Did the Lib Dems sell out their principles — or just lose their way? Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt examine the electoral disaster that has nearly destroyed the party

On Thursday 17 April 2014, the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Oakeshott, an old personal friend of the business secretary Vince Cable, sent an email to Cable’s wife, Rachel. It contained the results of a private poll, commissioned by Oakeshott from the respected polling firm ICM, of six Lib Dem seats. It showed that Cable was already trailing in his Twickenham constituency. Oakeshott followed up the email with a text to Cable himself, stressing that his secretary’s discretion could be relied upon and explaining that Cable’s special adviser had “asked me to forward the poll to your wife”. Oakeshott signed off his text: “Happy to discuss on mob now, or we are back home tea time Sunday.”

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The timing of the poll, and the surrounding secrecy, was not a coincidence. Oakeshott, a stalwart of the party’s social democratic left wing and a vocal critic of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition’s economic policies, had long been a political opponent of Nick Clegg. The Liberal Democrat leader was on the brink of an expected disaster in local and European elections the following month – the voters’ roar of disapproval at his decision to go into coalition with the Conservatives. Oakeshott regarded the forthcoming electoral drubbing as the last chance to remove Clegg, whom he had long seen as a political disaster for the party. “It felt like the scene in Far from the Madding Crowd when the sheep charge over the hill together,” Oakeshott recalled. “I thought ‘Oh my God, this is it’. In the face of all available evidence – in council elections, byelections and opinion polls – there was collective self-delusion, and the party was going to press ahead to disaster.”

So the poll of Twickenham and five other seats – including Clegg’s constituency of Sheffield Hallam – was designed to map the scale of the defeat and shock the party into deposing Clegg, in order to avert an even more devastating wipeout at the next general election. Cable has always been vague about his precise knowledge of Oakeshott’s polls; he insisted at the time that he knew only about the polling in his own constituency. But it is now clear that Oakeshott briefed him not only on the poll results, but also on the coup being quietly plotted by John Pugh, the party’s MP for Southport, who was gathering names of MPs to join him in calling for Clegg’s resignation.

“I had no animosity to Nick,” Pugh recalled. “But the party could not hinge on the fortunes of one man. We could not let liberalism disappear off the map just because we were afraid to take a tough decision about leadership. I approached colleagues and set some benchmarks – if we fell below three MEPs and lost more than 500 seats in locals, then we would have to act.” The party went on to lose 10 of its 11 European parliament seats, and 310 councillors. “There were a dozen MPs with serious misgivings,” Pugh said. “I spoke to Vince because MPs wanted to know, if Nick were to step down, would Vince step up? One MP’s only question to me was, ‘Will Vince do it ?’ Answer, ‘Yes’. ‘Oh, right, I am for it’.”

At around the same time, Pugh spoke to Naomi Smith, the chair of the Social Liberal Forum, which represents the party’s left wing. Smith, a Londoner, was hastily arranging a series of key constituency meetings to discuss the leadership question – as was Cable’s special adviser, Ashley Lumsden. As many as 500 party members signed an open letter, many more than Smith had expected, though she was not the prime mover behind the letter. A broad timetable for the rebellion was set. On 24 May, two days after the local elections, Pugh and Adrian Sanders, the Lib Dem MP for Torbay, duly called for Clegg to step aside.

Pugh expected that other voices would follow. “To my astonishment,” he recalled, “some of the very people who had said to me, ‘Yes, we have got to do something,’ then said diametrically the opposite.” By 26 May, Oakeshott became nervous that MPs were not rallying as planned – and in a bid to restore momentum to the rebellion, decided to publicise his polling on the dire fate awaiting the party at the general election. He handed the details to the Guardian, but insisted that his involvement in commissioning the polls not be revealed.

Oakeshott tried to ring Cable, who was in China on a ministerial visit, to tell him what was afoot – but they missed each other by a matter of minutes. Pugh, meanwhile, was alarmed by Oakeshott’s leaking of the polls; he feared it was premature, and that it would look devious. Pugh worried – correctly – that the story would quickly shift from Clegg’s failure in the European and local elections to one focused on unmasking the identity of the mystery pollster.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck

At this point Stephen Lotinga, the newly installed Lib Dem communications chief, decided to try to flush Cable out. Without consulting Clegg, Lotinga telephoned Cable’s team in China and confronted them with an ultimatum: “Either you distance yourself from this, or you and Oakeshott are going to be named in tomorrow’s papers as the people behind it.”

