This article is from the October 2012 issue of Total Politics
A party leader who goes five and a half years before serious murmurings start about his leadership might be considered blessed. It has taken this long for the ranks of the Liberal Democrats to begin to get seriously itchy feet about their leader and voice the question about whether he is the right man to lead the party into the next general election.
Now the elephant in the room has now been named, there’s no question one of the big issues hanging over this autumn is whether the bright, fresh-faced third party leader who energised the televised election debates in April 2010 might now be a liability to his party. Clegg will almost certainly survive until the 2015 election, but the fact the question is being asked is indicative of the unrest in Lib Dem circles, as the second half of the coalition government’s Parliament begins.
“I like to think I’ve passed the resilience test,” says Clegg in the expanded edition of my biography of the Lib Dem leader. “In so far as politics and leadership are, as much as anything else, about getting up in the morning, putting a smile on your face even if you don’t feel like it, and keeping ploughing on. You never know until you’ve been tested. I’ve shown strength, even if I’ve still got challenges about how to get our successes across to people.”
In terms of dealing with the anger which was directed his way during the autumn of 2010 when the tuition fees furore was at its height, Clegg has indeed passed the resilience test. For a man only recently plunged into the deep water of government, with three young children, and still seeing politics as a debating chamber more than a game of strategic mud-throwing, it was a major shock for him to have to deal with angry protesters outside his south west London home, dog excrement put through the door of his constituency office, and mock executions with “Nick Clegg must die” bellowed through a loud-hailer. He has come through this period to become a man who now sits moderately easily in a senior government role, albeit with an inherent antipathy to the protocol and the general stuffiness associated with the job.
Now he has to develop is a different kind of resilience. By the terms on which he went into government, he feels he has not only kept his side of the bargain but also done fairly well. Yet with Lib Dem electoral fortunes looking highly precarious, his followers aren’t so sure. Hardly anyone within the party has turned against the likeable Clegg personality, but when his performance on the political stage threatens the work that MPs, councillors and general community party members have put in, then the threat to his position is real.
Both Clegg and those around him invoke the much-quoted distinction between policy and politics to explain the Lib Dems’ problems. They say the Lib Dems are achieving a lot in government, notably raising the income tax threshold to £10,000, and various other things in education and green economy areas which haven’t been well publicised, but stress the politics have been badly handled.
There’s even a view that the tuition fees settlement will turn out to be reasonable – at least for students from poorer families – but that this won’t alter the fact the politics of it were botched in a way which still hurts the Lib Dems today.
“The challenge for me is not inside government,” Clegg says. “I think I’ve learned how to ‘do government’, how to win arguments, how to win battles. I lead discussions well in government, whether with Tory or Lib Dem ministers, and I’ve got a good team around me which shapes the policy agenda according to my priorities. The issue is that you can be very good in government, but if no one knows, and if the media don’t let you talk and let people hear, it is of value for government and for your own conscience, but of little political value.”
Just how is Clegg approaching the political challenge? While party members across the country are hoping for a high-profile initiative that will help them tell potential voters what makes the Lib Dems distinctive, the Clegg strategy is to trust that the public will eventually come round to respecting what the Lib Dems have done, even if such respect is grudging.
Richard Reeves, who until July was Clegg’s strategy guru, tells me: “We should at least test the hypothesis that people will give us credit for the things we’ve done, by making sure that they know what we’ve done. Right now they don’t. They just know tuition fees. One of the reasons people don’t know what we’ve done is that we don’t tell them. These things do work, but, by God, they take a long time. A message or a position has to be repeated loudly, consistently and often – which requires extraordinary message discipline.”
The problem for Clegg and his party is that electorates don’t have a great track record in showing gratitude, or even understanding, especially in times of economic gloom. Since the credit crunch in 2008, most European governments up for election have been bundled out of office. Of course, economic fortunes might be improving in May 2015, but even then, the big challenge for the Lib Dems will be to show that they have brought something to government which wouldn’t otherwise have happened.
