Why all three leaders reach the end of the year sighing with relief

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/22/survival-cameron-clegg-miliband

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As they reflect on a rollercoaster year, what is the main thought that will be going through the head of each of the party leaders? Funnily enough, I suspect it is exactly the same one in all their cases. David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg will be blowing out their cheeks and saying quietly to their loved ones: "Phew! I survived."

Each of them faced a crisis of leadership over the past year. For each of them, it is a success of sorts simply to have made it to Christmas.

For the Lib Dems, 2013 began bleakly. Their poll ratings were flatlining; they had wholly justified expectations that their councillors would again be culled at the local elections; and they had little collective sense of how they were going to haul themselves out of the deep hole in which they were trapped. They were also faced with the mortifying prospect of one of their most senior figures being put on trial. Paradoxically, it was the conviction and resignation of Chris Huhne that threw a lifeline to Clegg.

The turning point was the Eastleigh byelection. It turned out to be a very smart call by the Lib Dems to call the contest quickly and keep the campaign short. People from all parties agree that had voting taken place a week later, the momentum developed by the capable Ukip candidate would have seen Nigel Farage's bandwagon roll to victory. A few more days of campaigning or less than a thousand votes going a different way and it is possible that we would now be discussing Clegg's leadership in the past tense.

Objectively, one byelection changes nothing about the big picture. The Lib Dem's poll ratings remain dire. They were hammered in the local elections and expect to be given another pummelling in next year's electoral tests. Eastleigh mattered because it gave their MPs morale-lifting hope that they might nevertheless hang on to their seats at the next general election. By the time of their party conference, talk of a challenge to Clegg had evaporated. The leadership won every key vote in Glasgow. Some will say that was because everyone but the most hardcore loyalists had left, but it provided him with a "Clegg stamps authority on party" narrative. And he gave them a message to pitch as the "third party of government" that would ensure that British politics was "anchored in the centre ground". How that will be received on the doorstep at the next general election remains to be seen. Even if members of the electorate want another coalition, they can't actually vote for one. But it gave the Lib Dems a clear project to work towards. To a party desperate for reasons to be cheerful, it offered one.

David Cameron began the year looking hunted and the predators were his own MPs. After a very long wait, he gave them what they had clamoured for: the pledge of an in/out referendum on membership of the EU. That did not calm the furies on his backbenches, partly because Cameron refused to say exactly what he would attempt to renegotiate and partly because there is nothing short of exit from the EU tomorrow that will tranquilise the passion of a certain kind of Tory Eurosceptic.

After an unprecedented revolt by Conservative MPs against the Queen's speech, the prime minister was then forced to turn the promise into legislation. Meaningless in constitutional terms, because one parliament cannot bind another, this was full of meaning about his relationship with his party because it was another case of Cameron resisting and then conceding. He did take a stand on gay marriage, which made it on to the statute book by resounding majorities in both houses of parliament. But not before it had unleashed more of the Tory party's internal devils. At the height of that furore, two senior Conservative MPs were having lunch with each other. As they sat down, one asked: "How many members have you lost this week?" Replied the other: "Two dozen."

There was feverish speculation of a leadership challenge to the prime minister. That there was no evidence that anyone else would be doing any better, no plausible replacement at all really, did not stop the frenzy, a sign that a kind of psychosis had taken a grip on a significant section of the Conservative party. Serious people feared that there was a prospect of the Tories completely imploding. Staff at Number 10 were reduced to trying to make a virtue of the uncivil war by talking about "clearing the battlefield".

And then the fever passed almost as suddenly as it had erupted. Sheer exhaustion was one reason. Tory MPs became worn out, at least temporarily, with fighting each other and their leader. The return of economic growth, even at pallid levels, lifted their spirits. The budget was unmemorable, but boring was certainly to be preferred to the omnishambles of the year before.

After the big sell-off in shares in George Osborne in 2012, Conservatives started to buy stock in the chancellor again. Cameron put in more time schmoozing his backbenches. They were treated to a hog-roast in the backgarden of Number 10. More significantly, he gave them a much more traditional Tory menu of policy with tougher positions on spending cuts, welfare, immigration and Europe. He brought in Lynton Crosby, the Australian election strategist who ran Michael Howard's campaign. He marked the death of the Iron Lady by declaring himself to be a Thatcherite, a label that earlier modernising incarnations of Cameron had always avoided. He was quoted – and hasn't denied using the words – saying: "We've got to get rid of all this green crap." Those old allies who had called themselves Cameroons wondered what it meant to be one any more. Tory modernisers – a shrunken and largely muted band – worry where the drift to the right will ultimately leave them at the next election when it comes to the competition for centrist voters.

Sir John Major made a rare intervention to give a public warning. What the shift rightwards did do was stabilise Cameron's position with his party, which is what seemed most important to him. It helped him survive losing the vote on military intervention in Syria. Historians debated whether this was the most significant defeat for a prime minister on an issue of war and peace since Lord Palmerston or Lord North. Commentators, especially Tory ones, declared it to be a humiliating, even irrecoverable, blow to his authority. As things turned out, it wasn't.

A total of £120. That relatively small sum was the saving of Miliband's year and he didn't even have to spend a penny of it himself. Anxiety among Labour figures about his leadership was rumbling not far below the surface for the first half of 2013. Drifting. Timid. Indecisive. Defensive. Unpriministerial. Too leftie. Not radical enough. Some of that discontent erupted publicly when the August news vacuum was filled with various voices offering more or less helpful – usually less helpful – suggestions about where Labour was going wrong. The answer to the chorus of complaint was his conference speech. "We bet everything on it," says one of his senior aides.

Specifically, they gambled on the headline-grabbing retail offer to voters infuriated by inflation-busting price hikes by the utility companies: the promise that a Labour government would freeze gas and electricity bills for at least 20 months.

As I disclosed earlier in the year, many of Miliband's colleagues were wary or downright sceptical about making the pledge. Even those who did think it a good idea under-estimated the impact that it would have. There were a lot of predictions that it would unravel after a few days of scrutiny and leave the Labour leader looking stupid. Cameron and Osborne were initially so blithe about it that they thought they could simply scoff it away as "nuts" and "Marxist".

Yet that one pledge – worth about £120 to the average household and entirely hypothetical unless there is a Labour government – dominated the agenda for weeks. It switched the conversation from the resumed growth and on to the territory of living standards where Labour prefers to fight. It gave Miliband a bridgehead into his wider argument about who will prosper from the recovery. Increasingly split about how to respond, and visibly so, the coalition flailed.

A panicky Cameron began rushing out his own cost of living initiatives, over-ruling Osborne and Clegg who both thought they shouldn't be seen playing on Labour's terms. Suddenly the coalition was talking about rail fares, water bills and payday loans. Intervening in the market was not so "nuts" or "Marxist" after all. None of the coalition's rival offers had the resonance of the energy bill pledge. It didn't magic away the many challenges facing Labour in the year ahead, but it did mean people stopped arguing about them for a while.

Survival. There may be grander goals in politics, but at the close of a turbulent year and facing a highly unpredictable future, to each party leader there is some satisfaction to be derived just from having got through the past 12 months in one piece. Survival is, after all, better than its opposite.

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