Lotinga now admits that he was bluffing. He had no definitive evidence that Oakeshott was involved. But Cable was disoriented, and started to get cold feet – he had already been uncomfortable with the prospect of being handed the leadership on a plate after Clegg was forced out. His wife, who was travelling with him in China, was unhappy that he had let himself become embroiled in the coup attempt to begin with. Within a few hours, Cable told the BBC that Oakeshott’s activities were reprehensible, and insisted publicly that there was no leadership issue in the party.

The lesson, Lotinga said, was: “Never go to China if you want to mount a coup.” Cable was completely cut off. “If you go as a government minister, they take your phone off you. He could not phone the people he needed to find out what was going on, and he was entirely reliant on us to be told what was happening back in Britain. He panicked.”

Oakeshott resigned from the party after declaring that his only purpose had been to present evidence of the urgency of a leadership change. But the grassroots rebellion sputtered out without Cable’s support, and Pugh’s dozen rebels disappeared into the night. Clegg commissioned an official review of the election defeats, but little changed in the aftermath.

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The party’s result at the general election one year later was even worse than the rebels had feared: the party lost 49 of the 57 seats it had won in 2010, and its vote share plummeted by nearly two-thirds. The party had not been in such bad shape since the 1960s. In retrospect, it is easy to argue that the party needed to be warned of the scale of the approaching catastrophe. But the defeat is not easily explained away. How did an intellectually vibrant centrist party that was on course to become a permanent feature of a new British coalition politics fail so totally? Inside the crippled party, everyone is now asking the questions that were avoided at the time of the failed coup. They are attempting to determine whether the brutal result was caused by individual mistakes, fear of a Labour-SNP coalition, or a fundamental misjudgment in the party’s decision to enter government with the Conservatives in 2010.

* * *

Though there can be no doubt that the party was badly damaged by Clegg’s decision to join the Tories in government, the seeds of the Lib Dems’ eventual electoral collapse may have been sown before the coalition was formed. On the one issue that damaged the party more than any other – its high-profile U-turn in favour of increasing tuition fees – the ground had already been prepared.

After he became leader in December 2007, Clegg had begun to shift the party away from the social democratic populism that had defined it throughout the 2000s. Clegg and a circle of like-minded MPs, including Chris Huhne, David Laws and Vince Cable, wanted to move the Lib Dems towards the centre ground. The founding document of this group was the Orange Book, a collection of essays published in 2004, which argued that the party needed to find market-friendly solutions to policy problems.

By the time of the 2010 general election, Clegg’s Orange Book revolution was still incomplete: on a number of issues, the party was caught in an ideological no-man’s land, with a considerable divergence in views between its old social democratic wing and its centrist faction.

The Liberal Democrats had opposed Tony Blair’s controversial decision to introduce tuition fees in 1997 – and fees soon became one of the party’s signal issues. But in the wake of the financial crisis, as public finances tightened, the Cleggites became increasingly concerned about the party’s stance.

In December 2008, Julian Astle, who was director of the party’s thinktank Centre Forum, made the first attempt to shift the debate. “The Liberal Democrat policy on fees is regressive and ineffective,” he wrote, in a paper entitled “Time’s Up”. The Lib Dem universities spokesman, Stephen Williams, also believed the abolition of tuition fees was an expensive albatross: with support from Clegg, Williams tried three times to shelve the policy, and met sharp resistance inside the party. One MP, David Howarth, threatened to stand down and force a byelection for his Cambridge seat if the party reversed course.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Cameron and Nick Clegg hold their first joint press conference in the rose garden of Number 10 Downing Street in 2010. Photograph: Charlie Bibby

But Clegg believed a moment of reckoning was imminent. A major review of university funding, initiated by the Labour government and chaired by the former BP CEO Lord Browne, was to be published in October 2010, and it was widely expected that the report would recommend abolishing the £3,000 annual tuition fee cap. Before the 2010 election, however, Clegg did not feel strongly enough to challenge the party’s commitment to free education – and he backed away from a battle over the issue at the 2009 Lib Dem conference. “There are only so many fights you can have before an election,” one of his aides recalled. But few expected the party would be forced to confront the matter so soon. “We probably did not think in 2009 that we were going to be in government from 2010,” the former party spokeswoman Baroness Grender said.

