Labour should stop wooing the Liberal Democrats and avoid appearing like it has a ‘Plan B’ to go into coalition with them after the next election, the party’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman, has suggested.

She also uses an interview with Progress to attack the prime minister’s treatment of women ministers in his recent reshuffle, saying he has revealed himself to be ‘an old-fashioned paternalistic Tory who does not understand that women expect to be treated as equals’.

Harman’s comments on the Liberal Democrats came just days after shadow chancellor Ed Balls began the new political season by publicly stating that he could work with Vince Cable. Launching a stinging attack on the Liberal Democrat business secretary, she made clear that while Labour has ‘a long way to go’, it should ‘certainly not [be] defeatist and certainly not [be] doing Plan B, which is that we should go into a coalition’.

Other senior Labour figures have suggested that, although the party could not work with deputy prime minister Nick Clegg in the future, it needs to keep avenues open to those in his party, such as Cable, who are believed to be most uncomfortable in coalition with the Tories.

But Harman refuses to draw such a distinction. ‘Vince Cable voted for the cuts in tax credits, he voted for the increase in VAT, he voted for cutting the tax for millionaires, he’s voted for NHS reforms and, actually, he’s as much an accomplice of the Tories as Nick Clegg is,’ she argues. ‘You have to judge people by their actions and for all we get Clegg positioning himself against the Tories, and Cable positioning himself against Clegg, the reality for the voters is that the Tories would not be able to do what they’re doing if it were not for the Lib Dems, all of them, supporting the Tories.’

Labour’s deputy leader brushes aside suggestions that other members of the shadow cabinet appear to be reaching out to some Liberal Democrats: ‘It’s not that anybody is opening the door to any engagement for a future coalition.’

Despite speculation, the next election could result in another hung parliament, Harman envisages little role for future cooperation with the third party: ‘The reality is if we are in government with an overall majority and the Lib Dems want to support us then that is warmly welcome and if they want to oppose the Tories the way we did on the boundary changes we will end up in the same lobby as them. But, so far, they appear to be voting for all the things which our analysis says are making things more difficult for the country.’

Harman is keen instead that Labour present the country with a straight choice at the next election, one between the party and the coalition: ‘We don’t have a preferential voting system in this  country, it is first past the post. You have one vote … and we’re saying the only way to bring about change is a Labour vote. They are the government. We’ve got to replace the  government.’

Harman’s views are shaped by her analysis of the voters that Labour needs to win back at the next election. Although she dismisses any suggestion of a ‘core vote’ strategy and calls for Labour to be the ‘one nation party’, she is less focused on the ‘floating voters’ who switch between Labour and the Tories and were the target of New Labour’s campaigns under Tony Blair. Instead, she believes the party needs to target traditional Labour supporters who backed the Tories in 2010, disaffected Liberal Democrats, and those who were not motivated to vote in 2010. The first group, she insists, are ‘not switchers, they were previously Labour people. But we need them to be Labour returners’. In seats held by the Tories, Harman suggests, it is Liberal Democrat voters who will hold the key to Labour gains: ‘In 70 of our top 100 seats we need to win off the Tories, the Liberal vote is bigger than the Tory majority. So actually, the Liberal voters are key to us winning in Tory seats.’

Harman is upbeat about Labour’s prospects. ‘Obviously, we need to strengthen our poll lead,’ she says in response to concerns that Labour has not yet reached the 20 per cent leads that all previous postwar opposition parties have achieved before winning a subsequent election. But she compares Labour’s current state with the position it was in two years after its last general election defeat in 1979. ‘We were a shambles,’ she recalls. ‘I can  see this team going into government. It was years before anyone took our team half seriously [then]. We were in the wilderness.’

Harman speaks from experience: elected to parliament 30 years ago this month, she served on Labour’s frontbench for 13 years before being  appointed to the cabinet as social security secretary in 1997. Her time in  office was not a happy one: forced to push through the cut to lone parent benefits demanded by the Treasury, she was fired 15 months later by Blair in his first reshuffle after a very public falling-out with her welfare reform minister, Frank Field.

