Nick Clegg is wrong – the Lib Dems must never go into coalition again

Guess what was not mentioned once by Nick Clegg in his hour-long speech, his first since resigning from his job at Meta earlier this year?

The former Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister admitted to having made mistakes in general, but without naming any in particular.

He was proud of the record of the coalition government, he said, in a speech for the Institute for Government marking the 15th anniversary of the Downing Street rose garden event with David Cameron that launched it. It delivered economic growth, political stability and a responsible deficit reduction programme. He mentioned schools reform, green investment and “tax justice”, as well as same-sex marriage and, more controversially, the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, one of the worst pieces of legislation in modern constitutional history.

But there was one thing he didn’t mention. Nor was he asked about it, either after the speech or in his Today programme interview before it: the tripling of tuition fees.

It was an important omission, not in the ‘gotcha’ sense of mocking him for being embarrassed about it, although we can do that, too. It was important because tuition fees undermine his central argument.

The speech was not just a defence of the coalition government, but an argument in favour of coalition in principle. One of the purposes of the speech was to urge the Lib Dems to go into coalition again, if presented with the chance.

He was pushing against the conventional wisdom of his party. Most Lib Dems think they have learned the lesson of history. For them, the lesson of going into coalition with one of the large parties is: “Don’t do that again.”

Clegg disagreed. “I believed that political capital should be used, not hoarded,” he said. Asked specifically what he thought of deals to support a government that fell short of a coalition, he said: “I am sceptical of this ‘half-pregnant’ idea. Temperamentally, it’s not the way I think.”

He didn’t think it was right to be “half-in, half-out” at the time, but he implied that it would never be right. He said that when you have a chance to be in government, “just go for it”. He had no patience, he said, with the idea of carrying a Ming vase across a slippery floor, the analogy retailed by Roy Jenkins, one of the founders of the party.

Clegg presented himself as a person of destiny, serving the country not the party, interested only in doing the “best thing for the country”, even if it resulted in the destruction of his party at the 2015 election. Coalition was “totally the right thing to do”, he said – “not least because we’ve now seen the Lib Dems spring back to rude health”.

It is true that the party recovered dramatically at the last election, just nine years after Clegg reduced it to rubble, but that is hardly a good argument for demolishing it in the first place.

And it was the betrayal of their promise to oppose a rise in tuition fees that was largely responsible for the Lib Dems’ loss of support.

The problem for Clegg is that the Lib Dems didn’t need to take responsibility for the tuition fees decision. They certainly did not need to have a Lib Dem cabinet minister, Vince Cable, in charge of implementing it.

The Lib Dems could have supported a Tory government from the outside, issue by issue and vote by vote. Or they could have negotiated a core programme that they would support without becoming ministers.

Never mind country over party; Clegg gave the appearance of putting holding office over policy outcomes. In questions after his speech, he spoke with a touch of messianic zeal about meetings of the “quad” of two Tory and two Lib Dem ministers that was the engine of that government: “How oddly clarifying it is to sit in a room with people with whom you know you disagree. You are just trying to find that Venn diagram where you overlap.”

It was Clegg’s enthusiasm for being “all in” that trashed his party. Indeed, it was what allowed the tripling of tuition fees in the first place, and the early phase of so-called austerity. He admitted himself that George Osborne’s initial plan to cut the deficit was too ambitious, because he claims credit for softening it in 2012.

Clegg skates over the question of whether Labour, under a leader other than Gordon Brown, should have been given more of a chance to form a government in those five days in May 2010. But even if a Tory-led government was inevitable, the Lib Dems could have dealt with it differently.

An arm’s-length position of conditional support for Cameron as prime minister would have produced better policy outcomes from the point of view of most Lib Dems.

They are quite right to draw a different lesson from the history of that period from their former leader. For the Liberal Democrats, the lesson of the coalition years should be: “Never again.”