Lib Dems won't knife Nick Clegg – well, not quite yet anyway

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/02/andrew-rawnsley-nick-clegg-safe-for-now

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'Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!" cry the feral boys in William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

"Kill the Clegg! Cut his throat! Kill the Clegg! Bash him in!" chant an assortment of voices on coalition island.

It is not all that astonishing that the new political season should open to a burst of speculation about the political health of the Lib Dem leader. The party's opinion poll rating is poor and has been so for a long time. The leader's personal polling is rotten and has been so for a long time. The only straw of consolation to which Mr Clegg can cling is that he is not quite as unpopular as George Osborne. A survey of 500 party members by a Lib Dem website found them evenly split about whether he should lead them into the next election. Moreover, there is a serious looking alternative – step forward, Vince Cable. The business secretary has been indicating that he still entertains ambitions to become leader and would, according to the polls, be a more popular one than the incumbent.

The irrational behaviour of Conservative MPs isn't helping Mr Clegg. There are very few Tories who think that Mr Cable would be a more congenial partner, and a lot of Tories who think that the removal of Mr Clegg would collapse the coalition, but Conservatives are nevertheless doing their bit to create a bad vibe around the deputy prime minister. Their levels of aggression towards him have been heightened since he responded to Tory sabotage of Lords reform by saying that he would not deliver for them on the constituency boundary changes. The word from inside Number 10 is that David Cameron regards that as blood under the bridge. "We've drawn a line underneath it and want to move on."

But for many Tories further down the political food chain, the scuppering of the boundary changes is another reason to curse the Lib Dem leader. His suggestion that the very affluent ought to make more of a contribution to the burden of austerity through a wealth tax was treated as a reasonable proposition by the Financial Times, but has sent Tories ape. The hostile mood music is being encouraged by signals from within the Labour leadership that they are receptive to the idea of a coalition with the Lib Dems after the next election, but only if the party were under different leadership, the name of Mr Cable being spoken warmly about within Labour circles.

My initial instinct was not to take the idea of Mr Clegg being putsched too seriously. Very few Lib Dems of whom anyone might have heard have called for his head. In fact, only two have openly suggested that he ought to quit while he is behind. One is Lembit Opik, the eccentric former MP best known for his obsession with the risk of the Earth being struck by a rock from outer space – an event that is a bit more likely than Mr Opik turning into a statesman. A slightly more dangerous dissident voice is Matthew Oakeshott, a peer and former Treasury spokesman who gets attention because he is both good for a quote and an old and close friend of the business secretary. Lord Oakeshott has not explicitly called for Mr Clegg to go, but we didn't need the services of GCHQ to decipher him when he told an interviewer: "We have lost over half our market share... and any business that had done that would be looking very hard now at both its strategy and its management to see how we get some of that back."

But it was not his intervention that most convinced me that the Lib Dem leader should be watching his back. The clincher was Paddy Ashdown, the former Lib Dem leader and one of Mr Clegg's early political patrons. He used the pages of the Guardian to implore the party to stand by its man. When Lord Ashdown feels the need to give us a blast of his loyal bugle, then fears of mutiny in the ranks are almost certainly for real. More than one of his senior colleagues has since told me that Mr Clegg is very twitchy about threats to his leadership. In the words of one: "Nick has been jumpy for months."

One question that plagues Lib Dems in the dark nights of the soul is whether they made a fundamental strategic and historic error when they went into coalition with the Tories in the first place. Given how things have since unfolded, it is understandable that some Lib Dems now feel acute buyer's remorse. In my judgment, though, the decision they made back in May 2010 was a difficult one but still essentially correct. The parliamentary arithmetic really didn't add up for the successful creation of a coalition with Labour. A Lab-Lib government could have cobbled together a fragile majority only with the unreliable assistance of Nationalists and MPs from Northern Ireland. Moreover, a big proportion of the country had made it clear that it no longer wanted a Labour prime minister. For Labour to have tried to cling to power assisted by the Lib Dems would almost certainly have ended in disaster for both parties, as many senior Labour figures concluded at the time.

That presented the Lib Dems with only one alternative to coalition with the Conservatives, which was to have allowed the Tories to form a minority government. To have done that would have been to spurn a chance of wielding power after more than half a century of waiting. The Lib Dems would have indelibly branded themselves as a party incapable of rising to responsibility when the opportunity was offered. So I still think they made the best choice available to them. And even if historians conclude that it was a mistake, then it was a collective error. The decision to go into coalition was endorsed by gatherings of the party's MPs and peers, by its federal executive and by a special conference at Birmingham, each of which overwhelmingly supported taking office with the Tories. At the time, Mr Clegg privately groaned that he had to go through so many hoops, but it has turned out to be a protection. All their hands were dipped in the decision and they know it.

The next question for Lib Dems is this: could they have avoided the haemorraghing of support that they have since suffered? Probably not. Those voters who defected to the Lib Dems from Labour before 2010 because they were disaffected with Labour's record in office were always very likely to go home once Labour was in opposition. The process of desertion was inevitably hastened once the Lib Dems went into coalition with the Tories. Those voters who supported the Lib Dems as a vehicle for protest, a way of sticking two fingers up at the Westminster establishment, were also going to flee once they had become a party of power.

Some of Mr Clegg's decisions certainly made the loss of support more rapid and more sharp than it might otherwise have been. It now looks unwise to have over-romanticised the relationship with David Cameron at the beginning – all that cooing and joshing in the Rose Garden. It was a mistake to sign off on changes to the health service, as dramatic as they were unexpected, which were never in the coalition agreement. It was a big error to underestimate the penalty that the party, and Mr Clegg personally, would pay for breaking its pledge on tuition fees. What can be said in his defence is that this was not a solo misjudgment by Mr Clegg, but one in which all his senior team were involved. Lest we forget, Mr Cable, as business secretary, was the architect of the policy.

By far the most important decision they all made was to sign up to a Conservative austerity strategy they had previously described as madness. The double-dip recession is the single most important explanation for the Lib Dems' dismal standing in the polls. Until there are signs that the economy is recovering, they are denied what was their central justification for going into the coalition with the Tories, which was to address and resolve a national economic crisis. Mr Clegg has to shoulder a lot of responsibility for that decision, but so too must the two economists in senior positions on the team, namely Chris Huhne and, yes, Vince Cable. Of the business secretary, one Tory says, perhaps mischievously: "He has issues with us. But that's not his big issue. When it comes to the deficit-reduction programme, Cable can be relied on to defend it."

In sum, the Lib Dems chose the right course – in fact, the only realistic one – when they went into coalition in the first place. They were bound to pay a heavy penalty in popularity whoever was the leader. And the mistakes they have made are not Nick Clegg's alone.

I reckon enough Lib Dems appreciate this to keep his leadership safe from imminent danger. He does not have too much to fear at this party conference. The crunch one will be next year. If Lib Dem prospects still look so bleak in 12 months' time, then his party's understanding may be exhausted. It is then that the urge to "Kill the Clegg!" and replace him with a new leader who might improve their chances of survival could become overwhelming.