Harman admits that her dismissal was the ‘personal lowest moment’ of her 30 years in parliament. ‘Having been part of that amazing struggle to get the voters to see Labour differently, to get Labour back into government … in really hard times when everyone said Labour was finished … to be struggling and struggling and part of that team and then to be sacked after 15 months. That was a low point.’

While Blair made her a junior minister after Labour was returned for a second term in 2001, Harman agrees that her election as deputy leader six years later offered a form of vindication. ‘Yes, because that was not handed to me. I campaigned and won support myself,’ she says. ‘It felt like a great  achievement.’ It was, in fact, a pretty remarkable one: ranked a 22-1 outsider at the start of the race – ‘I should have taken money out on myself,’ she jokes – Harman did not receive a single union endorsement. ‘I was pretty certain I wouldn’t get the [union] barons backing me,’ she suggests, ‘but I knew there would be a lot of trade unionists I had worked with over the years who would have seen what I had done and would vote for me.’

Harman had, moreover, built a strong base of support among women MPs and party members, many of whom respected her willingness to fight for feminist causes – from the rights of rape victims to issues such as childcare and more family-friendly working practices in parliament – long before they became mainstream.

Currently the longest continuously serving woman MP, her ire at the treatment of women ministers by the prime minister in his reshuffle is barely contained: ‘I think what we have seen is that for all that David Cameron posed as a modern man and a break with Tory patriarchy and paternalism … this could be a Tory leader from the last century.’

Harman believes that Cameron’s behaviour will resonate outside the Westminster village. ‘What he has also shown is a kind of vindictiveness and a peevishness,’ she argues. ‘I think that the briefing against [transport secretary] Justine Greening after he had demoted her was absolutely …  vindictive. He absolutely does not understand how this will all be seen by  women when he tells [environment secretary] Caroline Spelman that she is too old for the job and appoints a man of the same age … He referred [Tory party chair] Sayeeda Warsi to the ministerial standards commissioner but not [culture secretary] Jeremy Hunt.’

Harman had, of course, been Hunt’s opposition shadow until Cameron moved him to the Department of Health. Having called for Hunt to resign over his handling of Rupert Murdoch’s bid to take over BSkyB, she is incensed by the prime minister’s decision to promote him. ‘I think that it shows all the insight into recruitment that he demonstrated in his appointment of Andy Coulson,’ she says. ‘He should have sacked Jeremy Hunt for misleading parliament [and] for not acting fairly when he was supposed to be in a judicial capacity, but instead he sort of covered up for him.’ She views Hunt’s promotion, though, as a sign of Cameron’s weakness: ‘He has clearly not got enough friends and therefore he’s [appointed] somebody who’s manifestly ill-equipped to do that job.’

As for Harman, despite her three decades in parliament, she still has one ambition left: to be deputy prime minister. But has Ed Miliband agreed to appoint her if Labour wins? ‘All I can say [is] we’ll have to get into government in 2015 for me to be deputy prime minister, but that remains my ambition,’ she smiles warily.

Harman is right to be cautious. After she was elected to the deputy leadership in 2007, Gordon Brown opted not to follow Blair in appointing the party’s number two as deputy prime minister. She passes up the opportunity to settle old scores, however. ‘I don’t want to make any criticism of Gordon,’ she says. ‘We can all observe the way a leader acts and think: “well, I might have done things differently”, especially in relation to something that affects myself.’ She prefers, she says, to judge Brown on his handling of the global
economic crisis.

But the aspiration to be deputy prime minister is, Harman insists, the limit to her ambitions. Despite speculation that she would stand for the leadership in 2010, she opted not to. What stopped her? ‘When I was on a jury, my mum asked if I was the foreman. I said: “Do I always have to be the foreman? It’s enough being on the jury.” I am deputy leader. That is a huge, great thing to be doing. I have never wanted to be leader.’

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Photo: Downing Street