His style is consensual rather than confrontational. Unlike his illustrious predecessor, he has no wish to see his premiership consumed by battles against the 'enemy within.'

Within weeks of those poll tax riots in the autumn of 1990, the Prime Minister had gone, albeit over a combination of that and other issues.

That is not going to happen to Mr Cameron just yet. But in his desire to lead a broadly united country, he won't want to see too many more weeks like this one.

Clegg will come to regret broken promise on fees

The cry of 'betrayal' is one of the most oft-heard in politics. Labour faced it on numerous issues between 1997 and 2010, not least when it introduced university tuition fees despite a manifesto pledge not to do so.

"We have no plans to introduce university top-up fees, and have legislated to prevent them" actually translated as "We have no plans to introduce them during the 2001-2005 Parliament, but we will legislate to bring them in thereafter."

The subsequent backbench revolt came close to bringing down Tony Blair, whose government only survived when a few MPs switched sides at the last moment on the orders of Gordon Brown.

One potential North-East rebel was told to support the measure with the words: "I'm not asking you, I'm [expletive deleted] telling you" - an interesting illustration of the way the Brownites used to do business.

But Labour's shameless U-turn created a huge political opportunity for the Liberal Democrats, which they subsequently sought to exploit to the full in constituencies with large student populations.

Among the seats they targeted in 2005 was Newcastle Central, and it was probably only the personal popularity of the then MP, Jim Cousins, that stopped them winning it.

The Lib Dems were again making the most of the issue during this year's campaign, which they fought on a pledge to abolish the fees in place of a 'graduate tax.'

As one Sheffield student told the BBC's Question Time on Thursday: "Nick Clegg was never out of our student union during the election. Now we can't even get a meeting with him."

The reason for that, of course, is that the Lib Dems are now part of a Tory-led coalition that is set to remove the current £3,000 cap and raise it to a maximum of £9,000.

They point out that the coalition agreement does not commit them to supporting the measure, allowing them to abstain when the proposal comes before the Commons.

But if party leader Mr Clegg saw this is some great concession wrung from his Tory partners at the height of those tense negotiations following the election in May, I suspect he has since been disabused.

In fact the public sees it for what it is – a fig-leaf to enable the Lib Dems to stand aside holding their noses while the Tories introduce a two-tier system of higher education.

The purpose of this column is not to go into the rights and wrongs of how universities should be funded and how that fits into the larger question of how to tackle the deficit.

My own personal views on the matter are inevitably coloured by my own experiences as a student in more benign economic times.

As someone who would certainly not have been able to go to university without the state support that was then on offer, I find it very hard to argue that the next generation should be denied the same benefits.

That said, alongside a 'free' university education, in those days you also used to be able to buy houses in the West End of Newcastle for a few hundred quid. It's a different world now.

No, the main point I am trying to make here is that this is yet one more example of the coalition's inherent instability.

It seems likely that a number of MPs, possibly including the former leaders Sir Menzies Campbell and Charles Kennedy, will rebel rather than abstain on the measure, calling into question Mr Clegg's control over his own party.

As the Lib Dem leader has frequently reminded us, compromise is a necessary part of politics, especially in a hung Parliament scenario, and some political promises are seemingly made to be broken

With hindsight, however, I suspect he will come to see this as one that really should have been kept.

Region losing its voice as cuts start to bite

The day after David Miliband stepped aside from the Shadow Cabinet and Nick Brown was axed as Chief Whip, a Newcastle Journal headline posed the question: "Has the North East lost its political voice?"

If that was a pertinent question to ask then in the wake of the departure from frontline politics of two genuine regional heavyweights, it is even more so now.

Since then, we have seen the Parliamentary Labour Party fail to elect any of the four North-East MPs who stood for the Shadow Cabinet while choosing no fewer than seven from Yorkshire and Humberside.

And on Thursday, final confirmation that One North East, the development agency which has presided over a regional economic renaissance, is among the 192 quangos being axed by the coalition government.

The contrast with the regional political scene of a decade ago could not be greater. We regularly saw five or six North-East MPs occupying seats around the Cabinet table – depending on whether Peter Mandelson was in or out at any given time.

Their value has been long debated. Tony Blair admitted in his memoirs that he dared not be seen to favour his home region, and at least one of those Cabinet ministers admitted the same to me.

There was also the now largely dismantled regional political infrastructure – ONE, the regional government office created under John Major, and the regional assembly made up of senior councillors and other representatives.

Later on, under Gordon Brown, the North-East had its own minister in Nick Brown. Now it does not even have a single MP in government, let alone someone dedicated to sticking up for its interests.

In retrospect, it is clear that a more concerted effort should have been made to get behind a single North-East candidate in the Shadow Cabinet elections, probably Helen Goodman as she came closest to being elected.

But as it has turned out, the region is fairly well-represented in the middle ranks of Labour leader Ed Miliband's new team unveiled last weekend.

Ms Goodman joins Kevan Jones, Sharon Hodgson, Roberta Blackman-Woods and new MPs Chi Onwurah and Catherine McKinnell as shadow ministers, while Alan Campbell has been promoted to Deputy Chief Whip.

None of them, as yet, has the parliamentary stature of a Nick Brown or a David Miliband, but at least there is hope there for the future.

But if new leadership is going to come from anywhere, it surely needs to come from within the region itself, and here the picture is much less promising.

