Britain has had a Conservative prime minister for the past 13 years, but a majority Conservative government for less than half that time. David Cameron spent his first term in Downing Street at the head of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Theresa May spent two years propped up by Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists.
Now the results of last week’s local elections, or rather their extrapolation to project a hung parliament after the next general election, has provoked speculation by Conservatives (and their press cheerleaders) about the deals that Sir Keir Starmer might strike in order to form a government, as if that would be an impediment to stable administration – a “coalition of chaos”.
This whole argument is desperate and dishonest. In reality, even single-party governments are coalitions of a kind. The majority that Boris Johnson won in 2019 was facilitated by the Brexit party, which didn’t stand candidates against many sitting Tory MPs. As a consequence, Rishi Sunak currently leads a de facto coalition of hardline Brexit nationalists and more traditional Tories.
If Sir Keir becomes prime minister after the next general election, he will have to manage rival demands and priorities reflected by MPs from various factions of his own party. Managing those competing interests will be a challenge, but not an unusual one. This is how politics has always worked.
In the event that Labour needs Lib Dem MPs to legislate – and some analysis of last week’s elections suggest Sir Keir will fall just short of a majority – a different set of calculations will come into play, but this, too, should be uncontroversial. It is not even news until it happens.
Premature speculation about coalitions is stoked by Conservatives who want to amplify doubts that Labour can win a majority, in the hope of diminishing the opposition leader’s authority. This is also meant to distract from the more salient fact about last week’s elections, namely the Tories’ dire performance and the mounting evidence of Mr Sunak’s failure to rehabilitate his party’s brand.
Results that Conservatives depict implausibly as a disappointment for Labour are more eloquent in expressing a uniform swing to whichever candidate is best placed to evict Conservative MPs.
The spectre of chaos under a coalition has diminished potency in the light of the chaos the Tories have managed to create with a substantial Commons majority. In a formal coalition, their government was manifestly more stable.
Most European democracies have coalitions as a normal feature of their governing repertoire. The idea of politicians from different parties collaborating is not inherently awful, nor does it have to imply ideological apostasy and betrayal of voters. Likewise, the belief that stability is guaranteed by a decisive result in a winner-takes-all election is a myth, refuted by a glance at recent British politics.
The Tories are scaremongering about coalitions because they are too toxic for any partnership. The prospect of deals between parties is not a hazard for British democracy, but it is a threat to Mr Sunak’s tenure in Downing Street. Instead of posing endless hypothetical questions about parliamentary arithmetic in an election that has yet to be called, the prime minister’s supporters might more usefully address the reasons why so many people keenly await that poll as an opportunity to remove the Conservatives from office.