During the coalition years, some enterprising jokers created the website “Nick Clegg looking sad”. His publishers haven’t done him any favours by putting a rather melancholy mugshot on the cover of this account of the five turbulent years of cohabitation with the Tories that culminated in the annihilation of the Lib Dems. As it turns out, this is not a doleful book. It is rueful, soul-baring and commendably candid about his mistakes, but also a spirited defence of the decision to go into government with the Tories and the role the Lib Dems played there. Despite his own battering experience, Clegg remakes the case for multi-party governments and pragmatic compromise in an age of populists preaching ideological purities.
Many political memoirs are exercises in self-justification. There is some of that here. No one else is rushing to his defence, so Clegg has to do it for himself. He fairly argues that the coalition did quite a lot of things, such as free lunches for primary school children, which wouldn’t have happened had the Tories been left to their own devices. Yet there’s not much arguing with the damnatory verdict delivered at the last election and it is to the credit of Clegg that he doesn’t spare himself from examination of what he got wrong. He dwells at length on why the reversal on tuition fees did so much damage. The Cleggmania of the 2010 election was bound to deflate once the Lib Dems sullied their piety with power, but that early U-turn accelerated the transformation into Cleggphobia. The protests became so personal that his protection squad advised him to duck down and lie flat on the back seat of his car so he wouldn’t be spotted by the thousands of demonstrators who descended on Westminster and he had to be smuggled around Whitehall by underground tunnel.
It was ultimately not so much the policy compromises that undid the Lib Dems – it was a broader failure to tell a persuasive story about their role in the coalition. The trouble started at the very beginning with Clegg’s bromance with Cameron in the rose garden. “I think we may have overdone it,” said Cameron afterwards. From Clegg’s perspective, it was designed to epitomise a new way of doing politics and settle jitters in a country unaccustomed to coalition government.
But he now sees that “buried in the bonhomie of the occasion, there was also the seeds of its undoing”. For many who had given their vote to the Lib Dems, especially those who did so because of an implacable dislike of the Tories, it became emblematic of “an excessive willingness to compromise, the abandonment of reformist zeal in a cloying stitch-up with the most establishment of all parties: the Tories”.
In so much as the Lib Dems had a “core vote”, it was public sector professionals. Many of them were on the frontline of the austerity agenda that became the government’s defining mission. The Lib Dem argument that the cuts would have been worse under a purely Tory government was not much consolation. Nor was it much protection for the Lib Dems from the accusation that they had sold out their supporters. The Tories were much more ruthless about looking after their people. To Clegg’s face, Cameron said that he would not raise additional revenues from increased taxes on higher value properties because Tory donors would not have it. Tellingly, the only time that Cameron really lost his temper with Clegg was not over a policy dispute, but when the Lib Dems blocked a boundary review that would have handed additional parliamentary seats to the Tories.
One of the charges repeatedly levelled against the Lib Dems was that they were in it for “the trappings of power”. The real problem was different. Not having had a sniff of it before, they were unprepared for office and often naive, especially about the Tories. Clegg was hopelessly under-resourced compared with Cameron and swamped by a “tsunami of unprocessed paperwork”. He became ill. Paddy Ashdown told him he had got fat. Cheers, Paddy. Clegg says this is not a “score-settling” book, and generally it isn’t, but some bitterness bubbles to the surface. He justly complains that the Tories resisted Lib Dem ideas about pensions reform or apprenticeships only then, when they were found to be popular, to shamelessly claim them as their own. He rails, rather eloquently, about a myopically tribalistic Labour party colluding with the Tories to frustrate reform of the Lords, party funding and the electoral system.
The book does not produce any especially juicy revelations. The best vignette is Michael Gove hiding in a lavatory to avoid talking to David Laws, a Lib Dem minister in the same department. Theresa May makes a few cameo appearances as the authoritarian face of the Home Office. Cameron is only an intermittent presence. Clegg seems to have found George Osborne a more engaging colleague, but also one prone to be “petulant and underhand” when he was not getting his own way. Clegg says he didn’t want to write a “kiss and tell”. In a sense, that’s a pity. I rarely complain that political memoirs are too short, but this one could have been longer. Contemporary readers and future historians could have done with more detail about how and why the big decisions were made to compare with the accounts we will get from Cameron and co.
He concludes by musing on how “the politics of reason” can compete more effectively with the politics of raging grievance surging across the democratic world. He suggests that liberals need to address the corrosive caricature of them as unpatriotic, cosmopolitan elitists, an image that did undoubted damage to the cause of Remain during the Brexit referendum. He speculates that the fragmentation of traditional political tribes and allegiances will lead to further multi-party governments. If he is correct, this honest and thoughtful book has some useful advice for smaller parties in future coalitions about how to avoid its author’s fate.
Politics: Between the Extremes is published by Bodley Head (£20). Click here to buy it for £15
