The new leader,’ said Charles Kennedy in his resignation speech, ‘has some serious internal political issues to resolve.’ Coming from the leader of a party that embraced both David Laws and Brian Sedgemore, this was something of an understatement.
Having allowed the disaffected Labour vote to become the growth industry for the previously centrist Lib Dems, Kennedy was bequeathing his successor a deeply divided party: with several new MPs reliant on a left-wing protest vote, the traditional centrist majority of MPs more vulnerable to a Tory challenge than for years, and a left-leaning, power-wielding membership even further radicalised.
However sore he might feel about his dispatch by the men in grey sandals last January, it takes some chutzpah for Kennedy to be popping up in the run-up to conference season to make political capital out of the Lib Dems’ current woes, given the central responsibility he bears for the situation they find themselves in.
For whatever the short-term gains, trying to defend Tory-facing seats whilst simultaneously making a play for the Labour left was always going to be unsustainable. As many Lib Dem-Tory contests at the 2005 election showed, there comes a tipping point where posing as angry Bennites in Brent puts off nice Tories in Torbay.
More seriously, the feasibility of facing both ways in 2005 was utterly reliant on external factors: an unpopular Tory leader pursuing a core vote strategy, and a seemingly unshakeable belief among large swathes of disaffected Labour voters that Labour would win regardless. It would be a brave man to bet on either, let alone both, of these being the case next time around.
So with two thirds of Lib Dem MPs facing a Tory challenge at the next election, it’s hardly surprising that the new leader, Ming Campbell, is trying to drag the party back to a more centrist position. But, as the current debate over the top rate of tax shows, it won’t be easy. And other issues are waiting in the wings. Public service reform certainly has the potential to expose further divisions. Who knows – maybe the debate over the replacement of Britain’s nuclear deterrent will cause as many problems for today’s ‘liberal’ alliance as it did for Messrs Owen and Steel 20 years ago?
‘Our unity must not come at the price of clarity,’ was how Campbell framed the dilemma in his acceptance speech. Kennedy’s legacy is that clarity can be attained only at the price of unity.