Across the pond

Cameron and Clegg did some joking around in the garden behind No 10 Downing Street yesterday that prompted the newspapers to invite readers to suggest which other double acts they most resembled. None of the entries I saw, which ranged from Flanagan and Allen, Ant and Dec to Wooster and Jeeves were remotely appropriate. Most people watching found it re-assuring. Thank God they’ve got a sense of humour and are able to work together despite the hurtful things which they said about each other during the election campaign. The media are already calling it a love-in and asking how long the honeymoon will last.

So perhaps it is time to abandon this marriage analogy, which I used in my last blog when I termed it a marriage of convenience with Prince Charming escorting the Cinderella party into the corridors of power.

Cameron and Clegg are two party leaders, both of whom have just failed to get as many votes as they expected from the electorate. They are not promising to work together til death do them part. But they have emphatically committed themselves to working together for five years, sharing responsibility for introducing the cuts in public spending, which all three parties agree are necessary to save the country from going bankrupt.

Their partnership is not an equal one. The Lib Dems have secured five of the twenty eight seats at the cabinet table, which roughly the same ratio of the number of MPs each party has. It does not take any account at all of that the Lib Dems got 23 per cent of the national vote compared with the Conservative’s 36.1 per cent. By contrast Cameron has made very substantial concessions to take account of Lib Dem policies notably on political reform and on taxation policies to deal with the financial crisis.

There was a real danger that if the Conservatives had won a substantial majority in this election, and pushed ahead with its manifesto commitments, we would be facing riots on the British streets, quite as nasty as those happening in Athens. How much this danger has been reduced by the coalition is still an open question.

If I wanted to give that double act a name, I would call them the Posh Boys. Clearly one of the reasons they get on so well personally is because they have very similar backgrounds, born with golden spoons in their mouths, happily married to rich women, educated at two of our finest public schools, followed by Oxbridge. They could not be farther removed from the realities of the working class poor.

When you look at the composition of the cabinet the class bias is quite as worrying. No less than 59% are privately educated, compared with 32 per cent in the last Labour government. And 69 per cent went to Oxbridge compared with 32 per cent. The gender ratio shows a small rise of two per cent to a still derisory 14 per cent. So fasten your seat belts we are in for five years of government by Posh Boys and the compassionate sex is no better placed at the cabinet table than the Lib Dems to plead on behalf of the poor. Even while I was writing, Cameron has announced that ministers will take a 5 per cent cut in their own salaries. A step in the right direction, but my God they can afford it.

At this point I should mention that although I have been offered a cheap low cost property in France I shall be emigrating to escape the rule of the Posh Boys.

Because I do not think either of the two top Posh Boys are power seeking opportunists, willing to abandon their principles to get to the top of the greasy pole.

Cameron right from the time he was bidding for the Conservative leadership has been emphasised that his two favourite British Prime Ministers, were Disreaeli and Macmillan. Disreali came from a Jewish immigrant family and fought his battles against that very powerful of the left wing, Gladstone. But it was Disreali’s Conservative government, which introduced the education acts that gave the British poor decent schooling. Macmillan, like Cameron was an Old Etonian who married a woman who was not only super rich but was daughter of the poshest of the posh, the Duke of Devonshire. But he was a relatively poor scholarship boy and as a man never forgot the poverty he had witnessed in the North East of England during the great depression of the 1930s. And it is also worth remembering that Cameron, unlike many Posh Boys is educating his children at state schools.

Clegg is on the right of his party on many, but not all issues. He is a rarity in British politics, in that he cut in his teeth not in British politics but in European politics. In 1994 he jacked in his first job as a journalist on the Financial Times and went to work for the European Commission. By 1999 he had decided he wanted to work in Europe, not as a civil servant, but as a politician. His then boss, Leon Brittain (a former Conservative cabinet minister, whom many of today’s Conservatives would regard as a left winger), tried to persuade him to give up his Liberal Democrat convictions and stand as a Conservative. Clegg stood firm, and in 1999, he started a five-year stint as a Lib Dem MEP. 

He did not come back to London until 2004. The following year he won the Sheffield Hallam seat for the Lib Dems. The new deputy prime minister, who will be taking questions whenever Cameron is not there, and the vast majority of those asking those questions will have many more years of experience in the House of Commons than  him. They will also know, that know that he has faced some very public resignations from Lib Dem activists in the constituencies, like many in the South West, where the enemy is the Conservative candidate, with Labour having no chance of winning.

But most of all Clegg knows. I have said a lot about Europe here, because that is key part of his core political position, that Britain must play an active part in the mainstream of European politics, so the biggest personal risk for him is joining with the Conservatives who are presently alligned with the right wing extremists in Europe. So I think he will continue to fight for fairer society for the under-priviledged as well as a more realistic approach to the Europe of which we are a part.

I have written at length about these top two Posh Boys, because there is lots of evidence that neither of them wants a New Thacherism. The arithmetic of the cabinet table makes very depressing reading for the working class poor. So much so, that they that they may well be considering either a painfree suicide or building up a stock of petrol bombs reader for the battle of the streets.

But arithmetic is not the only option. As I will argue in my next blog.