Politics: it’s one big party

As Churchill put it, “Democracy is the very worst form of government — except for all those others that have been tried”.

For a political junkie like me, the last few weeks have been one big party, and that’s what we seem to have ended up with.

Looking back, not much happened during the 3 weeks of the election campaign. An elderly lady in Rochdale was described as a bigot, and this became national news for several days. A cynic might say that the discovery of an elderly lady in Rochdale who could be described as not a bigot, would have been more newsworthy. But of course, I am not a cynic.

Our first ever live televised leadership debates were disappointingly dull. No gaffes or fist-fights. The best we could prise from them was a bit of unintended humour. “I agree with Nick” became an instant catch-phrase, a joke that must have worn very thin, very quickly, for Nicks across the nation.

Eventually, the electorate spoke, but no one could understand what we were saying. Every pundit had a different translation: the Tories won, the Tories lost. No one won, no one lost. They all lost. The electorate won, the electorate lost. We didn’t even have the vocabulary to describe the result.

The newspapers snarled and barked like a pack of wounded, frightened dogs. Mortified by the voters’ failure to follow the script that had been so painstakingly prepared for them, they howled and raged, and snapped at anyone who wandered past the gate. Instead of settling down to a victorious Tory banquet, they had nothing but a dog’s dinner. To continue the canine theme, the giddy little Lib Dem tail was wagging the imperious Tory hound. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown was apparently clinging to power, squatting in Downing Street. Even their own political pin-up, Cameron, was lambasted for failing to kick away the stick of this one-eyed tyrant. Rarely has any man been so savagely vilified, and still they couldn’t get rid of him.

For the first time in decades, the election went into extra time, then penalties, as Labour and the Tories took it in turns to score enough policy own goals to win the trophy of Lib Dem collaboration. With my political anorak tightly zipped and hooded and double-knotted, I watched in awe.

We all know the result. In something equating to the open-top bus parade, Dave Cameron flaunted his prize in the Downing Street rose garden the next day. As a grinning Nick looked on, he brandished a sheaf of documents and promised us something called “new politics”.

Was this the same Nick Clegg who announced before the election that there would be “no backroom deals with other parties”?

But this was just a warm-up act in the great festival of back-tracking that followed. We now have the Lib Dems supporting the £6 billion of cuts they had so passionately denounced. Trident isn’t so bad after all. Nuclear power? Bring it on!

Likewise, the Tories’ much-trumpeted plans to cut inheritance tax, to curb the power of the EU, and to scrap the Human Rights Act have vanished in a puff of coalition smoke.

Can “new politics” survive the scorn of the scribblers, and the party conference season? I hope it can. One of the benefits of the digital age is seeing the self-elected loud-mouthed agitators of Fleet Street on the wane. The election result suggests that no one is listening to them anymore.

The party conferences are likely to include some unscheduled pyrotechnics, but the leaders will be armed with heavy duty fire extinguishers. The rank and file of the victorious parties — and particularly the Lib Dems — seem to be in some sort of silent, post-coital repose. Can this last? Surely it won’t be long before the loud bleating appears from the back of the flock. The dilemma faced by Lib Dem and Tory malcontents is that they will have to propose some alternative course of action, and there doesn’t seem to be one. They may be doing something they don’t like, but the other options are worse.

Do I sound dubious? I don’t mean to. I rather like all this. Even though it was an arranged marriage, I’m hopeful that the parties will learn to get along, and manage to produce something radical and popular. I voted Lib Dem, and have been a long-time opponent of Conservative thinking, but even I’m hopeful that the Tories with a few sharp edges knocked off will be acceptable. Cameron is a good performer. If he can maintain the Blairesque sense of persuasive self-confidence, but unlike Blair, do more than talk a good game, and actually deliver beneficial change, we might be onto something with this new politics thing.

Outside the political activist class, most people find political intransigence foolish, exasperating and counter-productive. I’ve always thought concrete political principle to be a rather over-rated virtue, especially when it sinks its unretractable teeth into individual policies. If it takes an indecisive election to crush their collective nuts, then let’s have more of them.

Someone once said, “If democracy was such a good idea, we’d have tried it by now”. Who knows? Perhaps we are about to.