Clegg's Telegraph interview shows commitment to Cameron - and anger at Labour

By Paul Goodman

The Daily Telegraph today projects on to its front page Nick Clegg's support for a graduate tax.  That Clegg should back either his own party's view in opposition or Vince Cable's view in government is scarcely surprising.  It looks increasingly as though the Government's student funding solution will be a compromise between the Coalition partners' positions, as apparently briefed out recently to Matthew D'Ancona: higher tuition fees plus a graduate levy.  Such a scheme would build yet further disincentives into the tax system to work, earn and prosper.

The Deputy Prime Minister's recently pushed the Liberal Democrat boat out on Trident and tax avoidance.  Now he's done so on student funding.  Tim and I have written before about how the Government's being tugged from its left by the Liberal Democrats - postulating Montgomerie's Law of the Coalition and Goodman's Coalition Dilemma.  Some see Clegg as a bland bumbler - pointing to his apparent inability to grasp that one can't make a statement from the Government front bench in a personal capacity (let alone about the legality or otherwise of the most controversial British war in modern times).

But I think that, for most of the time at least, the Deputy Prime Minister knows what he's up to in these interviews and at these press conferences.  True, he looks startled by his vertiginous transformation to Deputy Prime Minister - as though he can't quite believe that the Liberal Democrats have at last made it back into government.  Richard Littlejohn recently captured this aspect of Clegg, presenting him as Adrian Mole.  None the less, have a squint at those three issues again: student funding, tax avoidance, Trident.  What have they got in common?

Answer: the Liberal Democrat position on all three is specifically protected in the Coalition Agreement.  In the case of Trident, it says that the Liberal Democrats "will continue to make the case for alternatives"; on student funding, that if Lord Browne's report comes up with a solution that the party doesn't like, "arrangements will be made to enable Liberal Democrat MPs to abstain in any vote".  On tax avoidance, the document says that the Government will "make every effort to tackle tax avoidance, including detailed development of Liberal Democrat proposals".

Sure, the stresses and strains within the Coalition are real enough.  But a certain amount of what's acted out by Clegg's party in public is a carefully-crafted attempt to prove - as its ratings plummet in the polls -  that it's got an independent mind and an important voice.  The move of course has David Cameron's endorsement: if you doubt it, read accounts of the recent "political Cabinet" at Chequers, where ways of supporting the Liberal Democrats were chewed over.

That's why I suspect that the most significant part of the Deputy Prime Minister's interview this morning isn't captured by the Telegraph's headline, and why it's worth reading the interview in full.  Mary Riddell, who carried it out, claims that he embarks "on one of the most bitter diatribes ever issued by a senior politician against another party and its would-be leaders".

He says -

“The Labour Party has become consumed by collective bile towards ... the Liberal Democrats. That portrays a rather nasty arrogance. They can’t believe that [we] could have done anything but fall into line with them. I get the impression, listening to the juvenile vitriol of the leadership candidates, that they can’t believe the Liberal Democrats decided to make up their own minds. I just think their leadership contest has been very dull and very dispiriting. You get the impression that none of them is up to the task of asking what’s happened to them as a party and to Britain. They seem strangely conservative, if I dare say it.”

Riddell's over-egging the pudding: after all, she's an interview to push.  None the less, she's on to something in highlighting Clegg's dislike of Labour.  After all, Clegg keeps moving away from the traditional Liberal Democrat insistence on electoral reform as a condition for government.  Here he is again this morning -

"I didn’t become leader to transform the Liberal Democrats into an enlarged form of the Electoral Reform Society," he says.  "It’s not the be all and end all for us...Of course [losing an AV referendum] wouldn’t be the end of the world. If the people say 'No’, I’m not going to throw my teddies out of the pram."

In other words, he's in the Coalition for better or worse, for richer or poorer.  It's easy to imagine the Liberal Democrats in coalition with Labour.  But it's becoming harder by the day to picture them doing so with Nick Clegg in tow.