First reactions to the cabinet

 

Two initial reactions. First, Mr Clegg obviously plays a lot more hard ball than his Mr Nice Guy diffidence would have us believe, a fact rather borne out by his somewhat meteoric arrival on the political scene via the back doors of European Parliament.  He’s definitely someone you’d want on your negotiating team and clearly has the ruthlessness to extract every last drop of goodies from the final bargain. He now has nearly as many of his party in the cabinet as the Conservatives and has pushed through various major Lib-Dem policies (although electoral representation principles seem to be pretty flexible!).

Second, there’s an extraordinary mix of people in the cabinet, from the old school Tories of Mr Hague and Mr Clarke to the comparatively inexperienced Danny Alexander (representing the Scots and the Lib Dems all in one fell swoop). At a dinner party, it could make for deathly silences or highly entertaining and intelligent conversation. As a cabinet, it is slightly more worrying that the mix could go either way.

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