The prospect of government by short-term deals and extortion is so depressing that you can see why Ed Miliband has said he won’t go in for that kind of thing, and why David Cameron and Nick Clegg have finally started laying down some red lines. But there’s no getting away from the electoral mathematics, as Gladstone and Salisbury learnt 130 years ago. Before the 1885 election, the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell worked out that he could hold the balance of power.
If this should happen at the next election, he can enable the Conservatives to turn out the present Liberal Government, and then enable the Liberals to turn out the succeeding Conservative Government, and so on ad infinitum. Parliamentary government will have become an impossibility until Mr. Parnell has been bought off, and the price at which he can be bought off will be Home-rule. England will feel herself checkmated, and the price will be paid.
In the end Parnell’s plan didn’t work out quite so neatly, but some of this came true: having first supported the Conservatives, he switched to the Liberals and another election was held within a year.
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