Driving back home I heard Radio 5 Live describe Gordon Brown's statement as "statesmanlike." I hadn't heard it at that stage, but of course it was nothing of the sort. As ever, Party calculation predominated. And by colluding in it and asking for talks, Clegg made himself vulnerable. Brown's resignation should not have made an iota of difference to LibDem calculations; his departure was inevitable. If the Lib Dems are seriously envisaging going into coalition with Labour (and also necessarily with the Scots Nats, Plaid, Green and...?) without knowing who Labour's next leader might be, and in the knowledge that whoever it is will be Labour's second unelected Prime Minister in a row, they should have been left to do so. The parliamentary arithmetic makes a coalition utterly impractical and unsustainable. It would have been old politics at its worst, and the best possible argument against any form of proportional representation. The markets would react ferociously. Parties of the left would have to engage seriously with making the cuts that their profligacy has necessitated, and take the necessary heat. There would be another election swiftly, and all involved in such a coalition of losers would sustain further heavy losses. And if they failed to cobble this unedifying coalition together they would have had to return to the Conservative table in a much weaker position. So the Conservatives should have called their bluff.
Instead we folded. There was absolutely no need to offer the LibDems a referendum on AV or any other form of electoral reform. To the limited extent that there is any public transparency in these negotiations, we know that the Conservatives had offered a committee on political reform, and the voting system was but one part of that. There are other important system reforms: constituency size; postal voting; Lords reform, fixed term parliaments, MP recall by voters, to name but a few. But, by offering a referendum on AV we have put proportional representation on the table, and it will now be very hard to take it off again. We have said for a long time that we believe that FPTP is in the national interest, even when it works against us. If we believe that we should defend it. It looks tonight like a principle too cheaply discarded. And it makes us look weak. I am rocked.
