Pact Hunch | Standpoint

November 2012

The redrawing of parliamentary constituency boundaries, which would have given the Tories a boost of a dozen or more seats, has crashed into the buffers as the Liberal Democrats have exacted revenge for their failure to achieve Lords reform.

In consequence, Cameron needs not merely to close the opinion poll gap with Labour, but to build up a substantial overall lead to have any hope of forming a stable, Conservative majority government. The chances of the Tories winning by default, which looked possible as Ed Miliband took time to find his feet as leader of the opposition, have substantially diminished.

Cameron now needs to strike out and pursue a bold new strategy. In short, he should seek an electoral alliance with those members of the Liberal Democrats with whom he believes he could provide a fiscally sound and genuinely reforming second term in office. He would risk further alienating the wing of his party who are finding the Lib Dems an irritating drag on pursuing radical yet key supply-side reforms, but it's a risk he could and should take.

The arrangement he should seek with free market-leaning ("Orange Book") Lib Dem MPs should be unilateral but not universal. It would essentially amount to an offer to withdraw the Conservative candidate from those seats in which an incumbent Liberal was willing publicly to take a pledge to continue the work of the coalition beyond 2015, specifically in regard to swiftly completing the process of fiscal consolidation, preferably at a rather more rapid pace than at present.

This would not amount to a full-blown alliance and would allow the Lib Dems and Conservatives to continue to run on distinct and separate manifestos. It would differ from the "Coupon Election" of 1918, when supporters of the Liberal-Tory coalition led by Lloyd George were endorsed by the two party leaders with a "coupon" and did not stand against each other. However, individual Lib Dem MPs willing to state that they would seek, as a preference, to work with the Tories after the election to tackle the deficit and cap our national debt, would effectively be "couponed". Not every Lib Dem MP would be willing to make such a statement, but perhaps 20 or so would.