The party, desperate for votes, then fell into a trap set by the National Union of Students. In November 2009, the NUS persuaded 400 Liberal Democrat candidates, including Clegg, to sign a pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative. To make matters worse, Clegg agreed to be filmed doing so. Aaron Porter, then the NUS president, recalls that the directive for party members to sign the pledge came from the Lib Dems’ campaign department rather than the party leadership. “It was very easy to get them to do it,” he said. Still, in the party’s 2010 manifesto, Clegg tried to create some wiggle room – keeping the commitment to abolish fees, but pledging to phase them out over six years.

However, after the general election, when Clegg’s team began negotiating with the Conservatives on the terms of a coalition, the tuition fee promise was quickly jettisoned. Over the summer of 2010, the view that the party had betrayed voters by abandoning one of its core promises began to take hold. “Clegg had to have a position [on the tuition fees U-turn], but in the summer, as the narrative of betrayal built up, he was very vague about what he wanted,” said one of Clegg’s aides. “It was quite chaotic in those early days. He talked about a graduate tax, but no one believed a graduate tax would work. We spent hours discussing the presentation, probably more than the policy.”

Many senior figures – including Clegg’s new press secretary James McGrory, Jonny Oates, the chief of staff, and David Laws, the former Treasury chief secretary – warned that supporting a rise in tuition fees would be disastrous. As business secretary, Cable looked for a way out; Danny Alexander, who had taken over from Laws as chief secretary to the Treasury, insisted the party should go along with the rise in tuition fees. Alexander, who participated – alongside Clegg, Cameron, and Osborne – in the “quad” meetings where coalition policy was hammered out, was less interested in the politics of the issue than the economic impact; he believed it was a necessary step to reduce the deficit. Far from being abolished over six years, as the Lib Dem manifesto had promised, fees were to treble over two years. Cable made numerous adjustments to the policy to make it less regressive, but by November he knew what had been spawned – on another trade mission to China, he watched on television as protesting students tried to trash the Conservative headquarters.

In December, on the eve of the Commons vote to raise fees, Martin Shapland, the chairman of Liberal Youth, went to see the chief whip Alistair Carmichael to make a final attempt to persuade the party to change course. “I told him the damage was going to be permanent and he disagreed,” Shapland said. “I even put a wager on it. At the time we, as a party, were identified with two issues: anti-war and anti-fees. What we did was equivalent to Labour coming out against social justice. The problem was at the time there was nothing but bravado about owning coalition policies.”

Aaron Porter tried to persuade the former party leader Charles Kennedy, one of the 21 Lib Dem MPs to vote against the fees rise, to say more in public. An apologetic Kennedy assured Porter that he would have his fights, but not so early in the parliament. Ahead of the debate, he took Porter up to the Commons gallery, and told him: “From here you can stare into Cable’s eyeballs as he sells out the party’s principles.”

From here you can stare into Cable’s eyeballs as he sells out the party’s principles Charles Kennedy

Baroness Williams, one of the original members of the “Gang of Four” who split from the Labour party to form the Social Democratic party in 1981, agrees that the fees decision cost the party dearly. “I just think we did not reckon with how deep the issue was, or how deep it would become,” she said. “It was a big mistake.”

Williams believes the party made similar errors in dealing with the unpopular NHS reforms spearheaded by the Tory health secretary Andrew Lansley – a set of proposals the scale of which appeared to have crept up on the cabinet unawares. Initially Clegg defended them: in an interview with Andrew Marr in January 2011, he called the reforms “a fusion of the best thinking of the Lib Dems and the Tories”. But within two months, Clegg was facing new protests from his MPs, as figures such as John Pugh brought deputations of senior doctors from the Royal Colleges to brief Clegg on the damage they believed Lansley’s reforms would cause.