The moreorless wholesale disappearance of region-wide political institutions has left a void which the coalition's plans for yet more elected mayors will not begin to address.

One of the arguments made at the time of the regional assembly referendum was that a future Conservative administration would find it harder to get rid of an elected body than a panoply of unelected ones.

In retrospect, this was surely right. After all, the coalition is not abolishing the Welsh Assembly or the Scottish Parliament, even though those institutions cost many times more than the RDAs.

Hopes continue to linger that the government may yet allow the creation of a region-wide Local Economic Partnership to provide a single regional perspective where necessary.

But Whitehall's signals on this have been mixed to say the least and while Business Secretary Vince Cable may be supportive, it is clear that not all of his colleagues share his viewpoint.

Much of the debate around the governance of the North-East over recent decades has essentially been about the need for a distinctive regional political voice.

It is no exaggeration to say that, in a few short months, the coalition has managed to set back that cause by at least 20 years.

Clegg cannot ignore his social democratic wing

Back in 1999, in his first keynote conference speech, Charles Kennedy insisted that the Liberal Democrats under his leadership would never become a "left-of-Labour party."

Nobody quite took the statement at face value, and neither, I suspect, did Mr Kennedy himself.

Sure enough, over the ensuing two elections, the man then known as 'Chatshow Charlie' succeeded in taking the Lib Dems to their highest-ever parliamentary representation by consistently taking left-of-Labour positions.

In 2001, it was the extra penny on income tax to pay for additional education spending that won over the voters, while in 2005, it was the party's opposition to the Iraq War.

Fast forward eleven years, and current Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg is making what at first hearing sound like similar noises about the party's positioning vis-à-vis Labour.

Interviewed before this week's conference in Liverpool, he said: "The vocation of Liberalism is not to be a leftwing ghetto for people who are disaffected by the Labour Party."

The difference between Messrs Kennedy and Clegg, though, is that Clegg means it.

Not only has he gone into coalition with the Tories. He is almost saying 'good riddance' to those left-of-centre voters who have helped keep the party afloat over the past decade as New Labour continued its rightward drift.

He said in his interview: "I'm not denying there is a chunk of people who turned to the Liberal Democrats at the height of Blair's authoritarianism and his fascination with Bush…that was always going to unwind at some point."

True up to a point….but unless he is genuinely relaxed about his party losing more than half its support at the next election, the logic of Mr Clegg's position – if you can call it logic – is very clear.

It is that, between now and 2015, he is going to have to find himself an entirely new set of voters - particularly in the North where the 'disaffected ex-Labour' vote makes up a fair slice of Lib Dem support.

Which in turn begs the question: where on earth are they going to come from?

Before delivering his two-fingered message to his left-of-centre supporters, Mr Clegg would perhaps have done well to consider his party's recent history.

The Liberal Democrats, it should be remembered, are a fairly recent amalgamation of two parties with very different philosophical strands – the Liberals, and the Social Democrats.

The party is therefore itself a coalition of economic liberals such as Mr Clegg who feel naturally comfortable as part of a Tory-led government, and social democrats like Mr Kennedy to whom it is anathema.

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why one opinion poll this week showed that more than half of Lib Dem voters regard the coalition as a sell-out, while 40pc said they voted Lib Dem specifically to keep the Tories out.

In his speech on Monday, Mr Clegg made an impassioned plea to his party to "stick with" the coalition, promising it would "change Britain for good."

Well, they'll stick with it as far as the referendum on voting reform next May. But after that, all bets are off are far as I can see.

I'll make another prediction, too. Mr Clegg will not find an army of new Liberal Democrat supporters waiting around for someone to vote for, and he will therefore be forced in the end to try to hang on to his existing ones.

And he won't be able to do that unless he can somehow first find a way of getting his party out of this coalition alive.

The Tories can reap the 'peace dividend'

While some political arguments never quite go away, recurring down the years in different forms and different contexts, there are others that are very much of their time.

An example is the issue of trade union power, and specifically whether it could legitimately be exercised to thwart the will of the democratically-elected government of the day.

This issue dominated British politics from the late-1960s to the mid-1980s, and was responsible during that time for bringing down at least one Labour government in Jim Callaghan's and one Conservative one in Ted Heath's.

It was eventually resolved by Margaret Thatcher's defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1985 strike, resulting not just in the marginalisation of the unions but the end of an entire way of life for many mining communities.

Yet to listen to this week's Trades Union Congress in Manchester, you could almost be forgiven for thinking the nation had undergone some kind of collective Life on Mars-type experience.

We learned that the TUC is planning a series of public sector strikes designed to get the government to think again about its spending cuts programme.

There is certainly an argument to be had about whether the cuts are going faster than they need to. There is a related argument about their legitimacy, given the Tories' failure to win an outright majority in May.

But turning the whole debate into a re-run of the 'Who Governs Britain?' controversies of the 1970s hardly seems the best way for the unions to try to win public sympathy for their cause.

Another ancient political argument that seemed to have been settled long ago was the one about Britain's independent nuclear deterrent.

This, too, was a battle that raged during the early 1980s, helping to split the Labour Party in 1981 when the pro-nuclear SDP broke away in dismay at its drift towards unilateralism.

The issue was seemingly put to bed when Labour then proceeded to lose three elections in a row before Tony Blair came along and wiped out all semblance of the party's pacifist tendency – and how.