Many of their greatest achievements are either not well known or not thought of as Lib Dem initiatives. Consequently, many see the Lib Dems as merely propping up a Conservative government.
Hence the call from some for Clegg to fall on his sword and let Vince Cable take over. This seems an unlikely scenario for several reasons. Much is made of Cable’s attractiveness to the left, so his name has been invoked to suggest the Lib Dems would attract more votes from Labour supporters in Lib–Con marginals under Cable’s leadership.
But scratch the surface, and Cable is economically further to the right than many in his party, and if the tuition fees issue is still rankling with the left, it might be noted that Cable described the Lib Dems’ 2010 manifesto commitment to phase out first-degree tuition fees over six years as “a potty policy”, and he had no great desire to fight for it in government. Add to that the fact that he’s not thought of in the upper echelons of the party as a team player, and his clashes with the Lib Dems’ federal policy committee have left some members wondering how much he respects the views of the party’s activists. Even those who say there is a problem with Clegg’s leadership don’t see Cable as the solution.
In truth, Clegg’s position is boosted by the fact that there doesn’t appear to be an obvious successor-in-waiting. Cable and Simon Hughes might play the role of caretaker if Clegg fell under a bus, but who are the leading lights of the next generation? Tim Farron has been the brightest, but there are reservations about him, and there seems to be no obvious rising star. It is possible the next Lib Dem leader is not yet in Parliament.
Given that the next election will be fought with two coalition parties looking to present their own identities, and with televised leaders’ debates at the centre of the campaign, the Lib Dems may still do okay under Clegg.
All who meet him find him personable, so if his general affability can be linked to a powerful message which can be imparted in the TV debates, he may yet repair a lot of the damage at the 11th hour. In addition, though Brand Clegg may have been tarnished by constant mocking in comment columns, comedy shows and cartoons, that can also generate a tacit admiration for someone who can take all the mud thrown his way and still emerge with dignity intact. Clegg’s humour, in particular his ability to poke fun at himself, might galvanise the “grudging respect” vote.
The political wayside is littered with predications of doom for the Lib Dems and for their forerunner parties, but those targeted have bounced back. It may be a lot harder this time, because this current incarnation of the ‘third party’ has never been in government before. For decades, there have been three broad voter groups: Tory sympathisers who’d never vote Labour, but would vote Lib Dem to keep Labour out; Labour sympathisers who’d never vote Tory, but would vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out, and a few die-hard Liberals.
The moment the party got into government, it risked alienating two of these three constituencies. This was always an acceptable risk because, so the thinking went, the condition of any coalition would be a proportional voting system which would leave the Lib Dems with more MPs even on a lower vote. But electoral reform has now gone, and the party’s hands are still sullied by the dirty work of government, so it is a much harder sell.
Ironically, it may be the voting system the Lib Dems have railed against that saves Clegg and his party. The Lib Dems may well fall from 23 per cent in 2010 to somewhere between 12 and 15 per cent in 2015, but the party’s MPs have a habit of defending their seats, thanks to strong personal votes. It is therefore possible – especially as it now looks as if the 2010 constituency boundaries will be used – for the Lib Dems to suffer a major fall in votes, but only a small fall in MPs (and possibly still hold the balance of power).
It has happened before, albeit on a smaller scale. During much of the Lib–Lab Pact of 1977–78, the Liberals looked set for annihilation, only to hold 11 of their 14 seats at the 1979 election because of personal votes. With tactical voting likely to be a strong factor in 2015, and a decreasing number of Lab/Con battlegrounds, something similar could happen.
Of course, it would make it a lot easier for Lib Dem campaigners if Clegg could, somehow, get his politics right between now and 2015 and be painted by his party as an authoritative voice of liberalism which has tempered the worst excesses of the Conservatives.
Whether – and how – he pulls this off remains to be seen, but despite rumblings about his leadership within his party, the deputy prime minister looks very likely to have the chance.
Chris Bowers is the author of Nick Clegg: The Biography (Biteback Publishing, £12.99)