Quietly, David Cameron is warming to Nick Clegg’s proposed plans for voting reform — even though it could bind the two parties together for a decade or more. James Forsyth on a Tory gamble that dares not speak its name
On the Monday after the election, David Cameron summoned his front bench for not one but two meetings as he frantically tried to put together a government. In the second one, he asked them for their support in offering the Liberal Democrats a referendum on electoral reform. The Tory party has long stood against this. It believed that any move away from first-past-the-post would be bad for the country and for the party; that it would lead to a string of mushy centrist governments and backroom deals between politicians that shut out the electorate. But the sense of the meeting was that this referendum was a necessary evil.
How much things have changed in two months.
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