It took Williams, who had previously been one of Clegg’s loyal supporters, to force him into retreat at the party’s spring 2011 conference in Sheffield. Facing the prospect of a wider revolt, Cameron and Clegg announced a “pause” in the NHS reforms: the bill did not reach the Lords until October 2011, and it only passed into law the following year after numerous changes engineered by Williams and like-minded peers.

“At the time, the Lib Dem party did not have anyone who was a great expert on health,” Williams recalled, describing her intervention. “Lansley is very much like a civil servant in many ways. He is very focused and hardly talks to anyone else – a lone man, a bit like Edward Heath in that sense. He had this fixed idea that all you needed to do was change the structure of the NHS and give commissioning powers to GPs. He is a decent man but fundamentally quite obsessive. So I went to Nick and said, ‘We are not having it’. Nick has never been very good at consulting more experienced members of his party or people who have actually been in government, such as David Steel. He did not fully realise the significance of what was being proposed, and he did not have that much time. It was only when he realised he could not carry his conference that he started to listen to me.”

According to Williams, Clegg apologised for having not studied Lansley’s proposal more rigorously. “He said to me, ‘I got the issue wrong – I had not had time to read it, and I should not have allowed it into the Commons without more scrutiny.’ In all fairness, he is in many ways a gallant noble man, very reasonable and thoughtful. One time he called me over to his offices in the pouring rain at short notice, and he was at the top of stairs with a towel waiting for me.”

Nonetheless, Williams believes Clegg made one more major error – eagerly joining the relentless Tory assault on Labour’s economic record. “I think the constant attack on Gordon Brown as being responsible for the banking crisis was terribly unfair and untrue,” she said. “We should not have taken part in it, but in fact we took part in it enthusiastically.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters scuffle with police during a student rally in central London, in 2012, against rises in university tuition fees. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images

Cable was similarly troubled by the Lib Dems’ refusal to challenge the Tories’ economic narrative; he seriously considered resigning from his post as business secretary in 2012 in protest against Cameron and Osborne’s spending cuts. Although his critics say Cable is too academic and too ill-disciplined for the cut and thrust of modern politics, throughout his time in government he remained an irritation to his coalition partners. (His close relationship with Oakeshott particularly infuriated the Tories, and once prompted Cameron to offer to take Oakeshott with him on a trip to Moscow to act as his food taster.)

After wrestling with his decision, Cable decided to remain, in part because he loved his department and wanted to protect it from cuts. Cable also believed that Osborne was heeding his calls to slow the pace of cuts – even if Osborne would not publicly admit that he had changed course.

But the early combination of the tuition fee hike, the unpopular NHS reforms, and the continuing economic slowdown all took a toll on the party. At one point, Clegg admitted to his aides: “I am not really leading.” Within three months of forming the coalition, the Lib Dems’ popularity had fallen off a cliff – from 23 points to 13 points. Clegg’s personal ratings were even worse: in the summer of 2012, one YouGov poll found his approval rating had sunk to minus 59.

Those closest to Clegg insisted there was no going back. Richard Reeves, his influential strategy adviser in the first two years of the coalition, was the most adamant. “There is a new political market for the Liberal Democrats,” he wrote in the New Statesman in September 2012. “The party just needs to seek it out rather than looking wistfully at the old customers who have turned away. The leftwing votes borrowed from Labour in 2010 will not be available in 2015. New ones must be found.”

That same month, in a bid to set the party back on course, Clegg launched what later became known as his “masochism strategy” – a nod to the phrase Tony Blair used to describe his own encounters with angry voters around the time of the Iraq war in 2003. Phase one was a party political broadcast a week before the Lib Dem conference in Brighton, in which Clegg declared: “There is no easy way to say this. We made a pledge, we did not stick to it, and for that I am sorry.”

Baroness Grender, Clegg’s communications adviser at the time, admitted that the apology did not work – but she believes that it was worth trying. “There was very little advice against it,” she said recently. “The risk was that it achieved nothing and simply raised the issue again – and in a way that confirmed betrayal as the standard narrative. But I think tuition fees became the mantra you can deploy for a feeling you cannot explain to yourself. If it had not been tuition fees, it would have been health or the bedroom tax – it was driven by a general dislike of politicians, a general disbelief in politicians sticking to their word, and the way in which the smaller partner in a coalition always gets a kicking.”

