How should we judge Clegg's eventful year?
Though he's easy to vilify, the deputy prime minister warrants some applause for showing that a coalition government can work
The fashionable view in Westminster is that Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats have been ruined by coalition with the Conservatives. But all fashions change and few are replaced as routinely as the conventional wisdom at Westminster.
The case for Lib Dem doom is easy to make. The party's poll ratings are in a slump, flirting with single figures. For Mr Clegg, the decline has been uniquely precipitous given the sudden surge of popularity he enjoyed exactly a year ago, after his appearance in the first televised general election leaders' debate. He compressed into months a trajectory that most leaders take years to complete, from trusted herald of a better kind of politics to reviled emblem of everything rotten in the system. Such a public demotion is undoubtedly dramatic, but is it fair?
The journey from hero to villain might have been inevitable, but it was accelerated by the Lib Dems' support for a rise in university tuition fees, reversing a crystal-clear campaign pledge. The U-turn damaged Mr Clegg far more than is usual for a routine manoeuvre in politics. There are two main reasons.
First, Mr Clegg's popularity was built on the offer of "new politics" and "no more broken promises". The Lib Dem leader gave the impression that his participation in government would act as a kind of moral tonic. His popularity soared when people thought he might not be like other politicians; inevitably, it crashed when they discovered he was. He exacerbated his woes by continuing to address the camera with earnest piety long after the audience had dismissed it as an act.
Second, the Lib Dems' participation in government made Mr Clegg a target for tribal resentment on both ends of the political spectrum. On the left, there was a sense of betrayal, expressing the lazy old idea that the Lib Dems are duty-bound by history to ally themselves with Labour. On the right, there was deep irritation at the Conservatives' failure to win an outright majority in the most auspicious electoral conditions imaginable. David Cameron's willingness to coalesce with Mr Clegg reinforced doubts among some Tories about their own leader's ideological purity.
The Lib Dem leader has become a scapegoat for the private disappointments and mistakes of other parties while suffering very publicly for his own. His fall from grace has been met by some MPs and sections of the media with cruel relish. The Clegg-baiting circus has not encouraged a dispassionate account of his party's record over the past year.
The Lib Dems are a serious force in government. That statement would have sounded implausible two years ago. When the coalition was formed, the old habits of dismissing Lib Dem capability led many to presume their ministers would serve only as window dressing. In fact, their influence is pervasive, as many Conservatives bitterly acknowledge.
That irritation is caused in part by Mr Cameron using coalition as an excuse to jettison or change orthodox Conservative policies that proved impractical in government. Tory hostility towards the European Union has been softened; the party's manifesto pledge to scrap the Human Rights Act has effectively been dropped; rigid anti-immigration measures have been amended to accommodate the economic realities of the labour market.
Liberal tendencies in Tory thinking have also been empowered, chiefly at the Justice Department, where Ken Clarke's "rehabilitation revolution" has given him honorary Lib Dem status.
Pressure to make allowances for the Lib Dems is felt in every department in a process that the junior coalition partner likes to present as improvements and the senior partner sees as meddling, or sometimes sabotage. In compensation for their suffering over tuition fees, the Lib Dems won the right to bully universities into recruiting more state school students. They have diluted cuts to welfare and, trading on public outrage, helped salvage some sixth-form student grants. They have been instrumental in forcing a rethink of controversial NHS reform plans.
Meanwhile, Lib Dem MPs point disoriented and demoralised members to aspects of their own programme that are already enacted. There is a "pupil premium" that diverts money to schools that teach children from the poorest families – albeit from dwindling budgets. A decision on renewing Trident has been deferred. There is a referendum on electoral reform. A freedom bill is being passed that undoes some of the offences against civil liberties perpetrated by the last government.
One of the defining features in last month's budget – raising the tax threshold for low earners – was the enactment of a Lib Dem manifesto commitment. But it is hard for the Lib Dems to wring much credit out of their contribution to the budget when so much political debate is framed by much broader questions about the government's economic strategy.
Therein lies Mr Clegg's biggest problem. Whatever else his party is doing in government, it has signed up to the Conservatives' controversial and risky fiscal strategy. In the short to medium term, most people's experience of change in Britain will be conditioned by cuts to public services, higher taxes, stagnant wages and, quite probably, rising unemployment. In such a climate, the impact of supposedly palliative measures conceded to the Lib Dems will hardly register.
If critics of George Osborne's aggressive deficit-reduction timetable are proved right, and the strategy results in a slump, Mr Clegg will go down in history as the man who gave the Tories the parliamentary ammunition they needed to assassinate the economy. In that case, the forecasts of electoral oblivion will probably be realised and deserved.
If, however, Mr Osborne's gamble pays off and growth bounces back, the chancellor will want to hog the electoral spoils. Mr Clegg might wrestle away some credit for having shared the burden of responsibility and for "making tough choices". But he will still need to find a whole new way of selling his party to the country. The idiom of "new politics" is no longer available.
In swapping nebulous opposition for hard power, the Lib Dems paid a heavy price in integrity. They draw some comfort from the growing tally of things they can claim to have done with that power. Not least is demonstrating that coalition can be an effective and stable form of government, in defiance of predictions that it was a certain recipe for disaster and alien to our indigenous political culture.
That is a substantial shift in British politics and a healthy one. The Lib Dems are building a claim to have authored many other changes in policy and society. Only time can prove the significance of those changes. But for all his mistakes, Mr Clegg has surely earned the right to make the case, in due course, that some of them are for the better.
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