Danny Alexander: His master's voice

When I arrived this morning at the SECC in Glasgow, the venue for this year’s Liberal Democrat conference, the Schools Minister David Laws was striding back and forth across the foyer, a mobile phone clamped to his ear. His countenance and general demeanour were those of a happy man—the day before, delegates had voted, albeit by an exceptionally narrow margin, not to reintroduce the 50p tax rate. This was a victory for Nick Clegg and his supporters (though, as several commentators have pointed out, Laws and others on the “Orange Book,” economically liberal, wing of the party would like to see the top rate of tax eventually reduced still further, to 40p).

Clegg and Laws would have derived particular satisfaction from the fact that the self-appointed guardian of the party’s social-democratic conscience, Vince Cable, had intervened in the tax debate on the leadership’s side—this after the Business Secretary had let it be known that he might not attend the vote at all. Cable did turn up in the end and he told delegates that the Lib Dems had nearly convinced their coalition partners to agree to the policy on which the party had campaigned in 2010—a 40p rate plus a mansion tax. “There was the very real possibility about a year ago that we might have got out of this coalition an agreement with the Tories,” he said.

That was partial atonement for Cable’s crowd-pleasing set-piece speech earlier in the day in which he’d denounced the “hated” Tories’ reversion to “nasty party” type (“dog whistle politics, orchestrated by an Australian Rottweiler”). At a fringe event in the evening he went so far as to speculate that the coalition agreement could end a few months before the general election in 2015—a thought experiment for which he appeared to be upbraided by his colleague Danny Alexander, who said in a television interview this morning that “our firm intention is to make sure this coalition continues until the end. We are not going to walk away from that job months or years before the end of the coalition government. We have big Lib Dem commitments to deliver.”

The papers today were full of lurid speculation about the state of Cable’s relationship with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The Times carried a particularly colourful report of a meeting of senior Liberal Democrats in the summer at which Clegg, “egged on by Danny Alexander … deliberately engineer[ed] a confrontation with Dr Cable, in an effort to bounce him into supporting the Deputy Prime Minister’s position on deficit reduction.” (The “egging on” bit sounds plausible—Alexander often reminds me of the podgy amanuensis to the school bully.)

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Alexander’s speech this afternoon was, as they say in the trade, “eagerly awaited,” but at least some of the hacks who’d skipped the early morning debate on a motion proposing legal recognition for British sign language bothered to enter the hall to listen to him. He appeared to have memorised his address, though he delivered it as if he were acquainting himself with the words for the first time. And when he tried to be emphatic—“The last thing Britain needs is a Labour majority”—Alexander merely sounded querulous.

The effect was particularly comic when he looked down the barrel of the TV cameras and addressed rogue landlords who don’t pay their fair share of tax: “Pay up or face the consequences.” It was meant to sound menacing, I think—like those awful posters advising illegal immigrants to “go home or face the consequences” cooked up by the Lib Dems’ partners in government—though the effect was more like being slapped round the face with a wet fish.

Tax avoidance was one of the main themes of the speech. Alexander, as he has at previous conferences since 2010 (it’s become one of his party pieces), took the credit for “clawing back an extra £10bn a year from tax dodgers … the immoral majority who believe paying the proper amount of tax isn’t for them.” He also mentioned the sale, yesterday, of a sizeable chunk of the government’s stake in Lloyds, declaring that “the taxpayer is, at last, getting their money back”.

Alexander’s other aim was to unveil attack lines we’ll no doubt hear much more of as the general election gets closer. The trick he and his Lib Dem colleagues have to pull off is, on the one hand, to trumpet the achievements of the party in government and, on the other, to establish “equidistance” between Labour and the Tories. The Times’s Rachel Sylvester, in a rather breathless column today, anointed Clegg as, wait for it, “the heir to Blair” and praised him, not only for facing down critics inside his own party, like Cable, but also for settling on a “differentiation” strategy that swings both ways, against both Tories and Labour.

Alexander spoke in his master’s voice: “Labour can’t be trusted on the economy; The Tories can’t be trusted to create a fairer society.” Cue perhaps the most tepid standing ovation (most of the audience were, literally, standing) I think I’ve ever heard.