This year, 2012, might be seen as the year in which Nick Clegg and David Cameron came ruefully to terms with the fact that the parties they actually do lead are not the parties they perhaps ideally would choose to lead. The prime minister has had to recognise that many of the troops he leads are viscerally anti-European, untroubled by Lords privilege, sceptical about gay rights and fear turbines more than global warming.
The deputy PM, in turn, has had to recognise that being in government has not by itself won a whole new range of voters who it was said previously "considered" the party but doubted its capacity to make tough decisions and declined to vote for it. These hoped-for new Lib Dem voters ,"the Considerers", have proved as elusive and shy as "the Borrowers" in Mary Norton's children's classic – very tiny and almost invisible.
So need this spell doom for the coalition as Cameroons, Orange Bookers and Blairites, who collectively occupied the same crowded, cultural and political space, are forced to hearken to the primal instincts of their respective parties? Need the Lib Dems, as Tim Farron urged us two years ago, get an exit strategy in place? Are we seeing the scaling back of ambition or the end of hubris, depending on your take?
Certainly it implies that the Quad (Danny, Nick, George and David), for all its strengths, is unlikely to be always the most accurate and reliable barometer of the coalition mood.
Arguably, it never could be, but in the initial phase of coalition the bizarre assumption was made that coalition meant reciprocal legislative grief. Tories had to vote for things that pained them and in return we would vote for stuff (like police commissioners) that we thought were nonsense. The appetite for mutual legislative masochism, whipped up sometimes by over-indulged ministers, is clearly dwindling. Witness the quick quashing of the Gove return-to-O-levels proposal.
Laudably, the coalition has done wonders in improving civilised discourse between Liberal Democrat and Conservative MPs. The tragedy is that the juvenile tribalism of the Commons has hindered intelligent debate across the house as a whole.
However, I neither want nor expect to see Tory MPs voting against their own strongly held convictions. We can cope, as can the public, with ministerial spats and conflicting passions. We can probably cope, too, with attempts to unravel the constitutional package – Lords, boundaries, etc – so long as those doing it recognise that for good, intelligent, democratic reasons it is a package, not an à la carte menu!
The huge challenge that binds us together is the desire to conquer the deficit, to do hard sums, rebalance and broaden the economy, conquer youth unemployment, use public money efficiently, target welfare properly and prevent growing inequality. It's still a helluva challenge and a profoundly serious one. What can still destroy the coalition would be a growing division between the parties as to how this should be faced.
The quiet despair the public currently feel about "the political classes" is not easily going to turn into an electoral reward. Following the banking crisis, we have to show through fresh thinking how Britain can stay a united, cohesive community and tame, as well as ride, the tiger of global capitalism. We're still all in this together. Game on!