But by a supreme historical irony, that bit of Labour which broke away to defend the nuclear deterrent has ultimately morphed into that bit of the Lib-Con coalition which now wants to ditch it.

Of all the many issues on which the two sides of the coalition disagree, this promises to be one of the most toxic, with many backbench Tories seeing the renewal of Trident as an article of faith.

Delaying the decision until after the next election will undoubtedly save a few bob – but it is also sure to re-open the debate over whether we should have a nuclear deterrent at all.

Yet for Prime Minister David Cameron, there is a rare political opportunity here – so long as he can square his backbenchers.

For if any government is going to radically reshape Britain's defence capability – and reap the potential 'peace dividend' in terms of savings - then this one is probably best-placed to do it.

Labour could never have abandoned Trident - for the simple reason that it would have brought back all those fears that the party could not be trusted with the nation's defences.

But the Tories, who have never had that problem, might just be able to.

By the same token, the Tories will find it much harder to reform the welfare state – something Labour really should have done in its first term when Mr Blair was carrying all before him.

For Mr Cameron, cutting Trident, and maybe finding a less costly form of nuclear deterrence, could prove to be the easy bit.

Blairite, Thatcherite - or maybe both?

The milestone of a new government's 100th day in office is one of those political landmarks which is perhaps given undue significance by commentators.

After all, it would be a pretty poor sort of government that failed to reach the target, even one cobbled together from two wildly differing parties in the wake of an inconclusive general election result.

Nevertheless, while the first 100 days of a government's life do not necessarily determine its character, they do provide significant pointers to what sort of administration it is likely to become.

In the case of the Con-Lib coalition, it is reasonably clear that the dominant theme thus far has been what its critics would call the "Tory cuts" agenda rather than "Liberal reform" one.

Lib Dem deputy leader Nick Clegg, minding the shop this week and next during Prime Minister David Cameron's holidays, is understandably keen to disabuse the voters of this notion.

He insisted yesterday that being in government meant the Lib Dems were able to make progress with a "liberal agenda"- but few believe him.

In a different way, Chancellor George Osborne, who by contrast has provided the dominant voice of the coalition thus far, was also at pains to emphasise this week that the government is about more than cuts.

Although his big speech on Tuesday was focused on the continuing need for spending reductions, it was tempered with talk of creating a 'fairer society' in the longer-term.

For what it's worth, my own view on the coalition is that it probably has over-emphasised its determination to cut spending at the expense of its reformist credentials.

What reform proposals there have been, notably on education and the NHS, have been largely about shrinking the size of the state – something that is intimately bound up with the spending cutbacks.

There has been much less talk of political reform besides the announcement of the date of the referendum on the voting system, something which is likely to turn into the hottest of potatoes for the coalition.

What, for instance, has become of the much-vaunted 'Freedom Bill' to abolish hundreds of unnecessary regulations brought in by New Labour? Has the coalition belatedly decided they were necessary after all?

The debate over what sort of government this really is was thrown into relief by the decision of the former Darlington MP Alan Milburn this week to become its 'social mobility tsar.'

It inevitably led to cries of betrayal from some of his more tribal ex-colleagues, Andy Burnham and John Prescott among them.

A more charitable interpretation of his actions, though, would be to see the coalition as a Blairite continuity administration, implementing the public service reforms Mr Milburn himself advocated when in government.

Although he would never use these words, the former health secretary might well echo the sentiment: "I never left New Labour, New Labour left me."

Since Mr Cameron is on record as claiming that he is the true 'Heir to Blair,' I have no doubt that this is how the Prime Minister sees his own administration

Others, though, see it differently. To many on the left, Mr Cameron is not so much an arch-Blairite as an arch-Thatcherite, taking the axe to areas of the state even she would have seen as sacrosanct.

Perhaps, though, he is both. Such is the extent to which these two former Prime Minsters have dominated the politics of the past 30 years that it is hard for the current one to escape their influence.

After just 100 days, it is far too early to give this government an 'ism.' But if I had to, 'Blatcherism' would perhaps be the one I would choose.

Why did Milburn do it?

Some possible reasons as to why Alan Milburn (Lab, Darlington 1992-2010) has decided to go and work for David Cameron. Not all of these are necessarily mutually exclusive, and not all of them are necessarily intended as criticisms of the former health secretary.

(i) He genuinely sees Cameron as the 'Heir to Blair' and sees the coalition as a Blairite continuity administration carrying out the same kind of public service reforms which he (ie Milburn) was prevented from pursuing in government by Gordon Brown and his allies. He certainly would not be alone in this view of recent political history. There is evidence that Cameron himself sees it this way.

(ii) He genuinely believes there is a need to tackle the slowdown in social mobility and sees himself as the best person to do this. Though doubtless so does IDS, which should make for some interesting policy discussions.

(iii) He wants to put two fingers up to Brown and Co for sidelining him within the Labour Party and failing to make more use of his ideas on social mobility in the run-up to the last election. If so, this is hardly surprising. I myself advocated on a number of occasions that Gordon should set aside his personal loathing of Milburn and take on board some aspects of the agenda he was putting forward. It could have greatly helped in the task of "renewing" New Labour intellectually that Brown ultimately failed to accomplish.

