Laws’s resignation is a disaster for the coalition in all but one respect

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics

Straight after David Cameron had announced his final offer to the Liberal Democrats — a referendum on Westminster’s voting system in exchange for entering into coalition — I bumped into a member of the Tory Cabinet. I asked him if he thought that the offer was unnecessary seeing as a ‘coalition of the losers’ between the Labour and the Liberal Democrats was so unlikely to succeed. This Tory disagreed. He argued that the reward — the reunification of the right — was well worth the risk.

My companion soon warmed to his theme. He set about explaining how a Liberal-Tory coalition is what Churchill would have wanted, that it would bring together the two strands of right-wing thinking in this country that had been separated by quarrels over social issues. Look, he said, at David Laws. He was an economic liberal but was not a Tory because of ‘Section 28 and all that stuff’.