Coalition with Labour would suffocate the Liberal Democrats

I write this in Glasgow, at the Lib Dem conference. Nick Clegg has invented a constitutional doctrine. The doctrine teaches that after a general election, the party that comes third (should it have cohabitation in mind) must first approach the party that won the most seats. But there is no such rule. Our unwritten constitution is clear, minimal and simple. Any two parties jointly capable of commanding a Commons majority have an effective right to form a government together whenever they wish. That right is born of their joint ability to bring down any other government on the instant.

So after the general election in 2015, unguided by the rule book, Mr Clegg and his party may have to make a primitive choice. The choice would be made, I submit, on the basis of two considerations of which the second is less mentioned than the first, but (I’d argue) of greater importance.

The first consideration for a suitor-hunting third party is to ask which candidate shares more of its beliefs, aims and policies. The second is to ask which is in practice going to be easier to live with. The parallels with bed-sharing go deeper than the obvious jokes.

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Alexander Larman

Prince Andrew’s Easter appearance was a royal blunder

First, then, policy. I shall leave to others the study of what is the political equivalent of comparative religion, remarking only that — as with comparative religion — it is not enough to make lists. Lists may adumbrate the particular overlaps while overlooking profound differences of a more general nature. In its particulars a 21st-century Liberal Democrat Bible will share much ground with a modern Labour party Koran. In recent decades a strong strand of statism has woven itself into Lib Dem ideas for government. Wealth redistribution, taxation, welfare, health and European cooperation all find the Lib Dems more often on Labour’s side of the fence than the Tories’; and the weakening of the ancient Liberal hostility to collective labour has relegated perhaps the most significant historical difference.