“England does not love coalitions,” claimed Disraeli. It will positively loathe the one with which it has just been saddled: by the time it runs its inglorious course its two component parties will have shed a huge proportion of their support and rendered themselves unelectable. The Heir of Blair has managed to exceed his mentor’s 10-year record of betrayal in just 24 hours. The Conservative Party is now in the thralls of a relentless process of dissolution.

That process began with the capture of the party by Dave and his Portillista modernisers, alienating the core support and rendering the so-called Conservative Party unrecognisable. This led to last Thursday’s failure at the polls and consequently to the present squalid coalition. A strong Tory leader would have told Nick Clegg: “We are going it alone as a minority government. If you object, then vote us down: obstruct the reduction of the deficit, panic the markets, provoke a run on sterling, then justify your conduct to the electorate when we go to the country and seek a proper mandate.”

Instead, desperate to reach the sanctuary of Number 10 at any cost to his party, Dave smothered Clegg with largesse. The moral is: get an election result of fewer parliamentary seats and come in third place, and your reward will be the office of Deputy Prime Minister and 20 government posts, as well as a change in the voting system that will further disadvantage the Tories at all future elections. With a result like that, one wonders why Clegg has any problems with First Past the Post.

Looking at the enormous concessions the Liberal Democrats have secured from Cameron and the number of ministers across Whitehall, it was pretty decent of Nick Clegg to allow the Tories to join his government. It is amusing to see so many of the sycophants who have opportunistically gone along with Dave’s modernising madness now find no perks of office available for them since they have been given to Liberal Democrats. Dave, like some biological warfare scientist recreating the smallpox virus, has managed to resurrect a threat to civilisation that expired 65 years ago: the Liberal cabinet minister. There will be five of them sitting round the table in Number 10, in a supposedly Conservative government.

The nation’s finances are now the plaything of the Odd Couple: George Osborne and Vince Cable (who will major on “business and banks”). The first example of their strategy for recovery is already announced: the promised (and wholly derisory) figure of £6bn in cuts from non-frontline services will be implemented; at the same time, the income tax threshold will be raised to £10,000, at a cost of £17bn. That exercise in trimming the deficit should reassure the markets. As for a Liberal Democrat Home Secretary, such an appointment would mean that, a year from now, Somalia and Bangladesh would be completely depopulated regions.

Under Dave’s modernising régime just one policy got through the net that was recognisably Tory: raising the inheritance tax threshold. Unlike the Big Society and all the other absurdities cribbed from other countries and political movements, it struck a true chord with the electorate; so much so that it panicked Gordon Brown into avoiding a planned general election, the fatal mistake that led to his downfall. Yet the Tories lost the initiative and allowed Labour to demonise the proposal; now it has been put on the back burner to appease the Liberal Democrats. How did a flagship policy of proven electoral potency become transformed into a liability?

What is happening today is an historic watershed for the Conservative Party – and not in the sense its cheerleaders would have us imagine. Under Cameron’s leadership the party is becoming locked into a process of self-destruction that before long will become irreversible – that may already be so. The haemorrhaging of support that had already begun, as evidenced by the 900,000 votes for UKIP, will now accelerate. After so much speculation over what permutation of parties would emerge as a government, the answer turned out to be a Lib Dem/Lib Dem coalition – the Liberals led by Nick Clegg joining with the liberals led by David Cameron. There is no ideological gap between them.

This is very serious: the Conservative Party is dicing with death – its own demise. What remains to be seen, in the short rather than the long term now, is whether the party will disembarrass itself of Cameron in time and recover its identity or whether conservatism in this country will be forced to find a new political vehicle. As things stand today, the evidence suggests that the trappings accompanying the illusion of “power” will anaesthetise the Tories against reality until it is too late.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, May 12 2010

By: Gerald Warner
Gerald Warner is an author, broadcaster, columnist and polemical commentator who writes about politics, religion, history, culture and society in general.