Charles Kennedy: just pretending

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/sep/15/charles-kennedy-just-pretending

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With a loyal following, and a constituency spanning over the sea to Skye, Bonnie Prince Charlie Kennedy is a formidable figure for Liberal Democrat malcontents. His defence of "enlightened" public investment in a BBC interview is a significant intervention, coming as it does just a few weeks before the coalition's savage spending review and a few days before the yellow clan assembles for its conference in Liverpool.

Nobody knows how many dissidents there really are in the party, and the former leader is emphatically not – or not yet – setting himself up as a king across the water. Nick Clegg's triumph in taking the third force into government for the first time in 65 years will awe the delegates, and probably allow him to weather the scheduled storm on academy schools. The deputy prime minister can justly point to the liberal turn that public life has taken – in relation to civil liberties and prisons, for instance – as a result of his decision to join the coalition. The move was repeatedly ratified by the party's democratic machinery, and the prospect of reforming the voting system in next year's referendum may persuade some of those harbouring second thoughts to keep shtoom for now.

Mr Kennedy may, however, may be playing a longer game, and one that may not be so easily brushed off. Silly season rumours that he would defect to Labour proved wide of the mark, and he seems more interested in speaking up for those strands of the liberal tradition which risk getting lost within a coalition led from the centre-right. While always concerned with the individual, great Liberals have seen a role for collective action in promoting personal opportunity – think of Keynes, Beveridge and Lloyd George. Coalition Lib Dems are not blind to this insight, which is why they are rightly hopeful of securing extra state expenditure to finance a poor-pupil premium in school funding. But for every such victory for enlightened state action there will be many defeats within a straitened spending review. Already the Lib Dem desire to democratise primary care trusts has yielded to the Tory wish to abolish them, and liberal hopes of taming the state must compete with neoliberal ambitions to roll it back.

Compromise is, of course, integral to coalition – that new fact of life in Britain, which all the players are still getting to grips with. The challenge for parties is collaborating without sacrificing their distinctive edge. Vince Cable's talk of a business relationship of necessity – talk recently echoed by party founder Lord Steel – perhaps strikes a shrewder note than the marriage of true minds described in some of Mr Clegg's speeches. By refining his tone, today's party leader might just dampen down speculation about what the old pretender is up to.