Cameron is rattled – but why so far ahead of next election?

AFTER kicking off the New Year with a Conservative lead of as much as six per cent in the polls, Downing Street suddenly seems to be having an attack of electoral anxiety.

The bungle over Stephen Hester’s bonus and the conflicting briefings over whether or not No 10 really wants the Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, "taken out and shot", both coming within the space of a fortnight, would unsettle any government. Such upsets, though, are part and parcel of everyday politics. They have never seemed to concern the Prime Minister very much before.

Politicians, of course, tend to be obsessed about their electoral prospects. But, even so, to get the collywobbles when their next appointment with the voters is over three years away is surprising.

Even more surprising is that, although their New Year’s lead in the polls may now have evaporated, the Conservatives are still roughly level-pegging with Labour. Considering the state of the economy and the coalition’s programme of cuts, the Opposition would normally be expected to have a healthy lead at this stage of a Parliament.

It is true that on the existing constituency boundaries, which for a long time have been biased in Labour’s favour, the Tories need to be seven to ten per cent ahead to win an overall majority. But new boundaries will be in place by the next election, which are meant to ensure a level playing field.

So why all the worry? Having digested the fine details of the Boundary Commission’s proposals, what seems to have rattled the Tory high command is that while the new constituencies will reduce Labour’s advantage, they will not eliminate it. The calculation is that under the revised system the Conservatives will still need a clear lead of five to seven per cent to get an overall majority.

Even with the election still several years off, many experts reckon that is an uncomfortably tall order. Labour has picked up a large number of defecting left-wing Lib Dems, alienated by their old party’s alliance with the Conservatives, who are unlikely to return to the fold any time soon. If Ed Miliband ups his game, or Labour gets a new leader, they could be enough to push it over the winning line and back into power.

Faced with this, some Tories think their best hope would be to aim for another coalition. And it is certainly the case that, in many ways, coalition suits the PM rather well. He can keep the Tory backbenches, whom he has never really cared for, at arms length and it hobbles the Lib Dems.

For precisely these reasons, however, it does not seem such an attractive proposition to the grass-roots of either party. Most Lib Dems would probably prefer to be allied to Labour, while the overwhelming majority of Conservatives would much rather govern alone.

There is also the tricky matter of what the coalition is supposed to be about. Once it has dealt with deficit reduction, school and welfare reform, the three main items in its original agreement, what then?

Cameron is good at the ducking and diving involved in juggling two parties. But inevitably it constricts his room for manoeuvre, and the longer he has to do it the narrower his options become.

Already questions are being asked about how the Government is going to fill the rest of the Parliament. On an increasing range of subjects, from nuclear power to employment law, from tax policy to Europe, a vacuum is developing because the two parties cannot agree on them.

The risk, especially for the Conservatives, is that the agenda will instead be dominated by issues like the House of Lords, Scottish devolution and gay marriage. It is not that these are unimportant, but at a time of economic hardship they won’t strike many voters as a priority.

Quite what Cameron himself thinks of the idea of another deal with the Lib Dems is hard to judge. Partly because it is a coalition and partly because he likes to work with a close-knit group of advisers, the inner workings of this Government have always been opaque.

But it is less than a year since he was warning, in last spring’s AV referendum, that coalitions should be infrequent and for "exceptional circumstances" only. Even if both parties were willing to give it another go, it is hard to see how he could plausibly go back on that – however tempting the electoral calculation might seem. ·