If Nick Clegg had any knowledge of British history, he'd know that Liberals always lose out in coalitions

By Nigel Jones for the Daily Mail

Published: 15:15 GMT, 11 July 2012 | Updated: 16:22 GMT, 11 July 2012

The complete collapse within two years of Nick Clegg's two most cherished political dreams - changing the way we vote and 'reforming' the House of Lords - should surprise no-one with a knowledge of British political history.

But since this subject is one of the many on which Clegg displays profound ignorance (despite his professing expertise in them)  the crumbling of his pet projects may have come as something of a nasty shock.

For even a cursory glance at the history of coalition government in Britain over the last century or so shows two things with startling clarity: that the junior partners in coalitions inevitably lose out (usually being swallowed up by their larger partner) and that those junior partners have always been the forerunners of Mr Clegg's own sorry political sect - the Liberals.

www.inulpoker.com | Agen Poker Terpercaya | Poker dan Domino Online Indonesia Terpercaya | Poker dan Domino Terbaik |

Losing out: Nick Clegg has so far failed to get two flagship policies passed into law

Back in 1895 Joseph Chamberlain, the dynamic leader of the social reforming wing of the Liberal party - then the dominant force in British politics - split his party and led his followers into co-operating with the Tories in protest at Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone's support for Irish Home Rule. Chamberlain combined progressive policies of 'municipal socialism' at home with ardent support for the British Empire abroad, and Gladstone's anti-imperialism was anathema to him.

Within a few years the inevitable happened: Chamberlain's 'Liberal Unionists' had been completely swallowed by the larger Conservatives  (which is why that party is still formally called 'the Conservative and Unionist party') and Chamberlain was serving in a Tory Cabinet as Colonial Secretary. So complete was the merger that Chamberlain's two sons, Austen and Neville, became Tory stalwarts, ending up as Conservative Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister respectively.

Split: Joseph Chamberlain (left) co-operated with the Tories against William Gladstone (right)

In 1916, in the midst of World War One, the Liberals split again. After a decade in Government, the radical 'Welsh wizard' David Lloyd George, overthrew his party chief, the sitting Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. Lloyd George became Prime Minister in a Tory-dominated coalition and, despite leading the nation to victory in the war and winning a landslide election after it, was himself overthrown by Tory backbench rebels in 1922. (Which is why the Tory backbench organisation is called 'the 1922 Committee').

This event marked the eclipse of the Liberals as a party of Government, and Asquith and Lloyd George were (to date) the last Liberal Prime Ministers. As they declined, to be replaced by Labour as the main party of the Left, the Liberals desperately embraced the 'alternative vote' system of PR to compensate for the electorate's falling out of love with them. They have been campaigning - indomitably but entirely ineffectually - for this ever since.

Overthrown: David Lloyd George (right) unseated Herbert Asquith (left) as Prime Minister in 1916

The onset of the Great Depression in 1931 saw the formation of an all-party 'National Government' coalition - again dominated by the Tories, with support from a rump of Labour leaders, and an even smaller faction of Liberals (who had split yet again, this time not into two but no fewer than three factions led respectively by Lloyd George, Sir John Simon and Sir Herbert Samuel).

What was left of the Liberals joined Winston Churchill's wartime Coalition in 1940, largely because the then party leader, Sir Archibald Sinclair, was a crony of Churchill's who had fought alongside the great man in the trenches. (Sinclair's grandson, the extravagently mustachioed John Thurso, is an MP in Clegg's current  barmy army of Liberal Democrats - a rare link with his party's illustrious and aristocratic past).

After World War Two the poor old Liberals were a shadow of their former selves. At their lowest ebb the once great party were reduced to just six MPs, leading to cruel quips that party meetings could be held in a London taxi cab - or even a phone box. Then in the 1980s Labour rode to the rescue by moving so far to the Left that moderates quit to form the Social Democratic Party, leading to a merger with the Liberals and the birth of today's Liberal Democrats.

Though the then party leader David Steel told his members to 'Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government' power remained as tantalisingly elusive as ever.

Breakaway: Liberal David Steel and Labour's David Owen at the SDP party conference

The Liberals had foolishly lent their support to the dying Labour Government of James Callaghan in the late 1970s without being allowed a taste of office. The ludicrously vain and pompous (yes, it's a Liberal tradition) party leader Paddy Ashdown allowed himself to be romanced by Tony Blair with the mirage of another coalition before Labour's landslide win in 1997 made that redundant, and Paddy was dropped like the proverbial hot potato.

By this time, after almost a century in the wilderness, the Liberals were so hungry to get their backsides on the seats of Ministerial limos that they would have made a coalition with Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge if that had been the price for a slice of power. That this proved unnecessary was down to David Cameron, who managed the difficult feat of being unable to beat Gordon Brown - arguably the most inept and unpopular Premier in British history - in the 2010 election.

Romanced: As Labour leader, Tony Blair (right) pushed for a merger with Paddy Ashdown's (left) Liberal Democrats

And so the current coalition was born out of desperation crossed with disappointment. Led by two public schoolboys with outsize egos and little experience of life outside politics, we should not really have expected miracles. Yet the level of ineptitude demonstrated by this Pantomime Horse of a coalition made up of two rear ends has shocked even those who feared the worse.To mix my metaphors: Clegg twice made a splendid effort to get the tail of his little yellow dog to wag the rather bigger blue Tory hound, but now the  hound has rounded on him and chewed him into little pieces. If only he had studied the history of his own party and its disastrous record of coalitions he would at least have been warned.

Comparing the giants Gladstone and Chamberlain with the pygmies Cameron and Clegg may be absurd, but it does show the steep descent from the sublime to the ridiculous that Britain has travelled over the last century. To paraphrase that old fraud Karl Marx, it is a history of a tragedy becoming a farce. Yet few are laughing.

var rcShoutCache = '{}'; window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({flush:true}); DM.later('bundle', function(){ if (window.ArticlePage) { new ArticlePage(); } });

www.inulpoker.com | Agen Poker Terpercaya | Poker dan Domino Online Indonesia Terpercaya | Poker dan Domino Terbaik |