Politics: Get ready for a year of upheavals

This will be the year of the political identity crisis.

This will be the year of the political identity crisis. As we enter 2011, all three major parties are having internal debates about who they are and what they stand for. Add to that the fact that there is discontent in the ranks of all three parties and it makes for a particularly volatile combination. It could turn out to be even more dramatic politically than 2010.

The past 12 months have transformed the Liberal Democrats. At the beginning of the year, they were perceived as the most harmless of political parties, the one that actors could safely endorse without hurting their image. Nobody could be bothered to hate them. By the end of the year, however, their leader was being burnt in effigy and Lib Dem MPs were taking advice on how to deal with letter bombs.

It has not been an easy transition. As one Tory who works closely with the Liberal Democrats puts it, ‘We Tories have spent our entire lives preparing to be hated. They haven’t.’ The problem is that many Liberal Democrats yearn to be on the other side of the barricades. An alliance with the Tories seems most unnatural.

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The Daily Telegraph’s sting operation revealed just how uneasy many Lib Dem ministers are with their bedfellows in government. But what should worry Clegg more than these private musings is that disgruntled Lib Dems are beginning to go public with their concerns. Richard Grayson, former vice-chairman of the all-powerful Federal Policy Committee, has urged his fellow Liberal Democrats to reach out to Ed Miliband. Tim Farron, the party’s newly elected president, has suggested that he regrets voting to go into coalition with the Tories.

These unhappy noises will get louder if the party continues to bump along in single figures in the polls, does badly in the May elections and is on the wrong side of the result in the voting reform referendum.