The Daily Telegraph Sting: The Liberal Democrats Exposed - December 2010

The use of ‘entrapment’ to gain evidence is often a cause for that evidence to be ruled inadmissible in court and I certainly remember important criminal cases when that has occurred. Standards in court, however, are not the same in parts of the press. There does never the less seem to me something deeply distasteful about journalists entering a deception and pretending to be bona fide constituents attending their MP’s surgery in order to extract what amounts to little more than tittle- tattle about the tensions within a coalition government.
Liberal Democrats have been exposed for saying one thing in private and another in public. So what is new?  Ordinary people do it all the time, let alone politicians who make a profession of it.  Much of Liberal Democrat vote is a protest. Some of those protesters are disillusioned former Conservative voters and some are disillusioned former Labour voters. It stands to reason that these different kinds of supporters will be best addressed with a slightly different emphasis in the message and the tone in which it is delivered.  There is no hypocrisy or deceit in this. Anyone who has attended any of my own meetings will find that I adopt a different tone if I am addressing Tory activists at a political party meeting than if I am addressing all comers at a public meeting. It is common sense, but it is also common courtesy.

Notwithstanding the tensions that have been exposed, I believe that the coalition is working very well and that the players from the different parties are getting along together. I sit in on cabinet meetings where there is a strong sense of mutual trust and collegiate endeavour.  My colleagues report that the ministerial teams are working well together.  The tension is not so much within the Government as in managing the two political parties in Parliament and the country. Clearly there are frustrations and disappointments in reaching a compromise that both parties are able to support, rather than pursuing one political party’s instincts.  I receive emails all the time from Tory supporters expressing their disgust and outrage that we haven’t repealed the Human Rights Act as we promised in our manifesto, or that we haven’t used the opportunity of the Euro crisis to negotiate the return of powers given up in the Lisbon Treaty which introduced the EU constitution. We also promised to do that in our manifesto. In response to these emails it is no good my grumbling about the limitations of coalition government, I just have to tell my correspondents robustly that I was released from those manifesto commitments when we failed to win a majority from the British people for them at the general election, and that now this coalition government has come together for only one overriding purpose: to give our country 5 years of stable government in which to sort out our disastrous public finances.

The real test for the coalition will come next year, when MP’s surgeries are visited –not by journalists posing as constituents- but by real constituents who have lost their public sector jobs or who cannot afford their rent because of cuts in housing benefit. Then we really will know if the coalition is strong enough to hold.