(iv) He wants to launch a new political party positioned somewhere between the Lib Dems and Labour. Okay, I don’t really believe this, but stranger things have happened and by joining a Tory government, the Lib Dems have left a bit of an opening in the market for a new centre-left grouping, though if he wins the Labour leadership, I would expect David Miliband to move fairly swiftly to plug this.

(v) Ego. Always a consideration where Milburn is concerned. But perhaps, on this occasion, not necessarily a deciding one.

The coalition will collapse long before any lasting realignment of the right

A FEW weeks back, I wrote about the new government's attempts to construct a new political narrative in which the blame for the forthcoming spending cuts is laid firmly at Labour's door.

Any casual observer of the political scene might be tempted to regard this as the kind of routine knockabout that is only to be expected in our adversarial system.

But make no mistake, the coalition's concerted efforts to rubbish the reputation of Gordon Brown and his government is no mere idle politicking.

It is rather, absolutely crucial to the longer-term survival of David Cameron's Con-Lib administration.

For now, the political honeymoon that the coalition has enjoyed since Mr Cameron and Nick Clegg tied the knot in the Downing Street rose garden in May continues moreorless unabated.

But surely not for long. The cuts will soon be coming thick and fast, and the flak will then be flying equally fast in the government's direction.

Hence the coalition's determination to deflect the coming opprobrium by building as broad a consensus as possible that Labour's mismanagement of the economy is to blame.

This week's "Labour legacy love-in" between Lib Dem Energy secretary Chris Huhne and Tory chairman Baroness Warsi was but the latest phase in the strategy, and we are promised more to come.

As I have also previously noted, the government is in serious danger of over-egging the pudding here.

The voters are no fools, and if the coalition is seen to be protesting too much about the previous government's record, they are all the more likely to smell a rat.

Very little of it washes with me, I'm afraid. The Lib-Cons are choosing to go faster than Labour did in cutting the deficit not because there is no alternative, but because they hold a different economic viewpoint.

Mr Huhne in particular sounded very unconvincing at Wednesday's joint briefing, which is hardly surprising given that before the election, he shared Labour's critique of the Tories' planned austerity measures.

But for me, the really interesting thing about the Huhne-Warsi press conference was not what it says about the past but what it could signify for the future.

Inevitably, it sparked speculation that the coalition partners could agree not to fight eachother at the next election, which Lady Warsi hardly discouraged by failing to give a straight answer to a straight question about it.

Talk of a 'coupon election' - LibCons v the rest – is surely wildly premature, but it wouldn't be the first time that coalitions have led to more lasting political realignments.

Back in the 30s, the 'National Liberals' were ultimately absorbed into the Conservative Party after joining the Tory-dominated national government that ruled the country from 1931 to 1945.

So could this present-day coalition ultimately lead to the formation of a new, centre-right grouping, further marginalising the Tory right and reducing the Lib Dems to a social democratic rump?

You can see why a centrist Conservative like Mr Cameron and a right-leaning Lib Dem like Mr Clegg would be comfortable with such a scenario.

But the problem is that both the Tory right and the Liberal Democrat centre-left have a compelling interest in seeing the coalition collapse long before the two parties get anywhere near that point.

For that reason, it remains my view that, sooner or later, one or other of them will ensure that it does.

The coalition fractures start to show

Prime Minister David Cameron committed something of an historical gaffe this week when he referred to Britain having been the Americans' "junior partner" in 1940 in the war against Hitler.

Given that the US did not even join the war until 1941, it was not even historically accurate, quite apart from the, probably unintended, slight on our own WW2 heroes.

But while Mr Cameron was busy making friends across the pond, his own 'junior partner' was committing a possibly more serious gaffe in regard to a more recent conflict.

Standing in at PMQs, deputy premier Nick Clegg allowed himself to be goaded by Labour's Jack Straw into declaring the 2003 invasion of Iraq "illegal."

The comment was interesting on both a personal and a political level. It demonstrated that, for all his polished performances in the TV election debates, Mr Clegg hasn't yet quite made the transition from leader of a protest party to statesman.

While many voters will applaud his honesty in speaking from the heart, ministers sometimes have to be more circumspect.

More broadly, the comment also highlighted the fact that the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are very different parties, one instinctively pro-establishment, the other instinctively anti.

As we come to what is generally considered to be the end of the political year, the talk at Westminster is inevitably that the coalition is showing its first signs of fracture.

If the truth be told, the tensions were there from the start, but they really only began to come to a head once the scale of George Osborne's Budget cuts became clear.

If there were protests on the Lib Dem side about that, they were then more than matched by the mutterings on the Tory benches following the announcement of the electoral reform referendum to be held next May.

Then, this week, came Mr Clegg's PMQs outburst and a separate row over the Lib Dems' proposed graduate tax to pay for higher education, which the Tories have now turned their backs on.

Still to come in the autumn is a party conference season in which I expect to hear Lib Dem activists sounding-off loudly about the Tories' plans to reform education and the NHS.

With an election theoretically five years off, no-one is currently paying too much attention to opinion polls, but they nevertheless paint an intriguing picture of how the public mood has shifted since 6 May.

Leaderless Labour are up an average five percentage points for the loss of Gordon Brown, which tells its own story of what might have happened had someone else been leading them on election day.

Meanwhile Mr Cameron's Tories are up around eight percentage points at 44pc, while Mr Clegg's Lib Dems have slumped to around 13pc.

The worrying conclusion here for the Lib Dems is that while the public seems to generally approve of what the government is doing, it is currently only benefiting the Tories rather than them.

