Which way will Clegg go historically?

Chris Bowers, author of Nick Clegg: The Biography (currently available for £12.99, RRP £9.99) on the future for Nick Clegg. How will he be remembered? It could go several ways...

When Nick Clegg burst into the public consciousness in April and May 2010, there were three ways he could go in the history of British politics. He could change the political landscape markedly. He could become totally overwhelmed by the constant storm that is British political life. Or he could be one of the thousands of transient figures who come and go, leave a little mark, warrant an obituary in all media the day they die, but don’t move and shake any more than most.  

Two and a half years into the coalition, and it’s still not clear which of the three epitaphs Clegg will merit. All three are possible: at the moment it seems more likely he will be a notable figure for about five years but then disappear into the sunset, or even be shown to have been out of his depth. But maybe he is riding out a storm that will leave the political landscape very different to how he found it.  

The beams from two different lighthouses are guiding Clegg through the choppy waters of coalition government. The first is the belief that the British are fundamentally liberal, so if the leaders of the Lib Dems can fashion the free-thinking radicals and disaffected rejects from Labour and the Conservatives into a credible, genuinely liberal party, then it has the potential for massive support. The second is that never again should two parties have a duopoly of the political system the way the Conservatives and Labour have had since the second world war.  

His way of tackling this task is to show that coalition works. That was the philosophy behind many of the decisions he took in the early months of the government, and to a large extent it has worked. The government functions, and while decisions have been taken economically that have gone bad, the international markets are relatively calm about the stability of the UK’s coalition. Of course the government has its splits, but no more so than any single-party government, in fact one Labour MP has suggested the last Labour government was as much a coalition as this one: a coalition of the Blairites and the Brownites.  

Clegg’s problem has been that the smaller party has suffered in this ‘coalition works’ approach. To the public at large, it’s not clear what the Lib Dems have brought to government that wouldn’t have been there if the Conservatives had governed on their own. This may be grossly unfair to Clegg and the Lib Dems, and it is very tempting for them to blame the media for not highlighting Lib Dem achievements in government. But the fact that Lib Dem poll ratings have been consistently around 8-13 per cent since the coalition bedded down confirms the disaffection with the Lib Dems compared with the 23 per cent who voted for them in May 2010.  

To address that, Clegg has tried to differentiate his party more from the Conservatives. That has meant seeking territory where he can look different but still be on the side of public opinion. Such territory is hard to find. When David Cameron used the UK’s veto over a eurozone rescue package last December, the Lib Dems were appalled – that put clear water between them and the Tories, but public opinion was largely with the Tories. Hence the view in some Lib Dem circles that Clegg should have blown Andrew Lansley’s NHS reforms out of the water when he had the chance, because it was a situation in which the Lib Dems’ concerns were totally in tune with public (and medical) opinion.  

The fact that he didn’t stems from his belief that, by the spring of 2011 when he could have vetoed the entire reform package, he believed so much had already changed that throwing out the reforms would have left the NHS in a worse state than going through with them. In other words, he did what he thought was right in policy terms, even though it meant jettisoning a golden opportunity in political terms.  

And this is Clegg’s big dilemma. There is enough evidence to suggest he has become a very good government operator, ensuring Lib Dem influence gets to a number of policies that the public never hears about. But if he doesn’t play the political game, he’s unlikely to get the credit for it.  

It’s something he himself recognises. “I think I’ve learned how to do government, how to win arguments, how to win battles,” he told me in an interview for the paperback edition of Nick Clegg: The Biography. “I like to think I lead discussions well in government whether with Tory or Lib Dem ministers, I’ve got a good team around me, and we shape the policy agenda according to my priorities. The issue is that you can be very good in government, but if no-one knows about it and if the media don’t let you talk about it and let people hear about it, it’s of value for government and for your own conscience but of little political value.”  

Clegg does care deeply about the future of the Lib Dems. He is not going to sacrifice the party’s well-being for the sake of ‘doing the right thing in government’, but he does believe passionately that the party’s best chance of gaining respect at the next general election – even if it’s grudging respect – will come from being able to say he did the right thing, and the country is better off because of it.  

It will be a hard sell. Elections across Europe since the current financial crisis began in 2007 have revealed an array of unhappy electorates very willing to fire their ballots at those in power. And for it to happen, the Lib Dems will have to shout very loud about what they have done in government. There are some successes, notably the flagship policy of raising the income tax threshold to £10,000, but it’s hard to get even this one recognised as a Lib Dem initiative.  

If he succeeds in getting a decent Lib Dem result in 2015, he could have changed British politics for good. He will have established that peacetime coalitions can work, and that a junior partner can moderate the worst excesses of a senior partner. He is effectively challenging the British people to recognise what they were calling for in 2009-10 after the MPs’ expenses scandal when talk of ‘a new politics’ was all the rage.  

If he fails, historians are likely to conclude that Clegg was out of his depth politically. By becoming party leader without ever losing an election, without having cut his teeth in the grind of local politics, and by arriving at Westminster in 2005 an already established figure with some strong ideas, he has a naivety about him that is attractive, but whose flip side is an Achilles heel when it comes to understanding the need to play politics. By not playing the political game enough – or well enough – he may fail where the best intentions made him attractive to the British public in the spring of 2010.  

If he does fail, he is still likely to be vindicated in the 2015-20 Parliament. With a single party in power, whether Labour or Conservative, the advantages of coalition may come to be seen in a clearer light, and people may look back wistfully at five years of cooperative government. That could be Clegg’s tragedy – that it takes him to fail politically before people really appreciate what he has achieved.