I've said we can win an outright majority, I've predicted that we will win an outright majority, and I stick by that. But since I'm not standing anywhere this time, I don't need to exercise the politician's resistance to answering hypothetical questions. So, let's daydream, entering an improbable parallel world, just for a moment, in which there were no-overall-control in Parliament. What then?
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Obviously it depends to a significant extent what the seats balance is. If the Conservatives are just short of an overall majority, it would obviously be appropriate to proceed with a minority administration. We wouldn't need to contemplate any deals with Clegg (which wouldn't be necessary, and almost certainly wouldn't be offered by him or accepted by us if he offered them).
But suppose that matters were much less happy than this, and the Conservatives were perhaps sixty seats short of an overall majority. A minority administration might well still be feasible, but might some alternative be worth contemplating?
Some senior Conservatives appear to be floating the idea that some deal with Clegg would become inevitable - perhaps a referendum on PR in which the Conservatives would be able to campaign against? Well, we certainly shouldn't be offering any such thing. But is there any realistic alternative that would not involve Clegg going in with Labour? That itself might not be so bad as you might imagine - Labour won't give him PR - but is certainly best avoided. But how?
Well, I don't see why (even setting aside suggestions of unholy alliances with the SNP) everyone seems to assume that the Lib Dems would be our most natural coalition partner under these circumstances. Do we really have anything more in common with the Lib Dems than we do with Labour? I'm not saying that the differences with Labour aren't large - even post-Blair and post-detoxification. But are they really larger than the differences between us and the Lib Dems? Most Labour members are adamantly anti-PR. Labour is a traditionally very Eurosceptic party, which happens to have some pro-Europeans at the top at the moment. Labour favours liberal interventionism in its global foreign policy. Labour favours nuclear power and is unambiguously in favour of retaining an independent nuclear deterrent. In these and many other areas, although our position is certainly different from Labour's, it is far from clear to me that we are more distant from Labour than from the Lib Dems.
Conservatives have entered into coalitions quite frequently in the past. Our classic model of doing so was to find some opportunity to form a coalition with our main governing rivals, and absorb them, entrenching our own governing position. In the early 1930s, we formed a coalition with the leadership of the Labour Party, under a Labour Party figurehead, inducing a split in the Labour Party which kept it out for fifteen years. In the late 1910s and early 1920s we had a coalition with the leadership of the Liberal Party, under a Liberal Party figurehead, which prefigured the collapse of the Liberal Party. In the late nineteenth Century we formed a coalition with the Liberal Unionists (indeed, we offered one of their leaders the premiership).
If we really need to form a coalition this time, why assume that the Lib Dems are our natural allies? More natural, more in keeping with policy similarities, and more in keeping with our own history, to favour senior Labour allies. The Labour Party will be finished after this Election anyway. Joining with us is probably the last chance a number of senior Labour Party leaders will have to hold high office. Mandelson for Foreign Secretary, perhaps? Could Darling expect to hold high office again except with us - might there be a vacancy at the Home Office? - He hasn't tried that one yet. Ed Miliband will presumably be Labour Leader, but if not, perhaps Defence Secretary? Or perhaps one of these three might find a beefed-up Employment Secretary role attractive, combatting and mitigating unemployment?
Two or three senior Labour figures, each of whom might carry five to ten other Labour MPs with them, in a national coalition to help negotiate the country's way through a time of crisis. Been there; done that; worked to the great political advantage of the Conservative Party.
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OK. That was all rather silly and isn't going to happen, because we are going to win a solid overall majority. But the point of that silliness was to challenge the idea that we need to proceed in the rest of the campaign "realistically", seeking and planning to make accommodation with Clegg. Clegg is not our only option even in the unlikely event of a hung Parliament - our best option would almost certainly be a minority administration. He's not even our only option if we were to need a coalition partner - our best option then would probably be some senior Labour figures.
