For 50 minutes, Danny Alexander held it together. With George Osborne away in Brussels, the chief secretary to the Treasury was having to stand in for the chancellor at Treasury questions and had resisted all provocations to do in the Commons what he had been doing everywhere else: distancing himself from Osborne’s autumn statement.
“Long term economic plan … decisive action … improving work incentives … rebalance and strengthen,” he had burbled as an eidetic preface to every question.
Then came a moment that the sacred might call divine intervention, a public act of repentance for his four-and-a-half year love affair with the Tories. The profane might call it his Homeland “I was working undercover all along” moment.
MPs identified it as the panic of reading the latest opinion polls and realising the Lib Dems’ position is even worse than anyone had feared. Whichever it was, Alexander lost it. Big time.
“Let me say this to the Labour party and to the Conservative party,” he said, his voice deviating from a monotone for the first time in his life and his head spinning ever faster as he tried to address both sides of the chamber at once.
“Both of them, in different ways, are advocating relentless austerity for the whole of the next parliament, and it is only the Liberal Democrats turning around the public finances after 2017-18 who offer any hope of a change in the future.”
There followed a brief silence as Alexander’s head slowly came to rest. He appeared as startled as everyone else and tried to carry on as if nothing untoward had happened. “The best protection for the UK is to stick to the economic plan,” he said, though the way the economic secretary, Andrea Leadsom, and the financial secretary, David Gauke, shuffled along to create as much green space on the front bench between him and them must have told him his outburst was every bit as damaging as he had feared.
In one sentence, he had ripped up the convention of collective responsibility inside the House of Commons. As no one is going anywhere before next May thanks to the Fixed-term Parliament Act, the coalition government is now effectively several Lib Dems short of a full cabinet.
There can no longer be any pretence it is otherwise. It is a mess, for both parties. “An extra person has become employed every 80 seconds since the government was formed in 2010,” Alexander had claimed earlier in the session. Just as well, as he could soon be joining the jobseekers.
If Alexander had just had a personal nightmare, then spare a thought for Paige McConville, the young woman whom he had earlier declared to be the two millionth apprentice recruited under the coalition. Her reward? A personal visit from the business secretary, Vince Cable. How unlucky can a person get? If she had applied an hour later or earlier, she would have dodged the photo opportunity. She must be kicking herself.
The day was turning out to contain a lot of surprises. At the session’s start there had been slack-jawed wonder as a huge white hat that appeared to have escaped from Ascot glided through the chamber. It was only when it reached the dispatch box that onlookers realised the government whip and vice-chamberlain of the household, Anne Milton, was underneath it.