* * *

In early 2013, Clegg received another warning of the Lib Dems’ electoral vulnerability. In February, Chris Huhne, one of the party’s big hitters, resigned as MP for Eastleigh after pleading guilty to perverting the course of justice 10 years earlier over a speeding offence.

Huhne’s resignation led to a snap byelection in his Hampshire seat, which was regarded as one of the party’s safest. In the end, the Lib Dem candidate Mike Thornton only just managed to win the seat. “It was a complete fluke the way it turned out,” recalled Lord Oakeshott, who warned at the time that the byelection showed the party was in mortal danger. “It was our best-organised seat and it just happened that the Tory and the Ukip vote was equally split, so Mike Thornton scraped home. It gave the leadership an excuse to say, ‘Where we work we win’, a claim that irritated many activists, since they were working their socks off and still losing.”

Disgruntled Lib Dem activists, mainly based around the left-leaning Social Liberal Forum (SLF), were ready to register their concerns just over a week later at the Lib Dem spring conference, which began on 8 March 2013. After a failed attempt by activists to make the party distance itself from the Tories’ economic policies, Naomi Smith, the SLF chair, began to feel that the party’s future was in jeopardy.

“It really became clear to activists that we were going to fight this election on the ridiculous ‘Stronger economy, fairer society’ slogan, this ‘we’ll split the difference’ strategy that meant that you were always defined by other parties. There was the iceberg. Everyone could see it. We were drifting straight towards it. Everyone admitted it and nobody seemed to want to point the ship in a different direction.”

There was the iceberg. We were drifting straight towards it and nobody wanted to point the ship in a different direction

The warning shots had been fired by the dissidents. But Clegg trundled on, dutifully carrying out the masochism strategy by turning up every Thursday morning for his weekly mauling at the hands of LBC listeners on his “Call Clegg” phone-in programme. These radio appearances were not only painful, they were time-consuming: each one required that he be prepped as if facing prime minister’s questions – on subjects ranging from the latest developments in Syria to the case of a Sheffield United footballer charged with rape. “Ignorance was never an option”, one of his exhausted aides admitted.

Towards the end of the year, attention moved to the final major electoral test before the general election, the May 2014 European parliamentary elections. Clegg’s team in the cabinet office, under the leadership of Jonny Oates, decided to fashion a campaign that was true to his beliefs as a passionate pro-European. They took the novel approach of talking about Europe in a European parliamentary election, and, braver still, decided to brand the Lib Dems as the party “In” on the EU.

Confident that his LBC training had made him an adept media performer, Clegg agreed to take part in two TV debates against Nigel Farage during the campaign. They were not generally perceived to be among Clegg’s most dazzling performances. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem energy and climate change secretary at the time of the debates, was unimpressed. “The disaster over the Farage debate was there was a Liberal Democrat leader who was representing the establishment,” he said. “You looked and you thought if you want to have a pop at the government or the country and people in power you’re not going to vote for Nick because he is the status quo. He didn’t turn Europe into the aspirational change thing that it needs to be.”

But Lord Ashdown, the former party leader and Clegg’s mentor, who ran the party’s 2015 general election campaign, thought that his protege acquitted himself well in the face-offs with Farage. “I don’t think it made any difference in the long run,” he said. “What I think did make a difference was that Nick was absolutely flawless throughout the campaign.”

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The European election campaign may have been flawless but the result was a catastrophe. The number of Lib Dem MEPs collapsed from 11 to one, as the party’s overall vote halved, delivering a humiliating fifth place in the share of the vote. By this point Smith was, she said, certain that the party desperately needed a new leader who was untainted by working closely in coalition with the Conservatives: “It became a case of ABCD – anyone but Clegg or Danny [Alexander].”

Although the European results were not declared until Sunday 25 May, after a poor showing in the local elections that took place on the same day, Clegg knew what was coming. He descended into what Ashdown described as “the darkest of the dark nights of the soul”. In a series of phone calls with key figures across the party, Clegg ventured that the time had perhaps come for him to stand down.

