Irish lessons for odd couple
Cameron can learn from the Cosgrave coalition, writes John-Paul McCarthy
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THE great Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay used to say that there was no such thing as change in British politics, only the periodic re-enactment of past great events.
He was an MP when Britain debated the Great Reform Act in the 1830s, and he told his sister that witnessing the bill's ratification was like seeing Caesar get stabbed, or Oliver Cromwell picking up the mace when he dismissed the Long Parliament.
The extraordinary scenes from Britain last week, capped by that luminous prime ministerial press conference amid the flowers of Downing Street, came down to us similarly freighted with historical echoes.
Britain agreed to try its weary hand at a formal coalition government for the first time in over 60 years, as David Cameron and Nick Clegg emerged from the electoral fray to form a partnership that looks even more incongruous at first blush than Churchill's five-year coalition with Clement Attlee in 1940.
Many unkind observers suggested that the press conference last Wednesday afternoon reminded them of a posh gay wedding reception in Islington.
The Cameron-Clegg partnership actually brought to mind a scene from Brendan Gleeson's riveting portrayal of Winston Churchill, Into the Storm. Churchill called in Bomber Harris to find out how the RAF planned to deal with German morale, and was immediately told that Harris planned a campaign of unprecedented aerial bombing on German cities.
Attlee berated both the PM and the Air Marshal for their callous delight in incendiary bombings, before finally succumbing himself to the seductive lure of the needs-must ethos that dominates all meaningful partnerships.
Churchill dictated the mood, and Attlee provided the policy on so many occasions during that coalition -- and if Clegg and Cameron are to survive, they shall have to find some similar modus operandi.
Several Irish ghosts presented themselves rather sullenly last week as well.
One of the most important British governments of the last century had a similarly confused ideological structure, this being the post-1918 government that was headed by the great Welsh radical David Lloyd George, but which was dominated by the Conservative party.
The Tory body dictated constantly to the Liberal head between 1918 and 1922, especially as Lloyd George waded slowly into the Irish quicksands after the Irish tactlessly declared a republic following the 1918 general election.
Coalition governments as odd as our current one can function despite all the odds, as David Lloyd George proved in 1921 when he made that fateful deal with Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins.
Mixed governments leads to mixed results though, and the Treaty showed this reality rather vividly. The old radical in Lloyd George was on show as he told Collins that he was very interested in the Irish language and that during his private reading he discovered that one of the Irish terms for republic was the compound noun saorstat, which literally meant free state.
He said he was happy for this word to be used in any constitutional treaty that might emerge. Lloyd George bowed to his Tory flanks, however, in insisting that any future changes to the boundary of Northern Ireland would be determined not by local plebiscite, but by a quasi-judicial committee that would be asked to study the coherence of the border without allowing local communities a veto on their deliberations.
Collins walked headlong into this Tory-designed trap, and he was mercifully dead before the scale of Lloyd George's cunning became clear during the Boundary Agreement fiasco in 1925.
Cameron will need to possess skills as nimble as Lloyd George if he is to serve out a full term. There may not be too many exact parallels for him to ponder in the British context, but as he tries to learn how to deal with his exotic Liberal Democrat colleagues, he could do worse than cast his eyes across the water.
The gold standard for innovative helmsmanship in a coalition context was set by Liam Cosgrave in the Seventies. Cosgrave lavished boons on the junior coalition partner between 1973-77 so as to lock the Labour Party into the government structure.
He astonished Brendan Corish in 1973 when he told him bluntly that even though Fine Gael was the senior partner in government, he was willing to give Labour the Department of Finance on the sole condition that Corish took this job himself.
And he developed an unusual and somewhat mysterious rapport as well with the alpha male of the Labour Party, Conor Cruise O'Brien, a senior figure in 1973 who was disappointed not to be made Minister for Foreign Affairs.
Cosgrave soothed O'Brien by allowing him to have three jobs in effect, since no one was willing to assume that the former Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at NYU could be fobbed off with chair-moistening committee work.
O'Brien was made Minister for Posts & Telegraphs, but Cosgrave also asked him to take ministerial control of the Government Information Service, thus making him a de facto minister for information as well. And Cosgrave also allowed O'Brien to retain his role as Labour Party spokes-man on foreign affairs, which allowed O'Brien to compete with Garret FitzGerald for air time on Northern Ireland.
In return for this unprecedented largesse, O'Brien showed consistent respect and loyalty for Cosgrave during the lifetime of that government.
O'Brien always said that that odd coalition survived because of a pep talk they were all given in their first week by President Eamon de Valera, who warned them gravely that government only functioned if they all collectively sustained Cosgrave. Cosgrave and the Cruiser made a strange team, no stranger than Dave and Nick, in fact. And they might just survive to celebrate their five-year anniversary.
John-Paul McCarthy is researching Gladstone and Ireland at Exeter College, Oxford
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