It’s beginning to happen already, even before the new Parliament meets for the first time tomorrow, and what are now tiny cracks will open up all too soon into major fissures.   It’s not just Charlie Kennedy and David Steel expressing their reservations, it’s not just hundreds of LibDem supporters already switching to Labour, nor is it just grassroots LibDems at their Birmingham conference today vainly putting down red lines which their leadership should not cross whether on tuition fees (already ditched), VAT, inequality or Iran.   It’s most of all that a party that is so patently sacrificing its fundamental values will lose its identity and be torn apart, not immediately – as in marriage irreparable differences take time to build up – but ineluctably crisis by crisis.

A Tory-LibDem pact is not so much a surprise as a total suspension of belief.   Such a vision reminds one of the Minister’s wife who was asked: ‘Did you ever in your wildest dreams ever see your husband as a Minister in the Government?’ and replied “I have to tell you that my husband never featured in my wildest dreams”.

The grand talk of a reformist coalition is already looking bare even before it’s started.   With the neocon Trident-hardliner Liam Fox as Defence Minister, the anti-EU fanatical and Ashcroft-corrupted William Hague as Foreign Secretary, the inexperienced weakest link George Osborne as Chancellor, the anti-State ultra-marketeer Michael Gove as Education Secretary, and the anti-abortion and anti-gay rights Teresa May as Equalities Minister, it’s a throwback to the Thatcher era, in reactionary instincts if not in the same form.

But the first and biggest crunch will come with the spending cuts, not just the £6bn to reverse the insurance contribution increase, but the far bigger cuts to satisfy the financial markets’ demands for much deeper cuts much sooner than were planned under the previous Government.   The Budget within the next 6 weeks will stretch the credibility of the LibDems – even of “savage cuts” Clegg, let alone his strongest supporters – and this is just stage 1.   And even before we get to stage 2, next year’s swingeing cuts, it is likely that the gathering Eurozone crisis will impact brutally on Britian’s finances.   Already it’s predicted (by the EU Commission) that the British budget deficit will swell this year to become at 12% of GDP the biggest in the EU, overtaking even Greece.   If the Tory-LibDem pact survives these almighty bumps along the road, it would be a miracle, and miracles don’t happen in politics.

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