InVinceCable We Trust

Sean O’Grady writes a super commentary article pivoting around the prospect of a hung parliament in today’s Independent under the title “Get ready for Vince in Number 11“.

There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding about what will happen in the hung parliament that now seems inevitable. The misunderstanding is that Nick Clegg will find it difficult to extract concessions from Gordon Brown and that a Lib-Lab coalition would be tricky to put together. He won’t and it wouldn’t. In fact it has the air of inevitability about it. If he wants, Clegg can have the alternative vote, he can get Vince Cable into the Treasury, himself a nice cabinet job and junior posts for others, and, far more important, an agreed four-year programme for economic recovery and reducing the budget deficit.

Sean completes this paragraph with the assertion “Job done”. We love his optimism, but we have a long way to go yet, including the need to coalesce and focus public sentiment on this outcome.