Prime Political Objective: The door to No. 10 Downing Street, official residence of the UK Prime Minister.SPARE A THOUGHT for poor Nick Clegg, the Liberal-Democrat party leader standing in the eye of the UK’s political hurricane. Only he commands the numbers necessary to resolve the parliamentary impasse served up by a frustrated and anxious UK electorate. Only he has the power to keep Labour’s Gordon Brown in office or hand over the keys to No.10 Downing Street to the Conservative Party’s David Cameron.
What will he do?
The smart money will be on Clegg deciding to throw in his lot with the Tories. This is certainly the decision the UK Establishment is hoping for.
A Tory-Lib-Dem accommodation is the only option which guarantees a clear parliamentary majority – something which the City of London, beset with deepening fears of financial collapse across the whole of the Eurozone, is desperate to secure in the shortest possible time.
In this they can count upon the wholesale support of the right-wing press, which will, no doubt, bombard the Liberal-Democrat leader with screaming headlines and trenchant editorials urging him to "do the right thing" by putting country ahead of party.
Away from all the cameras and tape-recorders, the UK’s "permanent government" of senior civil servants will be doing some bombarding of their own.
Clegg will be given confidential briefings on the looming financial crisis. He will be told how exposed the UK economy is to financial speculation and capital flight. He will be warned in no uncertain terms how extremely "destabilising" a ramshackle, cobbled-together, electorally battered Labour-Lib-Dem Government – supported by a motley collection of nationalist parties from the "Celtic fringe" – would be to the UK’s fragile economy.
Deploying their time-tested strategies of fawning flattery, high-minded exhortation and Machiavellian manoeuvring (all so brilliantly illustrated in the Yes Minister TV series) the "Men from Whitehall" will bend all their powers to trussing-up Clegg in the sticky webs of the UK state apparatus.
There will, of course, be all manner of threats and promises mixed in with the flattery and exhortation. The Good and the Great will subtly let him know how very generous the State can be to those who put "the wider interests of the country" before "petty, personal ambitions" at a time of "national crisis". He will also learn what long arms and sharp teeth the State possesses when it comes to settling scores with its enemies.
And, waiting in reserve, behind all the tinted glass and drawn curtains; the closed doors and smoke-free rooms; stands the ultimate appeal to duty and fealty – Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II.
Few Englishmen possess the political fortitude to withstand a direct appeal from the Crown. And make no mistake, if the UK Establishment senses that Clegg is seriously considering throwing in his lot with the Centre-Left, then somehow it will find a way of bringing "the Palace" into the equation.
Men like Lord Ashcroft, who has poured millions into the far-Right’s quest for a Tory government, has a very substantial stake in the outcome of the horse-trading which the voters have forced upon his party and its allies. He knows that, by any dispassionate reckoning, the Liberal-Democrats have only one plausible bargaining strategy. They must secure the immediate introduction of proportional representation.
Without PR Clegg is doomed to repeat the experiences of his predecessors Jeremy Thorpe and Paddy Ashdown, and his party will be forced to wait for the best part of another generation before it again gets the chance to reform fundamentally the UK’s manifestly inadequate and anti-democratic electoral system.
But Ashcroft and his allies also know that if such a deal is done, then the UK Right will find it next-to-impossible to ever again win power. Between them Labour and the Lib-Dems represent a clear majority of the UK electorate. An electoral system that allocated parliamentary seats on the basis of the popular vote would condemn the Right to almost permanent opposition.
This, after all, was the fate to which FPP condemned the UK Centre-Left for the best part of a century. The splitting of the anti-Conservative vote between Labour and the Liberals kept the Tories in government for 56 of the 75 years between 1922 and 1997 – and this in spite of the fact that, in all that time, the Conservative Party only once (1931) succeeded in winning more than 50 percent of the popular vote.
The Conservative Party and its right-wing allies will do everything within their power to dissuade Clegg from doing the one and only thing likely to secure his own and his party’s political survival. Sadly, he does not come across as the sort of politician to withstand the pressures that will be applied to him. The odds are, therefore, very high that he will succumb to the blandishments of the UK Establishment.
To Murdoch headlines screaming "We agree with Nick", Clegg will hand the keys of No.10 to Cameron and become indelibly stained by the brutal retrenchment the Tories he has helped into power are bound to unleash. Very much sooner than he might wish, he will find himself enjoying a comfortable and well-remunerated retirement – and his party will be reduced to a smouldering political ruin.
But if Clegg doesn’t buckle, if he stands firm? Well, that'll be the moment UK politics gets really interesting!
