How to kill a party

Dear Deirdre - I am a reasonably successful British political party. I would like to become a very unsuccessful political party. Is there anything you can suggest to help me achieve my dream? Yours hopefully, a Reasonably Successful British Political Party

Dear Ms Party - Team up with the Tories. Works every time. Lots of love, Deirdre

If only the Lib Dems had listened to Deirdre. A political party should only team up with the Tories if they don’t really want to be a political party any more. If you enter any kind of alliance with the Tories, the electorate always thinks the same thing: well, they think, there’s not much point in you any more, is there?

A party can’t prop up the Tories in peacetime without suffering a political catastrophe. Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 decided that the best way to deal with an economic crisis was to form a National Government with the Tories. In the election later that year, Labour came the closest to extinction they’ve ever been. The electorate looked at the Labour party, and decided that if voting for them was basically the same as voting Conservative, they wouldn’t bother.

Similarly, the old Liberal party made themselves unelectable after the first world war by continuing to support a Conservative-dominated government. They also took the precaution of splitting themselves in two to ensure there was no danger of looking credible. So there were two Liberal parties, one that supported the Conservative coalition of 1918-1922, and another that didn’t.

Two Liberal parties? Oh, let’s make it three. Such was the Liberals’ capacity for hating each other, these two versions of the Liberal party were still not getting on in 1931, almost a decade after the original spat. But, hilariously, there was now a third Liberal party that was in favour of a brand new coalition - Ramsay MacDonald’s national government. Every time a coalition government was formed, half the Liberals piled in and created a new party. Liberal parties were splitting and dividing like amoebas every time a deal with the Tories was mentioned.

Of course, it was the divisions that turned the Liberals from a party of government at the beginning of the twentieth century into also-rans from 1922 onwards. But what caused the divisions? Every time, it was teaming up with the Tories. The idea is so poisonous, that even if you split in two - usually a Liberal tactic, but Labour also tried it in 1931 - the electorate don’t even trust the anti-coalition version of the party, out of fear that they may reunify after the election.

The current Lib Dems are not going to split into pro-coalition and anti-coalition schisms. Any pro-coalition gathering of Lib Dems would be so tiny they may as well call themselves the Liberal Popular Front (‘He’s over there’). There is only going to be one Lib Dem party, because they are all agreed. They all agreed that joining the coalition sounded jolly exciting at the time, but it all seems to have gone quite badly, which has taken them all by surprise.

They must be quite easily surprised, the LibDems. Even the most clearly telegraphed plot-twist must have then jumping out their seat. To Lib Dems, Postman Pat must be like The Crying Game. (I haven’t seen the new Postman Pat movie, but I suspect that’s not a plot spoiler, unless they’ve taken an extremely bold new direction with the Pat franchise.)

How could they not see this coming? Teaming up with the Tories never ends well. It is not like turkeys voting for Christmas, because that actually makes more sense: at least the turkeys know that turkey-eaters do not want the total extinction of turkeydom. The Tories may not be plotting the extinction of the Lib Dems, but if it happened I imagine they would be, to borrow a Mandelson phrase, ‘intensely relaxed’ about it.

The LibDem-Tory coalition is like a suicide pact, but with only one cyanide capsule. The Lib Dem manifesto for the 2015 general election may as well be called ‘So long, cruel world’.

And this is not because of what the Lib Dems have done in coalition. They haven’t gone about coalition in the wrong way, or been badly led over the last four years. It was always this bad an idea, it’s just taken an election cycle for the true horror to unfold. In entering coalition with the Tories, they have systematically removed any reason to vote for them.

If you did not vote Lib Dem in 2010, there is nothing they have done in government that would persuade you to vote for them next year. This is not to say that they have achieved nothing in government. But if you want their achievements to be preserved, it is hard to see how you go about voting for that.

If your favourite government policy of the last four years was the increase in the income threshold before you start paying tax then, yes, that has only happened because the LibDems were in coalition government with the Tories. But you can’t vote for that. If the Lib Dems hold the balance of power again next year, it is impossible to tell who they would do a deal with, and what that deal would be. Yes, you can look at what they promise in their manifesto, but that isn’t a perfect guide: just because the Lib Dems have promised something, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will do the opposite - though that’s always a useful starting point.

And if you did vote Lib Dem last time, did you get what you asked for? Whatever policy tit-bits the Lib Dems can parade, overwhelmingly Lib Dem voters feel they got one thing: a Tory government. And that is not what they asked for.

The Conservative party is the defining entity in British politics. We understand all political players by how much they oppose them, if at all. If you do not oppose them, then you are with them. If you do oppose them, then the electorate understands where you sit. But if you help them sustain their power, while claiming to be a different thing, you become a kind of nonsense. The Lib Dems may have thought they would be rewarded for becoming a complex, nuanced paradox of political affiliation. But no one votes for a riddle.