According to one senior Lib Dem who spoke to Clegg at the time, he said: “If I believe – and I think I’m very close to it – that I am the problem and not the solution, then I have to stand to one side.” But, the source continued, “I told him, ‘You don’t have that luxury – this is your burden now, you have to carry it through to the election. Whether you believe that or not, it’s tough titty.”

Clegg was so worried – and determined to canvass opinion widely – that he even consulted the party president, Tim Farron, a figure from the left of the party who had never been a natural ally. Farron knew there was trouble when Clegg contacted him on a Saturday night, while Farron was attending the wedding of his long-serving aide, Paul Butters.

“We ended up interrupting a bit of dad dancing,” Farron recalled. He went outside to the car park to speak to Clegg. “Nick was just distraught about everything and we knew the Euro [results] were going to come the day after, and he felt every single loss personally. There was never a sense of, ‘This is mid-term blues, collateral damage.’ He could feel it and the kind of weight you saw on him and the emotion on his face in that speech on the Friday morning was very real.”

Farron advised Clegg to carry on. “I just thought, ‘This could end up in a bloodbath,’” he recalled, “and we’re far better off sticking with the captain who has done nothing to deserve this.”

Ryan Coetzee, the Lib Dems’ director of strategy, said that everybody advised Clegg to stay. “Nick got a pretty relentless answer from practically everybody. So he concluded that the right thing to do was to stay.”

It was only days later that Clegg’s small team faced down the coup organised by Oakeshott, which had the tacit support of Cable. Their quick defeat of the rebellion seemed to restore Clegg’s political confidence: “Nick got through that,” Ashdown recalled. “When he’d internalised it, put it behind him, he was like a liberated man in the last six or seven months to the election. It was astonishing the speed from which he moved from the darkest of the dark nights of the soul to utterly on form, utterly clear about what he was doing.”

The way was clear for Clegg to run, for himself at least, a relatively relaxed general election campaign in which he served tea to travelling journalists and swung from a zipwire at a park in Devon. One ally said: “I remember Nick saying to me, ‘Look, I don’t care what the outcome of the election is’ – and he didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was – ‘provided I feel I’ve done the right thing. And we’ve done the best we can.’”

* * *

A veteran who served with the Royal Marines in Borneo in the 1960s, Paddy Ashdown is a man to turn to when your neck is on the line. With typical bluntness, Ashdown recalled the nature of his mission after Clegg asked him to head up the Lib Dem campaign. “This was a survival election,” he said. “My job was to make sure we survived – by and large.”

Ashdown, who joined the elite Special Boat Service after the Royal Marines, called his campaign command centre “the Wheelhouse”. Key aides, including Baroness Grender and Clegg’s long-serving media adviser Lena Pietsch, held three meetings a day of the 11-strong Wheelhouse executive during the campaign.

The first stage of their work involved building a ground campaign that would target 50 seats. At the time, Ashdown believed that it would be possible to win about 25 seats; if things went exceptionally well, he thought, the party could win up to 40. That higher tally was regarded as the magic number required to give the Lib Dems influence in a new coalition.

The party’s “air campaign” – national messages aimed at broadcasters – proved painfully frustrating as it dawned on the leadership that they were on course to be swallowed up by their coalition partners. Private polling had persuaded the Tory campaign director Lynton Crosby that Cameron’s most likely route to a majority lay in gobbling up Lib Dem-held seats in the south-west. In the end, 75% of Tory gains were taken from their junior coalition partners.

“We knew we had a problem with the south-west – we weren’t completely blindsided,” said one Lib Dem strategist. “When Cameron popped up in Yeovil and Twickenham, alarm bells were ringing, but not as much as they should have been.”

About three weeks before polling day, members of the Wheelhouse executive realised the disaster that they were facing. It was clear that the Tories had struck gold with their warnings about a possible tie-up between Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP. Voters’ fears were exacerbated by the false impression in opinion polls that the election was a neck-and-neck race between Labour and the Tories. “Our vote was being seriously eroded by the Labour/Salmond thing,” Ashdown recalled. “There was a sort of hidden army of people who were so worried about Labour that they literally came out to vote for the first time.”

