Quietly, David Cameron is warming to Nick Clegg’s proposed plans for voting reform — even though it could bind the two parties together for a decade or more. James Forsyth on a Tory gamble that dares not speak its name
On the Monday after the election, David Cameron summoned his front bench for not one but two meetings as he frantically tried to put together a government. In the second one, he asked them for their support in offering the Liberal Democrats a referendum on electoral reform. The Tory party has long stood against this. It believed that any move away from first-past-the-post would be bad for the country and for the party; that it would lead to a string of mushy centrist governments and backroom deals between politicians that shut out the electorate. But the sense of the meeting was that this referendum was a necessary evil.
How much things have changed in two months. When David Cameron and Nick Clegg walked in to the Spectator summer party together last week, they looked like brothers in arms. They seemed more relaxed in each other’s company than politicians from the same party normally are. Both were careful not to take champagne, but they had something to toast: they had just agreed that, subject to MPs’ approval, the referendum on voting reform would take place next May. Strikingly, several of those around Cameron are beginning to think that it would be good for the Tory party if Clegg’s side triumphed in the referendum.
There has been no official change of Tory policy. David Cameron will still campaign against Alternative Voting (AV), a system which asks voters to list candidates in order of preference. But, behind the scenes, an extraordinary change in attitude is underway. Oliver Letwin, one of Cameron’s closest allies, has even been making the case for AV to people in private.
This newfound interest in AV reflects a belief that British politics can be realigned with a Liberal-Conservative alliance at its centre. Rather than planning to ditch Mr Clegg at their earliest convenience, many of those closest to Cameron want the pair to walk into the sunset together.
Ever since the coalition formed, Liberal Democrats have whispered in Tory ears that they had no need to fear AV any more. That after five years of governing together, it will be natural for Liberal Democrats to put the Tories as their second choice and vice-versa. By 2015, they purred, AV could be working to both parties’ advantage with the only victims being Labour. The Spectator commissioned the first opinion poll since the election to test this thesis. It found that the Lib Dems are right.
In an AV system, the MP with the fewest votes — say, Ukip — would be eliminated first and their second preference votes given to the other candidates. This process keeps going until one candidate has more than half of votes cast. In 1998, the Jenkins Commission calculated that the unspoken Lib Dem-Labour alliance would crush the Tories, giving them a sixth of the seats on a third of the votes.
Just before this year’s general election, YouGov asked Lib Dem voters who their second preference vote might go to. Labour picked up far more of these votes than the Tories — 42 per cent to 27 per cent. But in a YouGov poll for The Spectator, carried out earlier this week, the figures had changed. The Lib Dem second preferences are now splitting evenly between the two parties, meaning that Labour gains no advantage from voting reform in Labour-Tory contests. AV is, for now, no longer an anti-Tory device.
Just as importantly, our poll shows that Mr Cameron would still fail to win a majority under the existing system. Under AV, the Tories would win 309 seats — 17 short of a majority, and Labour’s 273 MPs would not leave it within striking distance of power. With this result, a Tory-Lib Dem coalition would be the only possible combination that could command a majority: a second term would have been secured for the coalition. Factor in the proposed boundary changes accompanying the reduction in the number of MPs, and one can even come up with a scenario where AV gives the Tories an absolute majority once again.
Our poll tallies with what those inside Downing Street are thinking. One source told me that AV combined with the other reforms would be, at worst, neutral for the Tories in terms of seats. Furthermore, as I was told with a certain excitement, the party ‘could actually gain’. This was all, though, prefaced by a line that the party’s official position had not changed. Although, one Tory MP tells me that before the 2005 election, Cameron asked him plaintively if he thought the party could ever win under the current system; suggesting that he is less of a fan of the status quo than is generally believed.
To those around Cameron, this Liberal Democrat siren song is extremely appealing. It suggests that their leader’s decision to make a ‘big, comprehensive offer’ to the Liberal Democrats really has succeeded in realigning politics. That the last election represented not so much a failure to win a majority as a transition to a new kind of politics where voters expect the parties to be able to work together. In the past two months, Mr Cameron has shown himself to be both the author and master of this new era. Winning more support than Labour among Liberal Democrats, as our poll suggests the Tories are close to doing, is the ultimate proof that the brand had been detoxified and that the coalition had worked.
