Senior Liberal Democrats start to lay down markers as Nick Clegg struggles to move on from the Dave and Nick love-in
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Vince Cable is returning to the political frontline after well received attacks on Tory cabinet colleagues. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
One of the benefits of a political bust-up over Easter is that fans of W B Yeats can dust off their favourite lines of the great Irish poet.
Over at The Times Rachel Sylvester reminded us what Yeats wrote after the republican Easter Rising of 1916 as she drew a parallel with the British "Easter uprising" of 2011. Yeats wrote of the bloody uprising:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Sylvester was arguing that the eruption over the weekend, which saw Chris Huhne threaten to take George Osborne to court over allegations in the AV referendum campaign, will change the nature of the coalition. A terrible beauty may not have been born but it is difficult to see how the warmth of coalition relations can be resumed, goes the argument.
It is certainly true that the Nick and Dave love-in will not be repeated. But the British "Easter uprising" does have a slightly synthetic feel because it suits all sides to have a row.
Nick Clegg desperately needs to move on from the Dave and Nick show if he is to avoid the fate that often befalls junior coalition partners: electoral annihilation as voters punish the party for losing its identity. Clegg needed to hug David Cameron close in the initial phase to show the coalition could function and that the Lib Dems were serious about governing. But that phase is now over as Clegg seeks to regain political capital spent in the autumn after the U-turn over university tuition fees.
Cameron also needs to place some distance between himself and the Lib Dems to calm a sizeable chunk of his parliamentary party who loathe the coalition and have not forgiven him for granting them a referendum on AV.
The Lib Dems will be working hard to achieve two objectives once the referendum is out of the way on 5 May: to keep the coalition afloat while putting clear yellow water between themselves and the Tories.
But can senior Lib Dems credibly distance themselves from the Tories? This takes us into the intriguing territory of the battle for the soul – and probably the leadership – of the party if Clegg struggles to move out of the groove of the Nick and Dave love-in.
There are three figures who will be at the heart of this debate and whose success will depend on their ability to show they are distinctive figures not tainted by compromises with the Tories. These are their independence ratings:
• Tim Farron, the party president, has the highest independence rating. Farron, 40, will not be tainted by formal association with the coalition in any future leadership contest. A supreme political organiser and accomplished television performer, Farron will be the strongest candidate in a "wasteland" leadership contest if the party has to rebuild from scratch after an electoral meltdown.
• Vince Cable, the business secretary, has a middle ranking independence rating. Cable, 67, took a senior cabinet post but did so out of necessity and not love. His weakness is that he was responsible for devising the policy that has caused the Lib Dems most grief in government – the U-turn over university tuition fees.
But the business secretary is enjoying something of a renaissance after delighting the party with his pop at Cameron over immigration earlier this month. Cable, who suffered a setback last year when he "declared war" on Rupert Murdoch, showed he remains a potent political force with his call for a "progressive majority" of Labour and Lib Dem voters to support AV. If a vacancy arose in this parliament Cable might be tempted to rethink his decision not to contest the leadership in 2007 on the grounds that he was too old.
• Chris Huhne, the energy and climate change secretary, has the weakest independence rating. * Huhne, 56, once again showed a Gordon Brown Macavity-style touch on Tuesday when he missed the first cabinet meeting since the Easter bust-up. Important ministerial business detained Huhne in Brussels, just as important ministerial business detained him in Mexico during the university tuition fees vote.
Huhne is seen by many as the candidate who would be well placed to lead the Lib Dems into a coalition after the general election if Ed Miliband led the largest party. The two men have bonded over climate change.
But Huhne will struggle to assert independence because he is bound into the coalition more strongly than Cable and Farron. This makes him the most intriguing of the three key figures.
Two reasons explain why Huhne may struggle in any future leadership contest:
• Huhne argued strongly even before the election that the Lib Dems should not prop up a minority Conservative government but should instead go for a full coalition in the event of a hung parliament. He made this argument on the grounds that a weak political deal could unsettle the markets which would expect the new government to embark on a serious fiscal consolidation. This is what Huhne wrote in a note to the Lib Dem coalition negotiating team in February last year:
Financial crises are catastrophic for the political parties that are blamed, and we should avoid this at all costs. **
• Huhne, who ran a credit rating agency before his election to the European Parliament in 1999, was instrumental in toughening up the Lib Dem stance on deficit reduction. This led to the cabinet agreement to eliminate Britain's structural deficit over the course of this parliament.
If the coalition lasts the full five years until a general election in 2015 its success or failure will be determined by whether the deficit reduction plan works and not by the AV result.
As Ed Miliband assesses whether he could play "Dave" to Huhne's "Nick" after the next election, the Labour leader will probably cast his mind back to their commons debate on the budget. In this debate, which took place on 24 June while the future Labour leader shadowed Huhne, the new energy and climate change secretary gave a forthright defence of his decision to take a tough stance on the deficit.
The debate included this warm exchange between Huhne and Matt Hancock, former chief of staff to his new enemy, George Osborne:
MH: Is the right honourable gentleman aware that yesterday in the chamber the shadow chancellor argued that the problem with Greece, and one of the reasons for what happened there, was that the authorities did not act quickly enough? Does he share my surprise that the shadow chancellor can combine that with an argument for not acting now here?
CH: My honourable friend is absolutely right. There is no doubt that the lessons of history are completely clear. Those countries that grip their problems and deal with them do so in their own time and their own way and in a proactive manner. Those countries that fail to do so end up like Greece and Spain – with socialist governments – grappling with measures that will be far more severe than anything that we have introduced in this house.
I simply remind [Ed Miliband] that Lord Keynes, the great Liberal economist who continues to be an economic hero to me, was once famously accused of changing his mind. He splendidly replied: 'When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?' [Ed Miliband's] principal problem today is that the facts have changed and he has not changed his mind. That is precisely the argument.
Miliband helped his Labour leadership campaign when he responded to Huhne with this attack:
Today we have seen the completion of a remarkable political journey by the right honourable gentleman. Remember the Liberal Democrat leadership election? He was the tribune of the left. He ran to the left of the current leader of the Liberal Democrat party.
Today we heard the most remarkable political transformation from left-wing Liberal to Thatcherite. He could be the Reg Prentice of 2010. He could easily qualify as a Conservative candidate at the next election on the basis of the speech that we heard today.
But the problem for the right honourable gentleman is that in order to complete this political journey, he has to engage in the most remarkable amount of doublespeak, which speaks to the heart of the traditions of liberalism.
I come to this house today to praise the traditions of liberalism; he comes to bury them. What is the legacy of John Maynard Keynes? I know that the right honourable gentleman does not want to hear it. John Maynard Keynes taught us about the dangers of fiscal austerity at a time of global downturn. This budget pays no heed to those warnings.
Labour, which will be worried that its voice will be drowned out by squabbling coalition partners, will be keen to claim that the tiff is synthetic. No doubt Labour aides will be trawling the archives to pin the Lib Dems to the Tories.
* I make the usual declaration when writing about Chris Huhne. He is my step brother.
** Huhne quote is from 5 Days to Power, The Journey to Coalition Britain by Rob Wilson.