Andrew Lansley: the Tories chose not to win

I’m at a YouGov conference in Cambridge where we’re just had a speech from Andrew Lansley, the new Leader of the House. He was speaking about the coalition, and gave a brief history of its inception.

‘None of us had, in truth, understood the nature of what a coalition government might be…I’m not even sure the Lib Dems had thought about what a coalition would look like. In normal circumstances, with that election result, there would not have been a coalition. We’d have formed a minority government, put forward a programme, challenged the House to support it or not and after a decent interview – probably a few months – we would have had a general election and would have almost certainly won a majority… So the Conservative Party surrendered what would have been its narrow political interest for the national interest.’