One of the most prescient questions of the week was posed by the blogger Henry G Manson, writing on the excellent PoliticalBetting.com website.

In a neat reworking of the title of an old club anthem from the late 1980s, he asked: "Clegg: How low can he go?"

Henry's point was that there has to come a point beyond which Lib Dem MPs and activists will not allow the party's support to slump before they are finally moved to act.

I suspect that this is a question which will not only help shape the politics of the next 12 months, but one which may ultimately determine the fate of the government.

'Miserable pipsqueak' won't rescue Balls

Ever since the new coalition came into office, the consensus has been that its political honeymoon would last only as long as it took for real cuts in public services to start happening.

While people seem happy for ministers to talk about efficiency savings and even 25pc cuts to government departments, they become rather less so when that starts to impact on local schools, hospitals and police.

So this week's announcement of the scrapping of the Building Schools for the Future programme, aimed at refurbishing every school in England, was one announcement the government needed to get right.

And as we all now know, Education Secretary Michael Gove managed to get it totally and spectacularly wrong, producing at least four different lists of the schools affected each of which contained inaccuracies.

In this region alone, the original announcement led to building work being halted at 46 schools including five in South Tyneside.

However it later emerged that all five of these schools had been mistakenly included on the list and that the work would, after all, be continuing as planned, although other areas were not so lucky.

Those who long to see a bit of passion restored to the political arena will have loved Labour MP Tom Watson's Commons attack on Mr Gove after the minister was forced to make one of several apologies for the blunders.

Former whip Mr Watson concluded his onslaught with the words "You're a miserable pipsqueak of a man, Gove!" – incurring the wrath of Speaker John Bercow who swiftly ordered him to withdraw.

Ultimately, though, it is not the chaotic presentation of this announcement which is the real issue. It is the fact that cuts to school building projects should be happening at all.

Once again, the government has tried to pin the blame on Labour, arguing that the Building Schools for the Future programme was wasteful and bureaucratic.

This would be all very well, had Mr Gove outlined how the new government proposes to refurbish our dilapidated school buildings in a more cost-effective and less bureaucratic fashion.

His failure to do so leads one to assume there is no such plan, and that they will consequently be left to rot.

One consequence of this week's fiasco has been talk of an upturn in the fortunes of Labour leadership contender Ed Balls, who has led the attack on Mr Gove.

The Shadow Education Secretary is currently trailing in, at best, third place behind the Miliband brothers in the race, but with voting not due to happen until the end of August, much could theoretically change before then.

For my part, I don't think it will. While accepting that Mr Gove's hapless performance this week has given Mr Balls a chance to shine, I think the party has by and large made up its mind about him.

Sure, they want to see his combative political skills used to good effect in a senior role - almost certainly Shadow Chancellor – but my hunch is they want someone more emollient as leader.

The longer-term impact of the week's events is likely to be less on Labour and more on public perceptions of the coalition.

Even within the North-East, the scrapping of the rebuilding programme runs the risk of creating a postcode lottery between areas such as Newcastle, where all the projects had already been approved, and Durham, where 14 have had to be cancelled.

It is invariably going to create a huge sense of injustice in those areas unlucky enough to miss the cut-off point and which now face an indefinite wait for new facilities.

And at some point, that sense of injustice is something the coalition will need to address.

Troubled times for Clegg and Co

After the initial thrill of seeing Liberal bums occupying ministerial seats for the first time since the wartime coalition of the 1940s, the past couple of months have proved something of a reality-check for Britain's third party.

First, there was the loss of their rising star David Laws from the coalition Cabinet after just 16 days following revelations in the Daily Telegraph about his expense claims and his private life.

Then the Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, was forced to do a Robin Cook and swiftly dump his wife for his mistress after their affair was exposed by the News of the World.

Mr Huhne kept his job, although conspiracy theorists would doubtless see a pattern in this double embarrassment for key Liberal Democrats at the hands of Tory-supporting newspapers.

But of course, the unease currently being felt across Nick Clegg's party is not just about the personal difficulties of individual Lib Dem ministers. It goes much deeper than that.

The first two months of the coalition have been dominated by the Tory 'cuts' agenda, with Chancellor George Osborne emerging as the dominant figure in the government much as Gordon Brown did under Tony Blair.

For the Lib Dems, it has meant the humiliation of being forced to eat their pre-election words, when they warned that cutting too deep, too fast could cause another recession.

More and more grassroots Lib Dems, and even some of the party's more left-leaning MPs, have started to ask the question: What's in this for us?

Well, this week came the answer – news that a referendum on changing the voting system from first-past-the-post to the alternative vote is to be held next year, probably on 5 May.

For Deputy Prime Minister Mr Clegg, who will formally announce the move next week, it represents perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime chance to achieve the Lib Dem Holy Grail of electoral reform.

There are strong practical arguments for having the vote this early on in the Parliament, in that if it were held any later there would be little chance of getting any changes through in time for the next election.

Against that, though, is the obvious danger that it could shorten the coalition's life by about four years if the referendum is lost.

Were that to happen, of course, there would be little incentive left for the Lib Dems to remain in the government, and Mr Clegg would come under pressure from his party to obtain a swift divorce.

This might, in turn, provide a perverse incentive for the Conservatives not to campaign too hard against the change to AV, although premier David Cameron has insisted that he will.

