Conservative party

It must be Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau season at the Commons' film club. A string of odd political couples has stalked stages across the land this morning, supposedly pronouncing the merits or demerits of the alternative vote. David Cameron and John Reid were the oddest: the Prime Minister’s well-heeled insouciance contrasting with his lordship’s winking Glaswegian charm. It’s good fun, without being hugely constructive. Cameron and Reid joked that they agreed on nothing beyond FPTP, before embarking on a distended muse about party politics and that old canard 'Britishness'. Things were little better for Ed Miliband, who spent a large portion of his conference listening to Vince Cable explain why he wasn’t resigning from the government.

For weeks now, the genteel coalition has been getting grubbier. Today the Deputy Prime Minister cut loose and went into campaign mode as the leader of the Liberal Democrats. With both eyes on preserving his party’s loosening roots in local government, he assaulted (£) Conservative and Labour councils for cutting services. Clegg was not assisted by the more prominent Lib Dems in local government: the ubiquitous councillor Richard Kemp, the Lib Dems’ chief at the Local Government Association, asserted, almost with a note of relish, that the party is going to get a ‘kicking’. It probably will. But, as James argues, Clegg’s immediate concern after 5 May will be to ensure that the coalition returns to something approaching normality.

Vince Cable’s attack on the PM’s speech today is just the latest elbow to be thrown in what has been a fractious few weeks for the coalition. The immediate cause of these rows has been the need for the Lib Dems to assert their distinctiveness before the May elections and tensions over the AV referendum. The Lib Dems, who feel that their leader is being ‘swiftboated’ by the Tory-funded No campaign, have been increasingly assertive in the last month or so. But there are dangers to this strategy. For one thing, it has eroded trust within the coalition. Ministers are now not being frank with each other because they don't want what they say in private, turning up in the papers.

David Cameron’s Oxford gaffe is refusing to die down. Whenever I’ve called Tory MPs or other members of the Conservative family in the last few days, it has been the first subject they have wanted to raise. People are genuinely perplexed — and worried — as to why Cameron said what he said. As Pete pointed out earlier, Bruce Anderson — the commentator who is David Cameron’s longest standing media supporter — warns that the Prime Minister is fuelling fears of government encouraged discrimination against the middle classes. Another long standing Cameroon loyalist said to me earlier, that he now worried that Cameron just felt too guilty about his own upbringing to be an effective PM. I think these fears are, hugely, overblown.

Prisoner voting is back on the agenda. The European Court of Human Rights has rejected the British government’s appeal and declared that the coalition has six months to draw up proposals to change the law.   David Cameron now has to decide whether to ignore the Strasbourg Court or go against the will of his MPs, who voted overwhelmingly to oppose giving prisoners the vote in response to the court’s initial decision. In many ways, ignoring the court is the safer option. Tory MPs aren’t inclined to back down on this issue and if Cameron tried to make them he would create a lot of ill-will and take an awful kicking from the press.

The Vickers Review into the future of banking appears to have prevented a possible coalition row. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats have had different views on what to do about the banks, with the Lib Dems keener to break up the banks come what may and the Tories more worried about preserving the competitiveness of the City.   At the very start of the coalition there was a rather unseemly turf war between Cable and Osborne about who controlled policy on the banks, and many have expected a row to break out when he review reported. But, as we predicted on Coffee House back in February, the review has come up with a solution acceptable to both sides.