Is David Cameron brave enough to call a snap general election? If so, he will have to get a move on within weeks before he is boxed in and stuck with his junior coalition partners for four more years. The Westminster mill has been shaken by rumours that the Prime Minister is ready to do what, according to political legend, Gordon Brown chickened out of doing. That is, dash to the country before the country notices the full scale of the despond it is facing. The trigger for such thinking, of course, was the aftermath of the crushing defeat for the Liberal Democrats in the referendum on the alternative vote and the spectacle of the Tory vote holding in the council contests at the expense of Nick Clegg’s troops.
The shock waves felt by the Lib Dems were seismic. For a year, they had cravenly accepted the speed and scale of George Osborne’s public spending cuts, the axing of Building Schools for the Future and the Educational Maintenance Allowance, the tripling of tuition fees, the assault on the integrity of the National Health Service– all that in return for the AV poll. What’s more, as the council elections showed, it is they rather than the Tories who are getting the blame for broken promises leading to rising unemployment and reduced public services. The fact they did not see that coming shows how greed for power can blind even the savviest of self-serving politicians. The Lib Dems reacted with petulance and a rediscovery, far too late, of a social conscience. Clegg boasted that he would block NHS partial privatisation. Lib Dem peers halted the Government plan for elected police commissioners. And there is more troublesome posturing to come on welfare, Europe and schools.
Cameron, after ordering his troops not to be triumphal, has been quietly twisting the knife. At Prime Minister’s Questions, while listing supposed Government successes, he no longer bothers to mention the Lib Dems. This is no longer a coalition, it is a Tory Government using the Lib Dems as a convenient way of papering over the cracks in its economic and social vandalism. And their usefulness is running out, particularly if they become too bothersome. Cameron, too, needs to reassure bedrock Conservatives that he will bow no further to, in the words of one squire, “the woolly-hatted brigade”. Cameron is also well aware that his party’s patience with a leader who failed to deliver outright victory a year ago is finite.
So, back to the original question. Is he brave enough to ditch the Lib Dems? My feeling is that he is certainly arrogant enough. Don’t forget, he was born to rule and he has the ruthlessness of his class. And Gordon Brown’s failure to go to the polls for a personal mandate, at a time when the then new Tory leader Cameron was facing revolts and poll free-falls, is etched into his political fabric. He doesn’t want to be remembered as the “Tory Brown”.
However, he has just weeks to make up his mind. The seedy legislation introduced by Cameron and Clegg to gerrymander constituency numbers to damage Labour and introduce five-year fixed-term parliaments will be through its later stages by the end of next month. If Cameron fails to call an election by then, he will be stuck with Clegg and company until May 2015 (unless they walk out en masse). And, by then, both Tories and Lib Dems will be carrying the can for mass unemployment and a wrecked economy.
