This phoney atmosphere of happy-clappy coalition is rapidly coming to an end.    The real problem is not contrasting political philosophies – a relatively soft matter – it’s rather as Macmillan so pointedly put it:  ‘Events dear boy, events’.   And one has already struck hard, even before we get to impasse over massive public spending cuts on 22 June.

Teresa May was left tongue-tied this morning on Radio 4 Today trying to explain why two suspected terrorists, Abid Naseer and Ahmed Faraz Khan, were not being deported back to Pakistan.   It is alleged they were planning a bomb attack in Manchester a year ago, and the judge ruled that they posed a serious threat to national security; yet they couldn’t be deported under Human Rights Act rules because they were likely to face torture or execution in their home country.    This immediately raises three issues that sharply divide the Tories and the LibDems.

First, the Tories are determined to repeal the Human Rights Act, the LibDems are determined to keep it.   No obvious compromise here, and most likely the LibDems will be forced to back down – but not without a lot of soul-searching in the ranks of their supporters.

Then there is the question of what happens to the two students.   Teresa May was reduced to disingenuous circumvention: “We are taking all possible measures to ensure they do not engage in terrorist activity”.   She couldn’t bring herself to say ‘Control orders’, not surprisingly when the LibDems have in the past (rightly) condemned them as a Kafkaesque violation of a right to a fair trial.   Will the LibDems now swallow that too?

Third, the hearing was before SIAC (the Special Immigration Appeals Commission) where allegedly for security reasons those accused and their solicitor cannot be shown the evidence against them.   Do we then believe the MI5 claim that revealing the evidence would prejudice national security, or is this a convenient cover to conceal a botched security operation?   The Tories will certainly accept the former;  will the LibDems be bullied into rejecting the latter?

The awkwardnesses of cases like this won’t bust the coalition, but the jagged edges of this relationship will inexorably mount, and quickly – politics is about the constant tension of painful decision-making.    Events will claim their victims one by one till at some point not that far distant the edifice itself begins to slide.

But Labour has nothing to shout about over this case either.   The judge noted that “there is a long and well-documented history of disappearances , illegal detention and of the torture and ill-treatment of those detained”.   What is now being revealed in several legal proceedings is that the New Labour Government encouraged the Pakistani security services to detain, ill-treat and interrogate British citizens which has been condemned as complicity in torture.

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