What happens next?

First one to go
So the Nucoalition has come of age, it's lost, with the resignation of David Laws, its first member; so what happens next? Well first we must remind ourselves this is all a bit new. The oft overlooked voter weighed up the options on polling day and went radical by giving mixed signals, hence the coalition. This we may assume came as a bit of a shock to some; indeed the LibDems were still kidding themselves till very late in the day that they could form an alliance with Nulabour, before realising the voters wouldn't like this and going with the Tories. It would seem Laws was privately kidding himself too. If he's so clever, as we are frequently told he is, then why didn't he prepare himself and his private affairs for government?

After all it was none other than David Steele who encouraged the Liberals to do just that, "go home and prepare for government" in 1981. True Steele was talking to the Liberals and not the LibDems but then perhaps the real reason Laws did not act was he doubted the LibDems would have real power. Aha! So trickery all round eh? Laws has sympathy in that he wanted to keep his private life just that, private. It's the money that's important here, in reality what Laws claimed is trivial but it is public money, that's the sole problem although not all in the MSM see this. The are carrying on as before.

Laws is not alone in being ill-prepared for the new politics. One of the first things Cameron did as PM was get rid of a lot of the flummery so loved by Nulabour. This wrong-footed the police and others who so loved being part of something 'big'.

So no more police outriders and similar 'heavy stuff', so no more overtime and career opportunities either, the state cannot afford this. The criticism and advice began at once but what these experts overlook is that not so long ago Cameron cycled to work through the streets of London, as does Boris Johnson, Mayor of London. When it comes to security, privacy if you like, neither Laws, Cameron or Johnson have been responsible for a security lapse on the scale of the one that cost Bob Quick his job.

Another organisation still living in the past is the BBC, the recent Question Time programme giving Alistair Campbell free reign shows this to be so. Writing in the Spectator Peter Hoskin starts with the headline - 'Was last night's Question Time a preview of how the coalition will deal with the media?' He then goes on to give a link to the normally reliable blogger Guido Fawkes. However, after weighing it up, both Hoskin and Fawkes see the Nucoalition as having made a mistake by not falling into the QT trap. This misses the point; the old set piece battles, loved by Campbell and the BBC, turned people off, not on to politics, hence the hung parliament.

So some get it and some don't. When David Blunkett was forced to resign, the BBC set about his rehabilitation at once, he was on Radio 4 so often listeners might have thought he was on the payroll. Will that happen to Laws?