If some Tories hate coalitions so much, they might try winning a majority next time

By Bagehot

TO OLDHAM, a Northern ex-mill town stirring itself sleepily from the holiday season for a parliamentary by-election: the first such electoral test faced by the coalition government. Riding the train up to Manchester tonight (poor, half-forgotten Oldham currently has no railway connection of its own, but is instead waiting for a link to the Manchester tram system), I read various press cuttings about Tory disgruntlement with life in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. A Tory MP, Mark Pritchard, made the loudest noise of the New Year season with a piece in the Mail on Sunday, demanding an end to hints and nudges about electoral pacts to preserve the coalition. Mr Pritchard, a robust right-winger, concluded:

At the next General Election, the Conservative Party must fight to win – to win an outright majority and send the Liberal Democrats packing. It is the ‘temporary' nature of the existing political settlement from which the Coalition draws its strength – not the prospect of its permanence.

In the same newspaper, the Spectator's James Forsyth describes the grumbling among Conservative backbenchers who feel David Cameron and the party leadership operate double standards when it comes to demanding loyalty from Tory and Lib Dem MPs. For example, he reports:

Tories complain that the consequence for Simon Hughes of abstaining in the vote on tuition fees was that he became a Privy Counsellor and the Coalition's access advocate, while Tracey Crouch, a Tory backbencher who abstained, faced dire warnings about her future career prospects and lots of personal and unpleasant briefings against her

Reader, I fear my first thought was an uncharitable one: if some Tories dislike being in coalition so much, they should have won a majority at the May general election, shouldn't they? Of course the 57 Lib Dem MPs have to be treated with kid gloves by the prime minister: if they walk, his government falls. And being from a different party, they need more coddling than even the 50 grumpiest Tory would-be rebels. The Lib Dems are guests, not family, and as a well-brought up chap, Mr Cameron knows that when guests are present, family holds back.

This led me to a further thought, which I think may help explain some of the real venom in the air. Ponder the current mood in the Commons, and it is not enough to say that Tory right-wingers dislike being in coalition with more left-wing Lib Dems. Nor is it enough to note that the Tory right fears that Mr Cameron secretly prefers the company of centrist Lib Dems, and thus dreams of using the coalition to create the "Frankenstein" party that Mr Pritchard attacks in his article.

I think that an unexpectedly big problem is that the Conservative party has not resolved its internal argument about why it did not secure a majority in the May elections. To explain, if you are a Tory right-winger, it is almost infinitely maddening to be told that David Cameron must suck up to Simon Hughes because the voters did not reward the Conservatives with a majority in May. That is because such right-wingers think that Mr Cameron threw away what should have been an easy election victory by being insufficiently robust and Tory: they believe that the party should have offered voters more red meat on immigration, law and order and Europe, and less of that pseudo-Lib Demmist pinko nonsense about hugging huskies, worrying about climate change, the Big Society and so on. And, as the right sees it, the price of Mr Cameron's failure is that they all have to be sick-makingly nice to real, live Lib Dem pinkos like that dreadful oiler Hughes.

Whereas if you are an ally of Mr Cameron, you think that the last election was lost because the work of detoxifying the Conservatives as the "nasty" party was not fully complete. And if that is your analysis, and you think that the fundamental problem is that too many Tory MPs are still to the right of the electorate, then the Lib Dems in the coalition are not just special because they are guests who are somehow free to walk out. Instead, you think Lib Dems are special because (at last back in May, before everyone started hating them) they were more broadly popular and thus electorally valuable than Tory right-wingers, who appeal mostly to their mothers and a certain breed of die-hard party activist.

As it happens, there is some evidence for both interpretations of what happened in May. There are, for example, a number of seats where the vote for the anti-European United Kingdom Independence Party was larger than the Tory margin of defeat, which leads many on the right to say those were seats lost by being too milk-and-water on Europe. There are also lots of opinion polls showing that on Europe, the average voter's views are closer to those of the Tory right than to anything proposed by the Lib Dems.

But on the other hand, the Tory Party had already pretty much tested the base-pleasing robust right-wing thing to destruction, notably at the 2001 and 2005 elections. In 2001, indeed, the Tories showed it is possible to say lots of things on Europe that voters agree with, while still dismaying voters by banging on about Europe so much.

And here is the final problem, as midnight looms in an Oldham motel. There is now, at long last, a reasonably broad consensus about why the Tories did badly in the general elections of 2001 and 2005. Nearly eight months after the last general election, there seems to be no prospect of the Tories coming to any sort of agreement about why they did not win a majority in May. This surely explains much of the bitterness among the Tory rank-and-file about life in the coalition. They do not just find their new friends uncongenial in some important respects, and fume at the idea that Mr Cameron might find such Lib Dems congenial. They fundamentally disagree with Mr Cameron and his allies about who is to blame for the failure in May that now forces them to debate Lib Dem congeniality at all.