Can Any Deal Last?

As the horse-trading between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat teams continues in rooms at the cabinet office the whole country seems to be waiting with baited breath. I still have little idea of who precisely is talking to whom, nevertheless it is clear that any deal done, if indeed a deal is concluded, will have to sold very carefully to the respective party faithful.

When the proposed Rainbow Coalition between Plaid, the Welsh Conservatives and the Welsh Liberal Democrats was being negotiated by the three party teams after the Welsh Assembly elections of 2007, I was among many Welsh Liberal Democrat Party members who opposed the deal.

Fundamentally, I didn’t think the deal was good enough for the Welsh Liberal Democrats, nor did I think that there was anything like sufficient common ground between the respective ideologies of the three quite disparate parties but crucially, I felt that both Plaid and the Welsh Conservatives were more concerned to grasp power at any cost than they were to ensure the good governance of Wales under a decidedly unsympathetic New Labour government at Westminster. In the event, a hastily called special conference of the Welsh Liberal Democrats held at the Metropole in Llandrindod eventually endorsed the proposed deal but by then Ieuan Wyn Jones had jumped into the arms of Rhodri Morgan and the rest is history.

What is there to be learned from that particular experience? For me, it is that negotiating teams tasked with hammering out such deals are working in a bubble, they work extremely hard and with the noblest of intentions and I am sure, they genuinely believe in the worth of the outcome they finally propose. However to my mind the process starts in the wrong place. It is predicated on the minutiae of what is contained in the manifestos on which the parties have just fought the election and what is contained in these manifestos is merely a snapshot of those issues which the parties felt were important at that particular point in time. However, it is quite likely that where a superficial comparison of individual clauses of particular manifestos suggests some common ground between the parties, put into the context and the experience of the actual campaign and the feedback from the electorate during it, no such common ground actually exists. Not only that, during the campaigns other parties will have spun what is contained in a particular manifesto for their own advantage and in so doing, they may have so exaggerated the differences between their positions on issues that they now find impossible to close and compromise is simply no longer possible.

The most difficult task that any negotiating team faces is that of selling the compromise to their members, and the most vocal members are likely to be the activists who are already wound up from four weeks of campaigning and countering their opponents ‘dirty tricks’ real or imagined, and have little appetite for compromise at this particular moment. It is very tricky and not everyone will be satisfied whatever the outcome. The selling of the deal is likely to be more difficult for the Cameron Team than for the Clegg Team, because there is considerable doubt about how united the Conservative Party currently is. Just as Euroscepticism became a running sore for the Conservatives in the 80s and 90s, so might any deal with the Liberal Democrats become a running sore for them now.