Michael Crick's doing his cheeky trouble-maker thing this evening, suggesting that the Coalition was founded on a lie, since Cameron told his MPs that it was necessary to offer a referendum on AV to secure the Lib Dems as coalition partners because Labour was offering AV without a referendum, when this simply wasn't true. He's a bit unclear as to whether what happened was that the Lib Dems proposed the AV-without-referendum idea to Labour but was then rejected, or whether Gordon Brown offered this privately but then withdrew the offer well before the Conservatives made their counter-offer (a referendum on AV). Either way, he seems pretty confident that Cameron was not correct when he told MPs that Labour had an offer of AV without referendum on the table when the Conservative referendum offer was made.
Does any of this shock me? No. For at the time it was perfectly clear to anybody - e.g. as I argued here - that Clegg was bluffing, that there was no way the Labour Party would agree to ditch first past the post without a referendum and no way that any coalition between Labour and the Lib Dems would be agreed. It was never remotely a possibility. That's not because I had any privileged information or unusual insight. It was blatantly obvious, and I don't believe for a moment that it was anything other than blatantly obvious to Cameron and our negotiating team - many things they may be, but not complete fools. We didn't offer a referendum on AV because we were misled, and Cameron's saying that we needed to offer such a referendum or else the Lib Dems would go into coalition with Labour and get AV without a referendum was always obviously untrue - he must always have known that as clearly as I did. And though a few of our MPs might, as far as I know, be fools, most of them must also have known that it was not necessary to offer a referendum on AV for us to enter into government.
What could well have been true is that we needed the offer of a referendum on AV to secure a formal coalition agreement with the Lib Dems as opposed to our ruling as a minority government, with another election in the Autumn. That was why the AV referendum was offered - so that Cameron's advisory team would not need to face the music for having failed to secure a majority with the Party having a vigorous and open internal debate about strategy ahead of the autumn election with a clearer ConservativeHome-influenced platform (easily caricatured as "more right-wing") being the likely outcome. It was offered to avoid capture of the party by the ConservativeHome line from the Hilton-Letwin line. [And if, of course, you believed that mainstream Conservatism is unelectable and if offered to the voters would lead to electoral annihilation, such a shift to the right would have been a disaster for the Party. (That's obviously not a view I share...)]
The AV referendum was always clearly offered to secure formal coalition and thereby avoid a move to the right by the Party, rather than because it was required to avoid a Labour government and the introduction of AV anyway. Everyone has known that from the start.