In the nightly meetings of the Wheelhouse executive at 6.45pm, after the main early evening news bulletins, senior party figures complained that it seemed impossible to persuade the broadcasters to move away from the SNP. The party pleaded with the BBC’s director of news, James Harding, to focus more on policy – but the party’s relations with the BBC had been strained during the prolonged negotiation over Clegg’s participation in the leaders’ television debates.

Senior figures were stunned when, two weeks before the election, Clegg suddenly suggested to the FT that he would not form a coalition with Labour if it involved any arrangement with the SNP. The signs that he was leaning towards a fresh coalition with the Tories – he criticised Labour for its “frothing bile” towards his party – also alarmed senior aides. “That caused lots of panic internally,” said one source, who added that Clegg had to be told that he must remain neutral about possible coalition partners.

For his part, the party’s communications chief Stephen Lotinga thought the campaign focused too much attention on forming a future coalition with either of the main parties. “We’d slightly drunk our own Kool-Aid,” he said. “But people don’t vote for coalitions … so it’s not a compelling proposition.”

Ed Davey feared that it was misguided to pitch the Lib Dems to the electorate as a “moderating force” within a coalition. “We were the centre party – and on one level that sounds really attractive,” he said. “But the old adage of ‘If you’re in the middle of the road, you might get run over’ operated in spades. We were in the middle of the road without any distinction – we had no visibility jacket on. No one could see us, so we really did get run over.”

We were in the middle of the road. we had no visibility jacket on. No one could see us, so we really did get run over. Ed Davey

The debate over possible coalitions risked reopening the rift between Clegg’s Orange Book wing of the party and the social democratic faction that leaned toward Labour. Charles Kennedy, the keeper of the social democratic flame, who died a few weeks after losing his Highlands seat, was keen to keep his distance from Clegg: a suggestion that Clegg might visit Kennedy’s constituency in Scotland was met with a curt two-word reply.

Other senior parliamentarians sent messages to the wheelhouse team that the party needed to sharpen a “fear” message. In response, the team conjured up the spectre of “Blukip” – with Clegg warning that a minority Tory government would be propped up by Ukip and the Northern Irish rightwing Democratic Unionist party.

Ashdown was cheerfully honest about a major flaw in the new theme – Ukip was forecast to win no more than a handful of seats. One senior party figure put it more simply: “On Blukip, no one believed it.” Adrian Sanders, who lost his Torbay seat, said: “I just gave up and thought they did not live in the real world. It was just dishonest. There was no possibility of an alternative coalition built around Ukip.”

Amid all the recriminations, Coetzee dismissed the idea that any campaign could have made much difference. If the key issue in many voters’ minds was the threat of the SNP, he argued, there was nothing the Lib Dems could do. “We didn’t have a response that was as powerful as the Tories’,” Coetzee said. “His response was: I’m David Cameron and I’ll tell you the solution to this problem. You give me a majority and there won’t be any SNP in the government.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Clegg resigns as leader of the Liberal Democrats

On election day, Clegg ended his campaign on an energetic note, rushing from Land’s End to John O’Groats, before finishing in his Sheffield Hallam constituency to await the results. A few hours later, at 10pm, the mood among the Wheelhouse team suddenly soured: as the BBC exit poll indicated that the Lib Dems would hold only 10 seats, a cry of “Shit!” rang around the room. By 2am, when the education minister David Laws lost his seat in Yeovil, the next morning’s meetings were cancelled, and plans for Clegg’s resignation were set in motion.

In the weeks since the election, the Lib Dem meltdown has left many supporters feeling shellshocked. Recently, Clegg was approached by a distressed woman while shopping on his local high street in Putney. Speaking through tears, she told Clegg that his party did not deserve the battering it had received from the British electorate. Buoyed by the heartfelt sympathy from a wellwisher, Clegg told the woman not to worry and thanked her for supporting the Lib Dems – only to be told that she had voted Green.

“People were quite angry,” Coetzee said. “They wanted to dish out a slap on the wrist – and then found they’d cut the hand off and were quite horrified by what had happened. Then they went around saying: ‘Oh I’m terribly sorry, I’ve cut your hand off.’”

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