Just before the Christmas recess I sat down in the Commons cafeteria opposite a Conservative front-bencher whom I knew.  ‘There will have to be a coalition after the next election,’ he told me, ‘bringing you together with Labour and the Greens.’  I realised after absorbing this that he was effectively telling me that the Conservatives could not revive in time to hope for a majority, and that the prospect of either a Reform majority or a Tory-Reform coalition gave him nightmares.

It’s 3½ years at most until the next general election.  Plenty of crises and shifts in political moods may intervene to alter the pattern that opinion polls and local by-elections have indicated over the past year – of five parties between 10% and 30% in England, with six or more competitive in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.  But it’s wise to anticipate the likelihood of an indecisive outcome.  We would probably then have to negotiate – and successfully manage – a multiparty government.  The current Labour Government is floundering in large part because the campaign it fought to win its majority did not provide it with the programme needed for successful government in difficult domestic and international circumstances.  The circumstances that will face the incoming government – of whatever colours – in 2029 are likely to be even more difficult than in 2024.

Many readers of LibDem Voice will groan at the thought of entering another coalition.  But we’re in politics to promote liberal principles, and the most effective way to promote them is to be in power, locally and nationally.  So we need to learn lessons from the 2010-15 coalition and from earlier attempts to cooperate with other parties.

To start with, we need to admit that Liberals are instinctively too inclined to trust others, to be optimistic about outcomes and to believe in rational negotiation. David Steel was naively confident that Callaghan would reward the support we offered his shaky government in 1977-8.   In 1996-8 Paddy Ashdown was far too trusting of Tony Blair, not appreciating the hard and partisan men behind him.  Nick Clegg set out to demonstrate that coalition government would work, without being sufficiently suspicious of those behind Cameron who wanted to push through their Conservative agenda while leaving the Liberal Democrats to take as much of the blame as possible.  Next time we have to be harder, more suspicious and more politically partisan.

In the 2010 coalition government the 53 Liberal Democrat MPs served to close the small gap between the 306 Tory seats and an overall majority: too much of an imbalance to stop most Conservative ministers behaving as if they were still the majority party, let alone to change significantly the working methods of Downing Street, Whitehall and Westminster.  Parliamentary numbers matter enormously in our flawed political system.  If no party in the government has much above 200 MPs, and we have gained well over 100, we will be better placed from the outset.  Winning more seats is a necessary precondition for effective shared government.