Covert or overt coalition, Michael Gove offers cash or flowers
Education secretary woos both Lib Dem Sarah Teather and Tory cabinet colleague Theresa May
One day the dynamics of the coalition should be pieced together from Interflora bills and cloakroom tokens from Ronnie Scott's.
Sarah Teather, the education minister, had the awful task of going to the Liberal Democrat conference and defending her department's plan for free schools, a policy that would take power away from the party's base of councillors and bureaucrats. After rowdy fringe meetings and a defeat in the conference hall she retreated, bruised, to her hotel room to find champagne and flowers, sent by Michael Gove, her departmental boss.
This couple get on like a department on fire. Gove covers for his junior when she has a diary clash. When Teather was doorstepped on her way to a doctor's appointment, Gove's adviser unleashed wrath on the broadcasters.
No flowers, champagne or even kitten heels were sitting in Theresa May's office when she got back from the equally tricky task of announcing a replacement for control orders yesterday. While the Tory May moved to accommodate her Lib Dem coalition partners, inflaming some in her own party (Sarah Teather-style), her department was instead at odds with Gove.
May's civil servants shocked Gove's team by insisting they will send 200 unaccompanied children and teenagers back to a Kabul detention centre. Gove got wind of it and, pretty much the Lib Dems' favourite Tory, assumed the task of fighting it.
The clash is partly one of Whitehall departments. May and her civil servants believe immigration is a Home Office matter; friends say Gove an adopted child himself believes it's a matter of child welfare and so relevant to his department. May's team acquiesced, as long as Gove paid.
The issue is still unresolved but, apart from money, there are greater things at play. Gove and Teather are in what one of May's predecessors as home secretary, Roy Jenkins, called an "overt coalition". May and Gove are in the s! ame poli tical party but it too is a coalition, a covert one. In the same party, Jenkins would say, but not on the same page.
The Jenkins quote is mentioned to Tories prepared to ally with the Libs against their colleagues: "Sometimes the coalitions are overt, sometimes they are covert," Jenkins wrote in 1998. "I do not think the distinction greatly matters. The test is whether those within the coalition are closer to each other, and to the mood of the nation they seek to govern, than they are to those outside their ranks."
"Incompatible people" and "incompatible philosophies," Jenkins goes on, get locked "into a loveless, constantly bickering and debilitating marriage, even if consecrated in a common tabernacle".
There are other departments where there is a coalition within the coalition. At the Ministry of Justice the Lib Dem Lord McNally and Tory Ken Clarke are separated by only three years in age and are said to enjoy each other's company so much that it is a wonder that any work gets done. Steve Webb and Iain Duncan Smith, both of whose politics are deeply influenced by their faith, have earned the DWP the nickname the "Department for Worship and Prayer".
But it's the Department for Education that has become the department for coalition. As well as Gove and Teather there's Nick Boles, the advocate of a coalition ticket at the next election, in there as parliamentary aide to the schools minister. David Laws, the Orange Book Lib Dem and cabinet minister in exile, frequently comes in to help Gove with policy detail.
Gove is thought to view this cohabitation as the first step towards a more formal arrangement (he recently said that where a local election clash is between Labour and the Lib Dems, Tories should vote Lib Dem).
Teather will be an extraordinarily good test of Gove's charm offensive. She has always been on the left of the Lib Dems. But colleagues think that the realities of government are bending her. When Tory MPs try to work out which Lib Dems they'd pick up if th! eir part ners split, Teather's name now features alongside Orange Bookers like Laws and Jeremy Browne.
You have to feel for Theresa May who, the last time she checked, was a Conservative home secretary.
Cameron's quip
One of the prime minister's latest jokes concerns Vince Cable. After the Telegraph caught Cable talking about the nuclear option of resignation, Cameron bounded round Downing Street testing out his new line. "Look on the bright side, I've got a Lib Dem who believes in a nuclear deterrent that's pretty funny."
Only days before politics broke up for Christmas, Cameron and Cable met and agreed that Cable would be stripped of his oversight of the BSkyB deal so much we know already. The speculation that has gripped ministers and cabinet ministers alike is that in Cameron's private meeting with Cable they agreed that Cable would stay for a cooling off period before being moved on in the next reshuffle. In the cabinet, but just not as high profile. The tearoom is braced for that reshuffle within a month.
Cameron is an avowed critic of frequent reshuffles - believing the annual cull that Thatcher, Brown and Major all inflicted on their staff to be pointless. He believes ministers need time to learn their briefs. His representatives on Earth maintain there won't be a shuffle until March 2012, the denouement of this parliamentary session. The reality may be somewhere in between. Downing Street sources say a shakeup is being considered for after the May elections.
On the Tory side, the chief whip has lost the confidence of George Osborne, with the chancellor on occasion running his own whipping operation.
There is discontent in the Lib Dems but they don't want a reshuffle within a month the inquiry into Laws has not yet concluded and they would want him considered if not for a big frontline job then a formal role on coalition links. In the meantime, they mull the hand they were dealt last time: tuition fees; Chris Huhne putting through new nuclear; ! a Lib De m doing the cuts; and being the Tory-led government's representative in Scotland not great.
But they can see the impetus. "Vince's credibility is damaged and we need to deal with that," a government source said. "But I would say that should be done by rebuilding him, not by demoting him."
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