Jeremy Browne looks more like a young subaltern preparing to go to India in 1860 than a typical Lib Dem. He stands ramrod straight, his reddish hair has an officer-class cut. He is always impeccably dressed. Whitehall gossip has it that when he was first appointed to the Foreign Office, the officials couldn’t believe that he was the Lib Dem. He is also, unlike many in his party, comfortable with being in power. ‘I don’t want Liberal Democrats to think we are having to endure these five years of government before we can breathe a sigh of relief, let our hair down and return to the relative comfort of opposition,’ he tells me.
When we meet in a drab Westminster interview room, Browne is in robust form. Being moved in the recent reshuffle from the Foreign Office to the Home Office has propelled him back into the domestic political fray and he is determined to take aim at those within his party who prefer ‘the comforts of powerlessness’ to governing.
Nick Clegg, he declares, is ‘the most successful Liberal leader since the second world war, more so than all the others combined’. Why? Because ‘all his predecessors didn’t implement a single Lib Dem idea’. Even the tuition fees question, which usually sends Lib Dems into a defensive crouch, draws an aggressive response: ‘People had a choice of voting for a party that didn’t want tuition fees and only 8 per cent of the constituencies in the country returned an MP from that party, so the people spoke and the people spoke very loudly and they said we want higher fees.’ I sense the Liberal Democrat special adviser sitting in on the interview flinching.
Browne admits that there have been times when both coalition parties have been more interested in blocking each other’s proposals than getting things done.
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