An hour or two is a long time in politics...

Blimey. I go away for a few hours of work and come back to see the news that the LibDems seem to have cobbled together a deal with the Labour Party. In principle. Well, maybe....possibly.


Whilst details are sketchy, my take on the decision by Gordon Brown to announce that he will relinquish his post as Labour Party Leader is that he would not have done so had Lord Mandelson not reassured him that such a sacrifice was not in vain.


If Brown has offered himself up as the price for the Lab/LibDem coalition proposal to have any chance of success, the General Election of 2010 will go down in history as the time when the Liberal Democrats ducked and failed to grasp the great opportunity presented to them by the electorate to change British politics and society for good. If the LibDems fail to recognise the judgement of the British people that the Labour Party, top-down government and the big state has had its day, then the Party is finished as an effective force in UK politics. 


However, a large part of me remains somewhat unsurprised by actions of the LibDems. Being a former Liberal Democrat member myself (sorry!), I know the visceral, almost familial, hatred for the Tory Party held by so many activists and MPs within the LibDems. It also remains a fact that the LibDems continue to fight most of their local battles with Conservatives and the seats where they slug it out with Labour remain anomalies, subject to complex and almost impenetrable local (and personal) factors. 


I can also see that LibDem strategists will have eyed up the 19 or so marginal Labour/Tory battles and seen that the Conservatives were only 16,000 votes off winning an overall majority in the Commons. With this in mind, they may have calculated that the attraction of a Cameron-led Conservative/LibDem coalition going back to the country pretty soon into this Parliament might have been too great a pull, in spite of all the talk of "national interest" and "stable government".


For my money, I think such calculations (if indeed these are/will be the basis of any calculations) are wrong and overly cynical. There is a huge and serious job to be done in terms of fixing the economy, mending the broken society and rebuilding trust in our politics and that cannot be left to the vagaries of partisan game-play. 


I still contend that a Conservative minority government is less in the national interest that a Conservative/LibDem coalition. But the prospect of a failed Labour government being propped up by a desperate, scared and divided Liberal Democrat party is something which fills me with a real dread.