The week in politics: Regular as clockwork, another crisis arrives
Just as one stupendous crisis draws to a close, another slots neatly into its place.
By Alex Stevenson
It's been another tough week for the coalition. After two months of the entire health sector trying to explain to them in straightforward and uncomplicated terms quite how stupid their NHS reform ideas are, they've tried to pull off the most absurdly embarrassing U-turn of all, while explaining all the while that it's a perfectly healthy, normal thing to do.
It's not. Yet somehow they managed to emerge intact. This, as Nick Clegg pointed out on Tuesday, is coalition government. Somehow, both parties use the other as cover for their mistakes. The only real loser in this situation is poor old Andrew Lansley, who would have escaped such public humiliation if David Cameron's No 10 had got its act together sooner and prevented him going so far. Ah, well. Time for some more summer reshuffle speculation.
Yet, as we also learned this week, that is unlikely to be the big story of the coming months. Instead it's the looming clash between unions and ministers over public sector pensions which is now on the horizon. Teaching unions voted to go on strike on Tuesday; the broader Public and Commercial Services union joined them a day later. Now we know that up to 750,000 public sector workers could walk out on June 30th.
The government is unlikely to curl up into a ball and be rolled over, as it had been on the NHS. With no money in the coffers, the Tories and Lib Dems are set to stand firm in the face of union-fostered anger. As chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander made clear on Friday, he's not prepared to budge. Hopes of ongoing talks actually reaching any kind of agreement are now miniscule.
It's not just the coalition which has been struggling. Labour leader Ed Miliband has spent the week trying to bounce back after his catastrophically poor prime minister's questions performance last time. He was much better this Wednesday, if a bit melodramatic. He will hope that he's done enough to persuade his party that they picked the right Miliband. A strong performance in a speech about welfare on Monday will definitely have helped in this regard. Some irritating advice from Tony Blair will certainly not have done.
Elsewhere, it feels as if the silly season has arrived a little early. Nick Clegg made the joke of the week in his speech to parliamentary journalists on Thursday. An aide to Boris Johnson was forced to resign over utterly unwise comments about his shoplifting inclinations. And David Cameron and Nick Clegg found their tough week getting just a little bit harder when an irate doctor showed them who was really in charge. Even the powerful deserve a bit of sympathy when they're treated like that…
