No turning back for Clegg

There’s no turning back, Nick Clegg told Lib Dems today. You’ve chosen to be a party of government not a party of protest and you can’t become a “stop the world I want to get off” party. His other message on the economy also had a Thatcherite whiff: there is no alternative (though the coalition economic policy is packed with stabilisers and flexibility).

The fresh information in the speech is Nick Clegg telling George Osborne that he can whistle for it if he wants to bring top rate income tax down from 45p in this Parliament. As I understood it Mr Osborne had pretty well given up on doing anything on that front in this Parliament anyway and felt the 2012 budget change was at the very end of the window of opportunity for such a measure. It reminds you of the difficulty the Lib Dems could have finding big Tory items to trade for a mansion tax.

He told his party there was “no doubt” the electorate would reward the Lib Dems for securing the country’s future. But he doesn’t know that and the early signs are unpromising. Nick Clegg’s hope is that, come 2015, will hover their pencil over the ballot paper, not feel ready to trust Labour with their money and not trust Tories to make the country safer… at which point the pencil may be drawn to the Lib Dems.

Mr Clegg doesn’t feel he has the freedom to knock George Osborne or David Cameron so goes for the relatively soft target of ex-minister Liam Fox. By contrast, he repeatedly attacks Ed Balls, the architect of Labour economic policy – a more central player in his own party right now.

He’s done nothing to make himself look any more like the man who could lead the Lib Dems into a coalition government with Labour. He has done quite a bit to cement the idea of staying in government with the Tories up to 2015. He has helped to shore up the coalition. A question mark inevitably remains next to his own future.

There are leaders’ speeches to the party and to the country. This was to the party. A speech where the peroration alludes to Jo Grimond and David Steel is not aimed at the floating voters of the suburban swing seats. The immediate reaction amongst folk in the hall was that it left most of them with their sense of purpose reinforced. But their medium term political hopes for their party in 2015 were still quite nervous, as well they might be.

And the appointment of Paddy Ashdown as the election campaign organiser is a sharp signal to the party: he is Nick the leader’s appointment to help with Nick’s election campaign. This is Nick Clegg  saying: “You mess with me, you mess with Paddy,” (yet another) strong signal that Nick Clegg doesn’t intend to go anywhere before 2015.

And that even if some in the party think Nick Clegg hasn’t got what it takes to lead the Lib Dems in an equidistant stance in 2015, the old father of the “realignment of the left” project, Paddy Ashdown himself, thinks Mr Clegg can do it.

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