Conservative/Liberal Democrat Election Pact?

Talk of some sort of 2015 election pact between the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat parties rumble on. I had thought it completely fanciful, but the last few days nonsense following the Telegraph's deceitful sting on Lib Dem MPs has forced me to reconsider. Firstly, the comments made by Lib Dems were surprisingly mild - unless you live in some parallel universe where honey and sweetness abound. Even then the miscreants were genuinely embarrassed, Nick Clegg was genuinely cross, and almost every Conservative laughed it off as inconsequential. Its clear to me that this Coalition is here to stay, and that the boat-rockers are going to be left rocking boats in vain.

All this lovey-dovey stuff with the Lib Dems comes quite naturally to me by now. For over three years I've discouraged gratuitous attacks on Lib Dems in Montgomeryshire - not because I suffered some great conversion which involved loving one's enemies, but because it seemed to me to be the road to victory. It also the way I like to do politics. This strategy, more than anything else, led to us winning Montgomeryshire last May. And its also the strategy that has delivered to the British people a government with the numbers to restore order to the public finances. Despite my almost four years of love-bombing the Liberal Democrats, I have not heard one single expression of concern from a Conservative Party member in Montgomeryshire. We prefer quiet delivery to noisy headline chasing.

Now I'm not suggesting that a Coalition candidate should be adopted for Montgomeryshire at the next General Election. The fact that the seat has been held by the Lib-Dems for 126 of the last 130 years makes it an unreasonable expectation that they should stand aside - and we're hardly going to stand aside because we hold the seat. In addition, we have no idea what will constitute the boundaries of Montgomeryshire in 2015, if the legislation currently winding its way through the Lords takes its place on the statute book. But I can see that it could well make sense in a lot of constituencies. John Major, Peter Lilley, Nick Boles, and a senior Conservative very close to Cameron supposedly think so. So do I - but I must add that this is an entirely personal observation, which may or may not be shared by anyone else.