A happy anniversary for the Coalition?

An esteemed and now famous colleague on another channel once confided that it was his wedding anniversary and that he hadn’t done anything about it and wasn’t sure if he should. I told him off, insisted he send flowers and booked a table somewhere nice for dinner. When he rang his wife to rather sheepishly make the arrangements she had already made work plans, and it was all too late. They divorced a couple of years later. I guess the signs had been there for a while.

This week is the Coalition Government’s anniversary. Will they be celebrating? Or pretending they forgot too?

This time last year we were all still wondering what kind of relationship we were about to get? David and Nick? Nick and Gordon? Nick and David Miliband? Were they just political dating? Moving in together? Or getting married?

A year on David Cameron is the dominant partner, Nick Clegg has gone from most eligible bachelor to public hate figure. And Ed Miliband is still there trying to tempt him to leave the relationship and move in with Labour.

So let’s start the couples therapy with David Cameron.

Let’s not get hung up with gender stereotypes in this relationship but when it comes to party policy David Cameron certainly looks to be the dominant partner (yes, I know, that makes him the woman). He will be feeling pretty pleased with himself after the local election and referendum results.

But let’s start with bad habits around the house. David has already had to change his ways in government after discovering he isn’t after all the chairman of a board, he’s the Prime Minister. His initial attempt to stand back a bit, trust his Cabinet Ministers, not getting too involved in policy and key decisions didn’t work. Some insiders say for most of the last year he simply didn’t engage with policy detail on anything like the scale of his predecessors. It still isn’t clear whether he is taking the kind of very close (some said too close) interest that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did, but he now tells people he starts work by 5.45am and gets a couple of hours of paperwork done before the kids surface (I’m talking about his actual kids now – not unruly backbenchers).

The obvious mistakes, the things he has U-turned on, could be partly down to this lack of grip last year so Caroline Spelman was allowed to try to privatise forests when most concerned thought it was a bad idea, and Andrew Lansley managed to run away with his controversial NHS reorganisation despite it never explicitly being in any party manifesto or thrashed out in the Coalition agreement.

However, those mistakes aside, David Cameron will feel he did rather well in last week’s vote. A governing party forcing through very controversial cuts managed to hold its ground in local elections and win a referendum campaign. But has he proved himself a rather selfish political lover? With his pal George Osborne has he manipulated his coalition partner ready to be dropped after the next election?

Letting the Lib Dems take the heat on government cuts, while ensuring they broke the key promise on tuition fees and killing their great passion of constitutional reform do not seem to be the actions of a protective partner. Even giving them their big economic wish of raising the tax threshold has probably benefited the Conservatives more than the Liberal Democrats, as it made them appear more concerned with those on lower incomes.

As this relationship was always a marriage of convenience, brought about by election results not natural chemistry, we shouldn’t expect the parties to want it to last. The calculation in Tory HQ must be that as long as the nation isn’t bankrupt they’ll get a quickie divorce from their coalition partner at the next election campaign, keep the house (in Downing Street) for themselves, and possibly a couple of the kids (sorry, this metaphor is getting a bit extended but this time I mean Lib Dem MPs who want to stay in power).

But if that is the strategy it is a risky one. The Lib Dems, as long as Nick Clegg is in charge, will not walk away from the Coalition but future success for the Tories if the Lib Dem vote collapses relies on those voters not going to Labour. The Tories have to bank that Labour are unable to write a new and credible political narrative in the next two years.

At this stage we just don’t know – Ed Miliband is still thinking through policy. But even if the Tories are right about Labour they are still assuming voters will come to them rather than going to others like the Greens or Ukip at the next election. They have already gone to the SNP in Scotland.

If some people voted Lib Dem in 2010 specifically because they didn’t want a Tory majority, they might next time choose to vote for smaller parties who they believe will not do the kind of deal Nick Clegg did last time. And of course if Nick Clegg were to leave and Chris Huhne was to take over Lib Dem voters might believe he would drive a harder bargain in terms of policy, or be a wily prospective “confidence and supply” partner. They might not desert the party in such numbers after all.

All of which means that David Cameron might just owe Nick Clegg a few political flowers, chocolates and nice dinners to get him through the next year or two. If not, he might find himself in that familiar trap so many couples experience: can’t live with him, can’t live without him. And that’s just no fun.