2012: The Three Leaders

Of the three main party leaders, Cameron has ended 2011 on an unexpected high. He has had a difficult year dogged by judgment questions, made HD by his misplaced loyalty to Coulson and his slow reaction when phone hacking went viral. Libya could have been a disaster, but for the time being appears a success. Nevertheless there lingered the feeling that the Prime Minister had over Gaddafi been lucky rather than smart. On came the Euro crisis. This played into his euro-sceptic hands. Even an eye-catching backbench rebellion over the demand for a futile referendum did not have anything like the impact commentators expected and Labour devoutly wished.

Then came that veto in the middle of the night. This was Cameron’s Falklands moment. The French fumed and said nasty things. The intelligentsia tut tutted. Clegg first said yes and then no. But the crowds were wowed. Anti EU feeling among voters is at an all time high. They are fed up with petty regulations of the kind continentals love and ignore, while we dutifully write them in to every bit of health and safety, employment and human rights legislation. Especially now they are fed up with the fact that the UK recovery is about to be derailed by political ineptitude in the eurozone. Cameron has at last established himself as the national leader significantly preferred by voters. The polls are moving to the Tories.

Nick Clegg has had a baptism of continuous fire which is still going on. He struggles hard to hold his party on the right side of panic and works doggedly to spin the idea that the Lib Dems stop the Tories being nasty. He has indeed held a much retreated line and his Lib Dem colleagues mostly have good reputations as competent ministers. He has three big problems nevertheless. His party is pro Europe when the majority of the country is anti. The two main parties now dominate political debate, with the addition of the Nationalists in Scotland. Fewer and fewer see the need for the Lib Dems. This was born out by the wholesale rejection of AV, which was in a sense a rejection of third party meddling. But worst of all there is the memory of the most spectacularly broken promise in post WWII political history. Tuition fees. That wiped out a whole generation a Lib Dem voters. At present it is impossible not to see more losses in council elections and an eventual return to a couple of taxi loads of MPs. Nick will retain his place in history and go on to become one of the political wise men called in by the Today programme or BBC News 24. But after the next election a lot of unexpected events will have to move his way if his party is to have any sort of chance of remaining in government.

As for Ed Milliband, there is little to say. He is not up to the job and this is a great disappointment. The trouble for Labour is that for too long it was dominated by the scrapping Brown and Blair and then became obsessed with not one Milliband but two. There is now little talent on the Labour front bench, a bit like the post Thatcher Tories. Only one has the ability and she is the one who would not step forward; Harriet Harman. She may yet be called. There is something Merkel about her.

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