Rejecting the idea of coalition

Perhaps what most depressed the Liberal Democrats this week was the sense that the two main parties were rejecting the idea of coalition. One described to me how depressing he found it during the Lords reform debate to watch the Labour front bench revelling in every Tory intervention on Nick Clegg.

At the top of the Lib Dems, there’s now a real worry that both Labour and the Tories would try and govern as a minority government after the next election if there’s another hung parliament rather than form a coalition. This would lock the Liberal Democrats out of power. 

All of this makes Andrew Adonis’ comments in The Times today particularly striking. Adonis, who started his political life in the third party and has long been one of the Labour figures most interested in a Lib-Lab pact, tells Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson that ‘unfortunately for the future this is not a good advertisement for coalition — people will look back at this and think “never again”.’