Ed Miliband’s comments in the Independent today were clearly based on the assumption that Nick Clegg will not be around if and when it comes to negotiating a possible Lib-Lab coalition in 2015. Vince Cable has already thrown his fedora into the ring to be the next Liberal Democrat leader, and Miliband backed the calls for a change of chief in his interview today. ‘I would find it difficult to work with him,’ he said, when asked about Clegg.
Clegg cannot go from being Deputy Prime Minister in one government to Deputy Prime Minister in the next: it would look ridiculous. A coalition with Labour would also not suit Clegg’s own political leanings, which makes Cable’s not-so-covert bid all the more plausible. Miliband knows both these things, and it is for this reason that he is able to be quite so scathing about the Deputy Prime Minister in the newspapers.
He was careful to point to the toxic baggage that Clegg would bring to a new government: ‘Clegg’s biggest problem is that he will say he is a brake on the Tories, but he is an accomplice. He chose not to kill the Health and Social Care Bill, a real bad bill doing damage to the NHS and pursue House of Lords reform.’
But even though he would be unlikely to be the man who would join forces with Labour personally in 2015, Clegg knows that he needs to start getting the message out now that the Liberal Democrats are a truly independent party. It’s worth noting that 74 per cent of Lib Dems surveyed recently by Lib Dem Voice said they believed the coalition was damaging their party’s prospects for 2015, up 14 per cent from March 2012. So his interview with The People was an attempt to show that he wasn’t simply wedded to the Tories. That the Comprehensive Spending Review next year is unlikely to go ahead in quite the way ministers had initially hoped is another example of the Lib Dems asserting their independence before they have even worked out what the end game for the coalition is. But note that Clegg tended to refer to ‘the Liberal Democrats’ rather than himself in his responses to questions about whether he could work with Miliband and Labour.
Incidentally, Miliband himself has got a long way to go before he convinces voters that he’s worth picking as PM. He has never convinced more than 25 per cent of opinion poll respondents that he would be the best Prime Minister – and Gordon Brown managed to score 26 per cent at the 2010 election. It is not, then, just a case of Nick Clegg needing to work on his reputation, or that of his party.
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