The referendum poses a dilemma for Labour, too. The logic of opposition suggests it is in their interests to get a 'no' vote in order to try to bring down the government and force a 2011 election.

But many Labour MPs favour AV, and both Miliband brothers have made clear the party will campaign for a 'yes' vote if they win the leadership.

Whether or not Mr Clegg succeeds in his ambition will depend at least in part on whether the coalition can retain the broad popular support it currently holds.

As the North-East knows all too well, referenda held at a time when the government is unpopular tend to result in resounding 'no' votes.

The biggest danger for the 'yes' campaign is that the public comes to view this as an irrelevance when set against the economic problems facing the country – as many Tory MPs already do.

Not for the first time in recent months, the Lib Dems are finding themselves having to negotiate uncharted – and shark-infested – political waters.

Playing for the highest stakes

Whenever we journalists describe something as a "political gamble," or even a "huge political gamble," I sometimes think we need to go and take a lesson in the avoidance of cliché.

The fact is, all political decisions require an assessment of the balance of risk, and in that sense, all political decisions are gambles to some extent or another.

Delaying the general election until moreorless the last possible moment was a gamble for the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for instance.

He was gambling on the fact that the economy would pick up sufficiently before 6 May to show the electorate that his prescriptions were working. It wasn't that far away from coming off.

The gamble unveiled by Chancellor George Osborne in his first Budget on Tuesday, however, was of an entirely different order.

This wasn't just a gamble with his own future, or that of the Con-Lib coalition. It was a gamble with the future of the whole country and the jobs and livelihoods of millions of its people.

The debate over the Budget has thus far focused on two issues. First, whether it could reasonably be called "fair" and "progressive," and secondly, whether or not the £40bn extra spending cuts and tax rises were avoidable.

All I would say on the first point is that it depends how you define fairness. Some will say that the rise in VAT to 20pc is fair because it will affect everyone in the same way, while others will say it's unfair because it will disproportionately hit the poor.

The more illuminating debate surrounds the second point – whether this Budget was indeed unavoidable, or whether these cuts are at least in part ideologically motivated.

As I noted last week, the government's attempts to lay the blame for the cuts at Labour's door has aroused the opposition from its post-election slumber and forced it to stand by its own, more limited deficit reduction plan.

The really difficult thing is that no-one knows who is right about this. There is no clearer consensus among the economists about how fast the deficit should be cut than there is among the politicians.

In short, it's a case of suck it and see. We will only find out the answer once we have been there and done it.

Whatever the outcome, it is no exaggeration to say that the politics of the next decade and beyond will be shaped by it.

If Mr Osborne's strategy works, and he succeeds in bringing down the deficit without causing another recession, then David Cameron will almost certainly win a second term and probably, this time, with an outright majority.

But if it he is wrong, the current political status quo will be transformed

The coalition's political honeymoon will come to a swift end, and Mr Brown will start to look not so much like a failed leader as a lost leader, or a prophet without honour in his own country to use a Biblical analogy.

A vindicated Labour Party would then be on course for a victory at the next election every bit as crushing as the one it achieved in 1997, four years after the last Tory government's claim to economic competence was swept away by Black Wednesday

The Conservatives could be out of power for another generation, while their Liberal Democrat collaborators may well be wiped off the political map entirely.

While some on the left might welcome this apocalyptic scenario on the grounds that it would be good for the fortunes of the Labour Party, the cost in terms of human misery would surely be too great.

For that reason, we'd better all hope that Mr Osborne's great gamble does indeed pay off.

Labour's would-be leaders must not stand for this

And so at last the real cutting begins. A new hospital in Hartlepool. A business loan that would have guaranteed hundreds of jobs in Sheffield. A huge modernisation programme for libraries.

All gone in a flash, along with another £2bn worth of projects apparently approved by Labour in its last few months in office, though in the case of the hospital, it seems to have been in the pipeline for rather longer than that.

And at last, too, some real passion from Labour in opposing the Con-Lib coalition's programme of cutbacks - both from Liam Byrne on the floor of the House on Thursday, and later from David Miliband in the BBC studios.

The defeated party finally found its voice as Mr Byrne, the man who came close to making it a laughing stock with his 'sorry, there's no more money' note to his successor, managed to redeem his own somewhat battered reputation.
The shadow chief secretary told Lib Dem opposite number Danny Alexander: "The country....will be aghast at your attack on jobs, your attack on construction workers, your attack on the industries of the future and the cancellation of a hospital.

"In five minutes this afternoon you have reversed three years of Liberal Democratic policy of which you were the principal author. What a moment of abject humiliation."

Mr Miliband went even further, when invited onto the BBC's Newsnight that evening to discuss the cuts - in particular the cancellation of the £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters.

"We were looking to facilitate a genuine industrial revolution in the North of England. It's been thrown away by an act of gratuitous economic vandalism," he said.

The sense of outrage that finally welled-up from senior Labour politicians this week has been long brewing.

As I wrote last week, the government is making a very determined effort to construct a political narrative in which "irresponsible" Labour is blamed for wrecking the economy and leaving a mess for the coalition to clear up.

It is, however, in danger of gilding the lily - just as New Labour's own 'repeat messaging' of its achievements ultimately caused people to disbelieve everything it said.