It also solves several headaches about how to fight the next election. May 2015 might seem a long way off. But how the coalition partners navigate this campaign is a topic that appears with amazing regularity in conversation with the Cameroons. Having embraced the Lib Dems so tightly, having love-bombed them in government as well as opposition, how would Mr Cameron fight his deputy in the next set of televised leaders’ debates? Would he all of a sudden disagree with Nick?
The coalition love-in is so intense that it almost pains them to think that, before too long, they will be at war again. As one Downing Street source said to me of the photo of Cameron, Clegg, George Osborne and Danny Alexander going through the Budget together, ‘they are all so young they could govern Britain together for a generation’. But a merger, or even an electoral pact, would cause revolt among the membership of both parties.
The AV system neatly solves this problem. Cameron could declare that his second preference vote would go to the Liberal Democrats — allowing him to fight them and support them at the same time. If Clegg reciprocated, then the two parties would — in effect — be running as a coalition while contesting every seat. They would be political ‘frenemies’, forming an election axis that would make it more difficult for Mr Clegg to switch his allegiance to Labour after polling day. It is a recipe not so much for a merger, but for a permanent Liberal Conservative coalition.
Successful Tory leaders would have to meet with Liberal Democrat approval. The Thatcher government won because it represented a stark, radical change from the failed consensus to which her predecessor, Edward Heath, had succumbed. Her style of government was to advocate an agenda, and attempt to win around supporters rather than walk towards the centre. Old Testament prophets, she said, did not say ‘Brothers, I want consensus’. She used to tell her underlings — ‘if they don’t vote for you, it doesn’t matter how much they don’t like you’.
But under the AV system, it matters very much what people who don’t vote for you think. The outcome of each constituency election would be decided on precisely these grounds. So a Tory party intent on victory would choose, as its leader, someone who would not offend. Under AV it is hard to imagine the Tories picking a Thatcher-style figure. The system would marginalise the Tory r ight. And there are, of course, plenty in the Tory party who believe this would be no bad thing.
This is why Mr Cameron must be careful. There are already suspicions that he enjoys the company of Liberal Democrats more than he does that of his own party members. Mr Cameron is hardly the first Tory leader not to love the grassroots: Eden was lukewarm to the party in the wider country, while Macmillan and Heath actively loathed it. But none was acquiescing in the introduction of a voting system which threatens to lock the Conservative party into a mushy middle ground. Not, of course, that the Cameron leadership would describe AV in such a way.
By no means all the Tory opposition for voting reform comes from those nostalgic for the Thatcher era. Many fear that the Cameroons are, once again, confusing tactics with strategy and have not thought through the wider implications. One frontbencher tells me that the opportunity to vote Ukip as a first preference, knowing that a second vote can go to the Tories, could see the party get 20 per cent of the first preference votes, as people vote with their conscience first, and their head second. It would expose, he contends, how many Tories support the party not out of any great love but because it was the only party on the right to have a chance of winning.
There’s no polling evidence to support this assertion. Yet. But it is possible that a large number of voters — on all sides — would cast a protest vote if they knew that it wouldn’t damage the chances of their candidate winning eventually. What this would do to the legitimacy of any Tory victory under AV is another question. What wvould the public think of a party that didn’t get the most first preference votes forming a government?
In this way, what seems to be a minor tweaking of the Westminster voting system could change our politics forever. For generations, the firm-but-unfair Westminster system of first past the post has created decisive governments for good or for ill. It has shaped the politics in every constituency: in every seat, you only need more votes than any other party to win. This has created a situation where a leader who has no desire to be popular with most of the people most of the time can still win — and win big.
Under AV this would be history. The emphasis would be on consensus. The second preference vote would be the swing vote: it would provide the stranglehold on our politics that the marginal seat currently does. Polls like ours, which seek to divine the second preference of Liberal Democrat voters, would come to define British elections. And this, to the opponents of AV, is the nightmare. They fear that it is a system, as Churchill once put it, of ‘the most worthless votes for the most worthless candidates’. It would lead to the three main parties picking a series of milquetoast leaders whose main quality is that no one feels strongly enough about them to vote against them.
That there is such a thing as a Tory case for AV shows how dramatically politics has altered in the past few months — fuelling the idea of a political realignment where a Con-Lib deal is the new normal. But the speed of this transformation is what should temper any Tory enthusiasm for a brave new electoral system. If the weather were to turn again, the Tories would find themselves running into a headwind of their own making.
YouGov interviewed 2,210 people between 5 and 6 July. More details at spectator.co.uk/av.