A marriage of convenience

This is what the New Politics looks like!” cried David Cameron, arms sweeping out, as he stood in the garden of Number 10, the May sun shining down on him and his dearly beloved Nick Clegg.

 

So what did it look like? Our leaders, appearing very much like two new gay dads, were standing at his ‘n’ his lecterns. The birds were singing. The grass was greener, an abnormally cold spring suddenly seemed warmer and the future looked bright, if not, as Nick Clegg would really have wanted, orange.

 

We were now entering an age of New Politics, where compromise, not conflict, would rule. Foes would become friends, all the while chanting the mantra “in the national interest”. Everything – every word, every chuckle, every policy – was in the national interest. And for once, the nation was interested. It had not so much spoken as muttered on election day and the result was standing here before us, giggling and intoxicated. “This will succeed through its success,” announced Dave. I think it is called being on honeymoon.

 

So what could go wrong? Well, there are plenty of embittered friends and relatives, not important enough to be seated near the top table, who think it is all a big mistake, too rash, too bold.


The two are not well suited, and their backgrounds, depending on who is talking, are either too different or too similar. In fact, as I know from having observed them at close quarters, they have painfully similar backgrounds of privileged and private education but
very different personalities.

 

Nick, a Europhile who could do Prime Minister’s Questions in Dutch if he wanted to, is sophisticated in a manner that Dave will never be. But the Tory leader is more conservative – with a small as well as a big c – in every way. Dave takes risks but is far more disciplined and calculating. In this relationship, Little Nicky is the teenager, Dave the grown-up. Dave may look young but Nicky looks even younger.

 

You do not need to be an embittered divorcee to predict trouble ahead. Their political families don’t help. First, there are the grandparents: Lord Ashdown for the Lib Dems, Lord Heseltine and Sir John Major for the Tories, Neil Kinnock for Labour. On the whole, they were immensely unhelpful during the crucial period when the marriage (sorry, coalition) was being hammered out. At one point, I got the feeling that Lord Ashdown was stitching up a deal with Labour on the Today programme. They need to shut up but, of course, they won’t.

 

Then there are the kids. Oh my god, the kids. The 233 new MPs who have just entered parliament are the truly great unknown. These are the offspring of the New Politics. In the first week after the election, they all posed for a ‘first day at school’ photograph. It’s not the revolution that some predicted but there are more women, especially among the Tories, and more black and Asian MPs. This is the first generation of the post-manure parliament. They will not be getting any John Lewis cushions on us. They will not be buying any second homes on us.

 

They will not be so easily herded, either. If there is one message that they will take from the 2010 election, it is that voters reward independently minded MPs. Among those who were re-elected, against the national trend, was Gisela Stuart in Birmingham Edgbaston, who has long since parted with the official Labour line.

 

In the austere and difficult times ahead, there will be many chances for mini-rebellions. Imagine the next five years as a long car journey: the new MPs are the children in the back, sometimes behaving well and sometimes badly, asking questions, playing games and demanding answers. “Are we there yet?” they will ask at critical stages on the journey. To which their two gay dads, their effervescence long since replaced by a sort of exhausted patience, will say: “Not yet. But soon.”

 

 

Ann Treneman is the parliamentary sketchwriter for The Times.