Indeed, the new Office for Budget Responsibility this week found that, far from being irresponsible, previous Chancellor Alistair Darling had been too cautious in his borrowing forecasts, and that it will actually be £22bn lower over the next five years.


Some of Labour's leadership contenders have appeared reluctant to defend the previous government's record, two of them even claiming they were against the Iraq War even though they were government advisers at the time.

But rather than let the coalition traduce its economic legacy and use that as a justification for cuts, Labour needs to take the fight to its opponents.

Sure, the Brown government was not perfect. But it was doing no more than following classic Keynesian economic theory - that you stimulate spending to achieve recovery, then wait for tax revenues to eat into the deficit before making cuts.

I for one am pleased that at least one of the contenders is prepared to defend that perfectly respectable position.

One of the main criticisms against David Miliband as a leadership candidate has been that he is simply too cerebral, that he lacks the moral passion to energise a movement which Harold Wilson rightly termed "a moral crusade or nothing."

Well, on Thursday night, we saw the South Shields MP try to answer some of those criticisms.

Some called his Newsnight performance a "rant." Some even questioned his fitness for office. But for me, it was no more than a recognition of one of the iron laws of politics.

Namely, that before you can be Prime Minister, you have first to make a success of being Leader of the Opposition.

The old politics is back

Is politics returning to normal? Even before the government's pettyfogging decision to boycott Question Time over, of all things, the presence of Bad Al Campbell on the panel, the signs were there. Here's today's Journal column.

---

After the unchartered waters of the post-election period and the initial excitement of the Lib-Con coalition deal, the political events of the past week had a reassuringly familiar feel to them.

A Conservative Chancellor unveiled a swingeing package of spending cuts. Labour frontbenchers queued up to attack them.

Meanwhile a Conservative Education Secretary unveiled plans to reduce the role of local authorities in schools – as Labour accused him of trying to recreate a two-tier education system.

So much for the 'new politics.' This was just like old times.

For the North-East, the new political era is already carrying unwelcome echoes of the Thatcher-Major years.

National newspapers have once again started to carry long features on the region's plight, and how its relatively high proportion of public sector jobs will leave it vulnerable to the spending cutbacks. Tell us something we don't know.

The one bright star on the horizon is that ministers have bowed to the demands of this newspaper among others to retain a region-wide economic body.

Communities secretary Eric Pickles moreorless confirmed on Wednesday that this would be the existing job-creation agency One NorthEast, albeit in a radically slimmed-down form.

But though some will doubtless bemoan the loss of Labour's child trust funds, there is a consensus of sorts over the cuts, the only argument being whether they should have happened now or later.

Michael Gove's education proposals - a re-run of the Major government's grant-maintained schools initiative - are however likely to be far more controversial.

By opening the way to thousands of schools to become 'academies,' the Tories' real aim appears to be to further neuter the role of local government.

For all the talk of 'localism,' all this will result in is more and more schools being directly-funded – and thus ultimately controlled – from the centre.

Labour activists, many of whom are teachers and many more of whom work in local government, will hate this measure probably more than any other to emerge from the coalition so far.

In terms of the Labour leadership contest, it ought to play into the hands of the former children's secretary, Ed Balls, who led the attack on it this week in his usual combative style.

Nevertheless Mr Balls remains very much an outsider in the race which thus far looks set to be a contest between the Miliband brothers, David and Ed.

The election of South Shields MP David as Labour leader would, at least, be some compensation for the fact that the North-East is the only region without a single MP in the government.

Of all the many vignettes that have emerged from that strange five-day post-election limbo when no-one quite knew who had won, one of the most intriguing concerns a 3am conversation between Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown.

The former Lib Dem leader was apparently begging his old friend to broker a Lib-Lab coalition and finally realise their dream of a new 'progressive alliance.'

But Mr Blair said no, it was time Labour went into opposition, arguing that if it clung on to power this time round, it would pay a terrible price at the next election.

As the initial euphoria around the coalition subsides, and the harsh reality of its programme starts to bite, it is looking increasingly like the right judgment call.

Is this what Cameron wanted all along?

Two things are holding the new Lib-Con coalition government together. The first is liberalism, economic and social. The second is a mutual loathing New Labour and all its works. Here's today's Journal column.

---

Last week, I suggested that the enthusiasm with which Prime Minister David Cameron has embraced his new Liberal Democrat partners hinted that coalition might have been the election outcome he wanted all along.

If I’m totally honest, I don’t think there is any ‘might’ about it. As several other commentators have remarked over the past week, Mr Cameron is clearly more at ease with his Lib Dem deputy Nick Clegg than he is with most of his own backbenchers.

Had he succeeded in gaining a narrow overall majority on 6 May, Mr Cameron would now be at the mercy of a bunch of hardline right-wingers, much in the way that John Major was throughout the 1992 Parliament.

As it is, he can now safely tell them to get stuffed in the knowledge that the Lib Dems’ 57 MPs give his government a near-unassailable parliamentary majority – unless of course, they themselves rebel.

There is no sign of that happening at the moment. Granted, Business Secretary Vince Cable looks less than chuffed to be playing second fiddle to Chancellor George Osborne, and well he might in view of the latter’s relative lack of economic expertise.

But that apart, there seems to be a remarkable degree of cohesion between the two sides over the coalition agreement that was finally published in its full, 34-page format this week.

Some critics have said the coalition is merely held together by the desire for power, but for me that is way too simplistic.

