Tory: Make coalition permanent
By politics.co.uk staff
The Lib-Con coalition should be put on a permanent footing, with just one candidate standing in each constituency, an influential Conservative has suggested.
Tory MP Nick Boles, who founded Policy Exchange, David Cameron’s favourite think tank, said the set-up would be natural given the two parties would have shared the same record for the five years before the election.
“The government is going to come under enormous pressure over the next few months and years and so what I’m saying is, if we’ve spent five years together governing, we’ve got the same record to defend,” he told the Today programme while publicising his new book, ‘Which way’s up?’
He added: “Surely it would make sense that in each constituency there’s one coalition candidate who’s representing everything that we’ve done and everything that we want to do over the following five years.
“An electoral pact would make an enormous difference in making sure that every backbench MP, however small their majority, has an interest in sticking with the coalition until the election in 2015.”
Mr Boles is the first Tory to break rank and suggest that the coalition survives beyond the next election.
