Saturday 2nd June

One has to almost feel sorry for David Cameron, every time he tries to move on he is dragged back by the Leveson inquiry and his disastrous relationship with News International.   And, long-running sore that this has become it will not be the trigger that fires the gun.  There have been many predictions that the coalition will break up; some observers gave it a year or eighteen months at best, but it has outlived that.  The LibDems are in a bind, their popularity is at an all-time low but they still don’t quite understand why.  It is not because they are part of the Government and therefore suffering from the usual mid-term unpopularity, it is because they have betrayed everything they ever stood for.  Imagine that you were a habitual LibDem voter, what were you voting for all those years, when you knew that your party would most likely never form a Government on their own?   You were voting for a party that you believed had some integrity and honesty, and you were certainly NOT voting for the Tories.  Those who did vote Tory may not be perfectly happy with them but they can hardly be surprised at the policies being pursued.  As the clock ticks on and it becomes more and more obvious that unless the LibDems break from the Tories and state that they will not go into coalition with them again then many LibDems MPs will lose their seats, the pressure will grow.

But before that even I believe the pressure will come from the other side.  There may well be a feel-good, or feel-a-little-less-bad factor, this summer, with the Jubilee, the Football and the Olympics, and the poll lead Labour enjoys at the moment may begin to close, especially if Europe gets worse.  And then the right wing of the Tories may well seize their chance, of both winning an election without the nuisance of going in with anyone else, and they will push for a referendum on Europe itself.  And I suspect that David Cameron might be up for it, or if not him there may even be a coup and George Osborne will try his luck.  Whether they would ever win a referendum is not at all certain, but giving people the opportunity of a vote on it might be enough to make an election worth a try.   So, remember, you read it here first.