I think the glue that is holding it together, for the time being at any rate, is rather a mutual loathing of what New Labour perpetrated in office, coupled with a mutual determination to address those perceived mistakes.

The economy is the most obvious example. Whatever their differences during the campaign, there is general agreement between them that deficit reduction is the coalition’s No 1 priority.

The new government’s unfolding narrative in this area is essentially that the previous administration had been spending far too much and it is this one’s job to balance the books.

The revelation that former chief treasury secretary Liam Byrne had left a note in his drawer saying “sorry, there is no more money” has hardly helped Labour’s cause in this regard.

That said, his Lib Dem successor David Laws appeared to have suffered something of a humour collapse in his account of the discovery of the infamous document.

Or take civil liberties. Here too the narrative is already clear – that Labour came close to turning us into a ‘surveillance society’ and it is the coalition’s task to unpick that.

Doubtless Labour was dealt a difficult hand in having terrorist outrages like 7/7 happen on its watch, but its response to those terrible events is increasingly seen as having been too authoritarian.

Some past Conservative leaders have also had a distinctly authoritarian tendency – and some of those right-wing backbenchers still do – but Mr Cameron’s own worldview is very different.

The Prime Minister is, and always has been, a liberal Conservative. Hardly surprising then that he should have described his government as such on its first full day in office.

In embracing partnership politics to such an extent, it is tempting to think Mr Cameron might be paying heed to a lesson from history.

Before the 1997 election, Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown held extensive discussions about a coalition, but the sheer size of Labour’s majority eventually rendered the idea untenable.

Mr Cameron was dealt a rather different hand on 6 May – but has actually managed to turn a perceived setback into an opportunity.

If the new Prime Minister is already showing a determination to learn from the mistakes of previous ones, then that can only be an encouraging sign.

In the end, the public got what it wanted

So is it a betrayal of millions of people who voted Liberal Democrat to stop the Tories getting in - or a noble attempt to set aside party differences in the greater national interest?

Is it a reflection of the public will as it was expressed on 6 May – or something absolutely no-one actually voted for?

Opinions have invariably been divided about the new Con-Lib coalition that took office this week following Gordon Brown's protracted but ultimately dignified exit - and doubtless will remain so.

Whether it succeeds or fails - and much will happen between now and the scheduled date of the next election in 2015 - British politics will surely never quite be the same again.

Given that I have said as much already, it won't surprise readers to know that I think this is probably the outcome that best makes sense of the inconclusive election result.

Whether by accident or design, the public has got what it wanted - change, but in a way that avoids entrusting the fortunes of the country entirely to the Tories.

Were it not for the case that the coalition had a fair wind of public opinion behind it, it would probably not have come about.

By contrast, the public's reaction to any Lib-Lab deal would have been far more hostile - as the likes of John Reid and David Blunkett realised from the start.

In retrospect, Mr Brown should have realised this too rather than allow himself to be persuaded by Alastair Campbell and Lord Mandelson into trying to stitch together such a deal on Tuesday.

Maybe he was playing a longer game. By staying in No 10 and holding out the prospect of a deal, he enabled Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg to wring concessions out of the Tories that he would not otherwise have been able to.

Whether that was intentional or otherwise, we have ended up with a much less right-wing government as a result, and perhaps we owe the former Prime Minister a debt of gratitude for that.

That said, the enthusiasm with which the new Prime Minister David Cameron has embraced his new partners suggests that he may actually prefer it this way to governing alone.

There will be plenty of time over the coming months to analyse the new government - but what of Labour, in the week that it took its leave of power after 13 years?

Some think that by steering clear of a coalition that is destined to become hugely unpopular once the cuts start to bite, the party has snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

Had Labour somehow managed to stagger on in office, the resulting public backlash could have ended up destroying it for a generation.

As it is, the party now has an opportunity to rebuild and, free of the poisonous legacy of the Blair-Brown rivalry and the mistakes of the past 13 years, rebuild it surely will.

My own assessment of New Labour is that it was handed a remarkable opportunity to reshape British politics for good which, by and large, it squandered.

It has well and truly paid the price for its timidity. Mr Brown's opposition to Roy Jenkins' 1998 electoral reform plans finally came back and bit him on the bum this week - much as Jim Callaghan's opposition to Barbara Castle's 1969 trade union reforms were to bite him on the bum ten years' later in the Winter of Discontent.

He probably did save the economy from meltdown in 2008/9, but without a 'big idea' to take it forward, it was clear his government had run out of road.

It now falls to Messrs Clegg and Cameron to bring about the lasting changes which Messrs Blair and Brown ultimately failed to deliver.

Old school reunion

Contrary to what some people believe, I'm not a class warrior, and this apart, I'm generally feeling pretty positive about the Cameron-Clegg coalition thus far. But there must be some truth in the suggestion that the two former public schoolboys' shared social background made it easier for them to deal with eachother than with gruff old, state school educated Gordon, and this spoof report from the Daily Mash hits the nail on the head.

The coalition deal was finally sealed yesterday evening during a hastily arranged phone call between David Cameron and Nick Clegg where they compared notes on the daughters of minor aristocrats that they had felt up at charity balls in the 1980s.

The Prime Minister's spokesman said: "We knew we had a workable, four-year deal when David and Nick both realised they had probably fingered the Hon. Charlotte Brampton during the same Henley Regatta."

Sheer, er, class.