End mating signals and let’s govern alone, Boris tells Tories
DAVID Cameron should rule out coalition with any other party after the general election, according to Boris Johnson.
The London Mayor suggests it would be ‘fatal’ for the Conservative Party to give any suggestion that it is in the market for a fresh power-sharing deal with the Liberal Democrats or another smaller party.
‘We should say “stuff coalition with anyone”,’ Mr Johnson told the Daily Mail. ‘We are there to win, we are there to offer leadership, we are there to be a Conservative government.
‘If we go into this thing issuing faint pheromonal offerings or mating signals to this or that party, it would be absolutely fatal.’
Asked whether the Prime Minister should rule out a second coalition altogether, Mr Johnson replied: ‘Yes. Otherwise people don’t know what they are voting for.’
Lord Steel says there is no appetite among Liberal Democrats for another
‘Stuff coalition with anyone’
coalition – or among the two big parties. ‘A lot of David Cameron’s Tories want a Tory-only government, even if it’s a minority one, and similarly on the Labour side,’ the former Liberal leader told the BBC.
‘I suspect – if you have to look into the crystal ball – that we’re going to get a minority government which will have a multitude of minorities in the parliament, which is something new, and they’ll be able to play one off against the other.’
He said the most that Lib Dems would countenance in another hung parliament would be a ‘ confidence and supply deal’, where they agreed to support a larger party in key votes but did not enter a formal coalition or take ministerial jobs.
He also said that his party needed to ‘recharge its values’.
Mr Johnson, who is Mr Cameron’s chief leadership rival, criticised the fixed-term parliaments legislation introduced by the coalition – suggesting it should be repealed.
‘The sooner it expires, the better. I always thought it was some bit of Lib Dem nonsense,’ he said.
‘Constitutionally the thing we need to address is the rank injustice that it takes so many thousands more votes to elect a Conservative rather than Labour MP. It’s an absolute scandal.’
Former Conservative minister Sir Alan Duncan has led the calls for a cross-party deal to repeal fixed-term legislation, branding it a ‘recipe for political horse-trading and coalition manoeuvrings’.
Labour’s Jack Straw and Tory Kenneth Clarke support the move.
Critics say five years is too long, risking a ‘zombie parliament’ in the final year. Few appreciated the long-term impact of the constitutional change, which was introduced to ensure one of the coalition parties could not walk out on the other and prompt an election.
It means prime ministers no longer have the power to go to the Queen to ask her to call an election when opinion polls are favourable.
Instead, they need to win the support of a ‘supermajority’ of two thirds of MPs for an election to be held at any time outside of a five-year fixed period. This means the leader of a minority administration would never be able to go to the polls without the backing of his or her opponents.
The only other way to trigger an election as the law stands is if a government loses a vote on a formal motion of no-confidence.
But other parties then have a twoweek period during which they have the opportunity to stitch together a pact to govern before an election is held. A new coalition could therefore take power without an election.
Critics say the legislation is a recipe for never-ending power-sharing.