Fishburn Hedges

22.07.2010

The audience would be forgiven for feeling like a gaggle of gooseberries at last night's love-in between Oliver Letwin and Danny Alexander. Representing the Conservatives and the Lib Dems respectively, the two turned up to Policy Exchange retaining that flush of early romance.

Despite being there to talk about the policy-making process in coalition, little of substance emerged. The chaps chose instead to focus on how terribly polite they all are to each other, with Letwin in particular hailing the air of decorum with which they conduct themselves compared with their predecessors.

The chippy ones in the audience couldn't help reading the sub-text as: "it's so much nicer seeing public schoolboys running the shop, rather than those chavvy thugs that went before..."

The questions were pretty tame, along the lines of "what do you do when you do disagree?" to which the answer was always "talk it through over a muffin". I exaggerate, but you get the point.

A few interesting points came out:

- Letwin in particular seemed to be in denial about the gulf between his euphoria, and the disappointment of many in the Conservative Party, including at Cabinet level. Alexander was more realistic about managing relations within his own party.

- He claimed that there was deep support and enthusiasm for the Coalition across the party. Now, obviously he would say that in public, but the sentiment seemed heartfelt. His use of language was revealing - several times he began a sentence with, "in a liberal democracy..."

- Both men claimed coalition results in better policy-making, because it makes Ministers test their thinking more thoroughly.

- Letwin claimed that the coalition agreement altered the balance of power between officials and Ministers, because policy agreements are documented, and Ministers are bound by them, so officials have to follow this and give best advice. That said, this theory assumes that policy is static.

- The most interesting question of the night came from a Telegraph journalist, who questioned whether tripping over each other to get on was actually compromising honest debate and argument in the legislative process. Letwin shrugged this off by saying that debate does happen, just more behind the scenes and in a gentlemanly fashion. One wonders whether the debate may get less gentlemanly soon, with legislative challenges like the 'graduate tax' coming up.

- Letwin also denied that the parties were becoming homogenised and added they would never consider an electoral agreement such as previous coalitions have made.

All in all, it was a bit of a relief when they stressed they had to be off "by 7 on the dot".

Presumably Le Poule au Pot needed the table back by 9.