As well as trying to prepare voters for what may happen after 8 May, David Cameron needs to make sure he has his party on board for the ride after the election, too. The 1922 Committee will need to approve a second coalition, but the hope in the Cameron camp is that this will be made easier by making the approval a show of hands from Tory MPs, rather than the secret ballot 1922 Committee chair Graham Brady wants.
Two interesting points that loyalists advance is that the Lib Dems approved the 2010 Coalition with a show of hands and that many prominent 1922 Committee Executive members were against the plan to elect the Speaker by secret ballot that the government tried to introduce rather sneakily in its last few hours. This isn’t strictly true: the reason so many MPs were against the secret ballot reform for the Speaker was not that they opposed the principle of votes being cast in private, but because it was a cunning yet clunky move to try to stitch up Bercow in particular.
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