Desertion or just deserts?

It is not exactly earth-shattering news that 48% of those who voted Lib Dem at the election are now less inclined to back them again as a direct result of the increase in VAT – or so the Observer (and Ed Milliband) state this morning – but there is an detectable sense of Schadenfreude from a paper which was only recently urging Nick Clegg to “grasp an historical opportunity to become a moderating force in government”.

What on earth did they [the newspaper] expect? As junior partners, the Lib Dems are literally just making up the numbers. Their ability to moderate or even influence policy is very limited and it is only the dangled prospect of electoral reform plus a few shiny trappings of government that underpins the rationale behind this coalition.

Unable to abandon their propensity to spin an electoral reverse in May into an “opportunity for the country”, the party is rapidly losing ground with voters who thought something a lot better would come out of a hung parliament and now feel they might have been taken for suckers.

Writing in the Independent, Clegg argues that his involvement in the emergency budget resulted in making “the best choices available to us in the circumstances, offering protection to those who need it and ensuring those with the broadest shoulders take the greatest strain”. His PR background is clearly to the fore in a well-written thousand word article which talks a lot about the “poorest” but only once mentions VAT.

It makes for good Sunday morning copy but the claims will be largely dismissed by a wavering intelligentsia readership. The article is also slightly undermined by treasury dude Danny Alexander who admits in another paper that tax increases run contrary to the Lib Dem election manifesto.

Politics is full of ironies, as one former chancellor once observed, but the one looming in front of Lib Dems is that if their popularity continues to decline then the promised PR hybrid that eventually emerges from the coalition agreement will have a negligible effect on their electoral chances next time around.

Update: Mike Smithson at Political Betting provides some useful context for the poll itself.