Options for David Cameron if there’s a hung parliament
David Cameron was just asked in Wakefield if he would consider working with the SNP and Plaid to get together some sort of working majority. He said he would do nothing that would put the UK at risk – it was, he said, “tattooed on him like a stick of rock.”
Leaving that image aside, the Nats would make very unhappy bed partners for David Cameron and very expensive ones.
The Democratic Unionists had some informal contacts with a friendly Conservative MP before dissolution. They are very much expecting David Cameron to give them a ring in the event of a hung parliament. They have some ideological overlap on areas like Europe and they have a track record of compiling eye-watering shopping lists. I understand that Peter Robinson and his deputy Nigel Dodds are working up another one.
Issues like the future of the Parades Commission they feel have been sorted but Northern Ireland, even with Stormont running devolved affairs, can easily throw up some sectarian issue that could put a Tory government dependent on DUP support on the spot.
The honest broker role that the Labour government would claim to have played could be very difficult under those circumstances. And a DUP deal could blow a hole through any claim to be administering cuts on a balanced fair basis across the UK.
As for the Lib Dems, they are following like hawks one key number in the extrapolations from opinion polls … how many seats short of a majority could David Cameron be? This will be the metric that we all start talking about unless the polls shift.
At what level of Commons support is David Cameron entitled to and capable of carrying on with a minority government? Is it 15 short of a majority? 20? Thereabouts, is what some senior Lib Dems say. (Last night’s Populus put him 36 seats short of a majority on the uniform swing number cruncher.)
Twenty shy, my Lib Dem sources say, and David Cameron could plough on with an informal arrangement with the Unionists. If David Cameron is more than 50 shy of a majority the Lib Dems feel that the British voters will have effectively forced them into a coalition.
In the grey area, David Cameron is 20 – 50 shy of a majority, they may have to contemplate some sort of supply and confidence support (in which you get limited concessions for limited support – only agreeing to back government in the Finance Bill and promising not to bring it down in a No Confidence vote).
All these numbers are completely thrown if Britain is in some Greek-style debt crisis – a possibility Lord Mandelson dismissed as “ridiculous” this morning.
In this brave new world it’s maybe not surprising that Nick Clegg has tripped himself up once or twice on the issue of whether he’d consider working with Labour. He said he wouldn’t do a deal with Labour if it came third, then said he wouldn’t do a deal with Gordon Brown if Labour came third then said he didn’t rule out doing a deal with Gordon Brown (presumably if he came first or second).
As one Lib Dem frontbencher put it to me, Nick Clegg was trying to close down the Tory argument “Vote Clegg Get Brown” but was unnecessarily closing down options and in danger of forgetting that hung parliament negotiations are an “auction” and “one bidder doesn’t get you a good price.”