Andrew Adonis enjoyed a week of glory in 2010. The former Lib Dem activist was asked to join Labour’s negotiating team as they tried to forge a coalition with Nick Clegg in the aftermath of 6 May general election. Adonis admits that his account of those five days is ‘vivid, partisan and angry’. And it seems strange that, as a Lib Dem defector himself, he should accuse the Lib Dems of ‘perfidy’ in their dealings with Labour.
The politician in him can’t resist the opportunity to attack his former colleagues. He shoves the knife into David Laws for admiring George Osborne and for advocating ‘faster and deeper’ cuts to the deficit. When Laws wrote a book on the same subject, 22 Days in May, he suppressed the Lib Dems’ draft agreement with Labour. Adonis publishes it here purely to embarrass Clegg and co with the infamous clause 3.4, ‘a commitment not to raise the cap on tuition fees’.
Adonis also tries to stir it up between Clegg and Vince Cable by re-announcing their well-known dislike of each other. Cable was once a Labour councillor in Glasgow, while Clegg is represented as a natural Home Counties Tory who declined to join the Conservatives because his cosmopolitan background would have precluded him from securing a Conservative seat. Adonis genuinely believes that having a Spanish wife, a Russian grandmother and being fluent in several languages is enough to convince most Tory activists that you’re some kind of Communist double agent. This barmy verdict suggests that Adonis has a stupefyingly blinkered view of his political opponents.
The book catalogues every meeting between the Labour and Lib Dem negotiators during those frantic five days, but the cascade of details will seem irrelevant to anyone but the most obsessive political wonk.
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