I meant to put this in my last post, but forgot. (See what an hour of Darling, Osborne and Cable does? It rots the brain, I tell you!)
Vince Cable was, as mentioned below, fairly pro-Labour in the Chancellors’ debate, but Labourites looking forward to a hung parliament shouldn’t be too excited about a Lib Dem coalition, nor should Lib Dems (and Vince) get too worked up about the prospect of St. Vince taking up his holy ministry in the Church of the Exchequer come the 7th of May. It’s well-known that Vince Cable is more pro-Labour than Nick Clegg, whose sympathies lie with the Cameroons…
In fact, these two personify the internal stresses of the Lib Dems that will stop them from forming a real coalition with either of the main parties. Vince Cable comes from the SDP wing of the party, and it’s clear from his points yesterday that he’s still very much the social democrat. He was after all a Labour member, and councillor in Glasgow for much of the 70′s. Joining the SDP in the early 80′s, he came to the Lib Dems through that route. Which explains his union-bashing last night, incidentally.
Clegg, on the other hand, has never been a Gang of Four-ite (and not only because he was too busy wondering what girls knickers looked like when they were betraying the Labour movement breaking away). In fact, it’s probable he was a Tory at University during the height of Thatcherism*. His sympathies lie far more with the pale blue Cameroons, and while he’s been keeping his options open, it’s pretty clear who he’d prefer to work with in the event of a hung parliament.
That said, Nick Clegg’s savvy enough to know that his party would implode if he led it into a formal coalition with the Tories, and would probably have some fairly serious internal difficulties if he joined a Labour Government. I don’t think it’s too out there to say the most either party’s going to get from the Lib Dems in the event of a hung parliament is confidence and supply.
Oh, and as a final note – if the Lib Dems did join a government, the most they’d reasonably get is one of the Great Offices of State. The obvious choice would be Cable at the Exchequer, but it’s hard to imagine the Lib Dems in Government, but Clegg on the back benches.
* Although he claims not to remember, and apparently the Cambridge Young Tories were the place to be for parties in the 80′s…
