Lib Dems - Surveying The Wreckage

In the classic British crime film The Italian Job, chief mafioso Signor Altobelli is asked how the English can get out of Turin with the gold they looted from the Fiat car company’s convoy, while the city is paralysed by a traffic jam. “If they caused this jam”, he reasons, “they must have figured a way out”. When Nick Clegg took the Lib Dems into coalition with the Tories back in 2010, it seems this was one film he had not seen.

The party’s euphoria at returning to power after 88 years meant that dissenting voices were drowned out. As results came in after Thursday’s poll, I spent some time talking to one of those who had dissented; Linda Jack was once again the party’s candidate for the Mid Bedfordshire constituency, and for her the procession of defeated colleagues was borne with dignity and sadness - but little surprise.

There are few genuinely nice people in politics; Linda is one of them. And at least she retained the support of enough voters to save her deposit, unlike so many across the UK. She readily agreed with my thought that Charlie Kennedy would never have gone in with the Tories: that was the moment it all went wrong. The party offered not to support him when his problems mounted, but to change leader.

From a brief interregnum under Menzies Campbell, the Lib Dems chose Clegg, and it seems the idea of ministerial power and its trappings were something to which he and those closest to him were highly susceptible. The lessons of how Stanley Baldwin had marshalled the Tories, exploited the then Liberal Party’s divisions, and then almost wiped them out through a series of coalitions and elections, was ignored or forgotten.

Nick should have listened to Linda

Now the party is back to where Jo Grimond found it in the 1950s. And now it needs someone of Grimond’s stature to rescue it once more. He understood especially the British failure to engage with Europe, and his speech in April 1960 on Britain’s place in Europe was one of those “Read and weep” moments: “we urged [the Government] to go in and take the place which this country could claim, as a leading European power”.

It took Grimond over a decade to turn the Liberals from a party that could indeed be fitted in the back of a London taxi into one that could win seats across the country. After he handed on the leadership, it took another 38 years to eclipse David Lloyd George’s 1929 total of 58 MPs. Sadly, while Mr Baldwin needed a decade and a half to decimate the Liberals, Clegg going in with the Tories needed just one Parliament.

What, then, would Linda have done? It was all too obvious: getting too close to the Tories had been fatal before; it would be so again. Confidence and supply, vote-by-vote: these were the kinds of ways in which Clegg should have used the party’s influence. But in the post-2010 euphoria, those voices were drowned out in the chorus of Coalition applause. Last week, the succession of defeats showed who had made the right call.

Many good men and women paid the price for ignoring that warning from history: Jo Swinson, Danny Alexander, and yes, Charlie Kennedy in Scotland, Vince Cable, Simon Hughes, Ed Davey, Julian Huppert, and so many others in England. Linda was right. But what is done is done, and it will be another generation that rediscovers the spirit of Jo Grimond, and hauls British liberalism back from the dead once more.