On the campaign trail in Watford yesterday I bumped into Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve, who was out helping their candidate Richard Harrington in his bid to topple incumbent and junior minister Claire Ward (notional majority: 1,151).
Asked about the weekend’s newspaper headlines, which report Nick Clegg as saying he would back the Tories in the event of a hung parliament, Grieve all but rubbished the idea:”I think a coalition is extremely improbable”, adding: “On the face of it, the most likely outcome of voting Liberal is to shore up the Government, not us.”
None of this means that discussions between the parties on a coalition are not underway, but Grieve doesn’t sound very keen on cosying up to Nick Clegg and his policies, does he? It raises an interesting question which I’m totally unable to answer: we’ve heard a lot about Labour cabinet views on working with the Lib Dems, but what about the Shadow Cabinet?
Meanwhile, as The Guardian reported yesterday, Clegg has re-finessed his position by saying that we would be prepared to work with Labour as well (but not Brown).
Update: So now Clegg won’t rule out working with Brown either. So everything is up for grabs. Maybe it was like that all along…
