I drafted this post before the horrendous Grenfell Tower fire. I didn’t have the heart for debating confidence & supply minutiae in the wake of that event. Then it seemed like Grenfell would make it impossible for the Lib Dems to contemplate approaching the Tories to make a deal. So this sat in my drafts gathering dust.

However, with news that the DUP are playing their characteristic negotiation hardball by refusing to answer calls from Theresa May for 36 hours whilst demanding £2 billion for Northern Ireland, I wonder if there is scope for this after all. Especially if part of the price of the deal is that Theresa May resigns, which could even be a relief for her at this point.

So here are my thoughts:

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Before the election, and before the Corbyn surge, I posted a scenario on my facebook whereby the election ends up in a Hung Parliament, and the Lib Dems jump straight back into bed with the Tories. That was shortly before Tim Farron announced ruling out a Coalition with the “May’s Conservatives”.

Now we have an actual Hung Parliament, with a dramatically weakened Theresa May, and the DUP keen to wring as much as possible from their deal with the Tories, regardless of the impact on the Northern Ireland peace process. This is a moment of high potential for the Lib Dems.

In a Hung Parliament scenario, Tim Farron was always going to have to go. Not because he’s a ragingly illiberal homophobe who thinks Christ hates the gay, but because he ruled out the possibility of any deals with either Corbyn or May. Which, tactically speaking, he had to do to try and win back voters who had punished the Lib Dems for the Coalition, whilst reassuring Corbyn-phobic voters that he wasn’t snuggling up to the beardy man.

But the end result of those contortions is a slightly increased Lib Dem group bound by a Gordian knot of ruled out deals, right when the threat of an unstable minority Government in hock to the DUP is real enough to delay the Queen’s speech. And so Tim Farron had to go, and by good fortune, there was an apparently ideological reason to force him out.

Personally, I think the Lib Dems are in the unique position of being able to offer Theresa May a confidence and supply arrangement that doesn’t invoke the same electoral punishment the Coalition did. This will depend on allowing the full reality of a deal with the DUP to provoke widespread revulsion among the electorate.

The Lib Dems wanted to be seen as saviours in Coalition, but there was no perception among voters as to what they were being saved from. The 2015-17 Tory Government certainly made a lot of people conclude, with hindsight, that the Lib Dems had been a restraining force. But that had limited effect, as the Lib Dems remained complicit in everything the Tories did by never threatening to end the Coalition. Which in turn created the perception that the Lib Dems had enabled the subsequent Tory majority.

If they have learned from this experience, then they will allow the DUP to demonstrate their ugliness before offering their own confidence & supply deal. This could successfully rest on two big asks:

A referendum on the final Brexit deal that includes revoking Article 50 as an option. A referendum on Proportional Representation that piggy backs the 2nd Brexit referendum.

The first ask will be easier to secure than the second, but in exchange for stabilising Government and seeing off the risk of another General Election in the short-term, it could well be a price Theresa May is willing to pay.

After all, May thought that championing Brexit would give her a huge majority, and it turned out that the electorate was much more ambivalent than she had been led to believe (it’s almost as if a 52-48 vote isn’t a clear expression of the will of the people, who knew?!).

So now there’s a big problem. May’s entire premiership is pinned to Brexit, she’s probably going to have to resign at the end of the two year withdrawal period (if she isn’t forced out before), and it’s increasingly clear that the Tories will be punished for anything less than a perfect deal that’s impossible to attain.

This could change how Theresa May thinks about a 2nd referendum, as it hands responsibility back to the electorate. It’s actually fairly easy to counter-argue hard Brexiteers who see a 2nd referendum as a sabotage attempt: if Brexit is going to be wonderful, then people will vote for it. If you think you’re going to lose a referendum on the final Brexit deal, then Brexit is no longer the will of the people and must be stopped.

The harder ask is Proportional Representation, but the Lib Dems can’t risk a deal with the Tories without it. Under a pure PR allocation of seats, the Lib Dem voteshare would have translated into 48 MPs, four times the 12 they actually won. So if there’s a chance of securing a change to PR, then the Lib Dems can risk a hit to their voteshare because, ironically, it would probably still involve an increase in seats.

There is also a convincing argument that if the Tories drop behind Labour in voteshare, PR would prevent a Tony Blair style landslide from happening, and potentially keep the Conservatives in the running for forming a Coalition.

It’s also quite likely the Tories would calculate they could win the PR referendum and properly end talk of electoral reform (Cameron wasn’t successful precisely because AV was an obvious fudge).

In any case, the Tories may well conclude that a double referendum they can pin on the Lib Dems is a lesser evil than having to repeatedly buy off the DUP. Especially as, when it comes down to it, a 2nd EU referendum gives them an out if things go as pear shaped as us Remoaners think they will.

And one thing the Lib Dems would have going for them is their refusal to break the 2010 – 15 Coalition; they can point to a track record of not reneging on deals (even if the background to that is bitterly ironic laughter from a generation of indebted students!), whereas the DUP are notorious for coming back for more.

Personally, I think the Lib Dems would survive such a deal, especially if a PR referendum was successful. It would provide stability for the next couple of years, though we’d most likely be looking at a 2019 General Election as a result. They would need to trade off by supporting some major Tory legislation and the budget, but here the threat from Corbyn could see at least a pausing of the worst austerity measures if not outright reversal.

The key factor here is the DUP. Given a choice between Theresa May at the mercy of the DUP, or Theresa May kept in check by the Lib Dems, which would you choose? I think it likely that a reasonable number of people would choose the Lib Dems. In other words, it’s plausible that the Lib Dems would be successfully shielded from retribution by being seen as rescuing us from DUP influence.

Now, that’s a risky calculation for the yellow team to take. But as they teeter on the edge of irrelevance, the right deal may well serve them better than no deal.

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Photo credit: featured image based on photo of Tim Farron by the Liberal Democrats.