Oh, it’s O-levels now, is it? Is Michael Gove as Rigorous as He Says He is? Or are we all dreaming (including Mr Gove?)

Is the new Tory minority government, noisily conservative and totally powerless, beginning to form before our eyes?

Close readers of this site will know that I have long predicted the break-up of the Coalition , probably next year.  The pretext for this, I am more and more convinced, will be the plan for House of Lords Reform, over which there can be no concord between the Tory party and the Liberal Democrats. The timing is set by several things .

One, it is generally accepted by experts in manipulation that voters have a political memory about 18 months long, and can seldom remember much further back than that (try it on yourself). The Liberal Democrats need to re-establish themselves as a separate, oppositional, raucously left-wing party untainted by association with Mr Slippery.

The Tories need to re-establish their image as a conservative party, rather than as the aggressively PC, pro-EU, soft-on-crime, tax-and-spend, welfarist egalitarian outfit they really are.

So, if the next election is to be in May 2015 (and the Fixed Term Parliaments Act mandates that it shall be, unless something really odd happens) , the two need to have split by somewhere round about Guy Fawkes 2013.

This is also round about the time that the next European Commission is appointed. Baroness Ashton, currently Britain’s EU Commissioner, was put in her job by Labour (and is a Labour supporter) so is most unlikely to be reappointed.  I think it very likely that Nicholas Clegg will be given the job. This will solve several problems for him. He cannot hope to hold his Sheffield seat at the next election. He faces a politically awkward choice, in autumn 2013, over where he should send his eldest child to school (he is said to have visited the Oratory, the controversial London Roman Catholic secondary where Anthony Blair sent his sons, which is a superb school but would cause some difficulties for an atheist egalitarian politician). And his party wants a different leader to take it into the 2015 election, as it is bound to suffer badly at the polls and his presence will make that damage worse.

My strong suspicion is that Vince Cable will be chosen as the party’s new leader , defeating Simon Hughes (if he chooses to try again) and Tim Farron, and that he will then lead his MPs out of the Coalition, agreeing to the arrangement called ‘confidence and supply’ which many Liberal Democrats and Tories wanted in 2010, but didn’t get because of the unexpected love affair between the Orange Book (free market libertarian) Liberal Democrats and the Cameroons, who found they had so much in common they couldn’t bear to be apart.

That’s worn off now, not because they don’t still agree on almost everything, but because of the weird pressures of the two-party system and universal suffrage, both of which elevate stupidity and ignorance to a great height. That is, the Liberal Democrats, who have actually got into office for the first time in decades,  and have obtained a government of the radical left, are far more unpopular with their (stupid) voters and supporters than are the Tories, who abandoned the last remaining filmy scraps of conservatism concealing their horrid nakedness,  to join a left-wing PC government, and so actually *did* betray their voters( at least, the ones daft enough to believe that the Tory Party is conservative, a regrettably large body of people).

The first formal step towards the new arrangement came last week, when the Liberal Democrat MPs were formally whipped to abstain in the vote on Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary.

This was the model for what was to come. The Liberal Democrats will do nothing to bring down the Tories, or to form a new informal coalition with Labour. They don’t want to trigger an election. They need mass amnesia to kick in first.

But they will be much more separate, and they will also, I believe, sacrifice their ministerial posts in the government, and the special advisor jobs given to their ambitious young apparatchiks. This will be hard to let go of, but a reasonable price to pay for regaining quite a few lost votes in marginal seats.

They will also get back, I think, the so-called ‘Short Money’, a very valuable  and much-missed subsidy from the taxpayer, given to Opposition parties in Parliament, but not to government parties.

Meanwhile the Tories will be liberated in equally useful ways. Mr Slippery will be able to silence many of his critics by appointing them to ministerial posts made vacant by departing Liberal Democrats. He will also be able to find nice jobs as Special Advisers for several young thrusters whom he seeks to advance in years to come.

And he can let Michael Gove, and others,  dream up (and go public with) all kinds of plans which will soothe dim loyalists into thinking that this is, after all a conservative government – sure in the knowledge that there is no parliamentary majority for them, and they will never happen.


It may even work, though I suspect the next election will throw up a Lib-Lab coalition in which Mr Cable , Mr Hughes and Mr Farron will be much happier than they are. As for the Tories, Mr Cameron can’t say this openly, but their day will come again once Scotland has quit the union (and if they can persuade the North of England, and Wales,  to declare independence as well, then their chances of a majority will be even greater).