State of union

My own coalition can be traced back 25 years, although the writing on the paper bit dates to 23 years. It was a union initially negotiated over an exploratory island-hopping holiday in Greece, comprised of sun, freckles and the usual getting-to-know-you exercises. One party was just out of a coalition that had ended badly, the other had spent a few too many years sulking over a coalition that was never going to happen however much he pulled that face and went about the place looking seductively tragic (or so he thought).

Over the years, the coalition has been engaged in protracted negotiations. Whereas David and Nick have to reconcile their differences over deficit reduction, tax measures, political reform and education, to name but a few, our coalition has had to face up to weightier matters. Such as the reasonableness or otherwise of continuing to play squash twice a week when there are three young children in the house. Once a week – that was the settled compromise agreed under Squash Reduction Measures, paragraph one.

There has not been much loud falling out, as argument is not the style of this coalition. Sulking and chiding silence has occasionally taken its place.

More recent negotiations, easier now that the coalition co-partners are nearly all grown up, have concerned one party – the non squash-playing one – taking up gym membership and joining a choir.

Personal coalitions can fail just as surely as political ones, but so far this one seems to work. As the coalition bumps along through middle age, each partner occasionally pauses to wonder what the other will be like in another 20-odd years. Will one witter so much and continue to repeat what he says and will the other rise ever earlier until she is getting up before she has gone to bed?

Of course, private coalitions such as ours concern only two parties. Political unions are much more complex. They are fraught with complications and potential flash-points, which the neighbours (which is to say, the newspapers) will be waiting to spot through eyes greedy for dissent.

TO return to matters more overtly political, I notice that last week’s column drew the following online observation from York Fox – “Such biased tosh as always, Jules...”

Happy to oblige, sir, although it is fair to say that one man’s tosh is another man’s hopeful truth. Still, disagreement is good, colourful disagreement even better.

In this brave new political world/queasiness-inducing union of slick political opposites (delete where applicable), a person’s response to any given development will run along a certain bias.

Take, for instance, the new Chancellor, George Osborne, popping up the other day to intone funereally that after 13 years of Labour misspending, the finances were in a much worse state than even he had dared to imagine.

How predictable that Boy George should trundle out that line. Some of what he says may be true, but to suggest that every spending decision made by Labour was a bad one is plainly bonkers. Besides, some of us can recall the tatty state of the nation in 1997, with falling-down schools and a sclerotic National Health Service where waiting times were cruelly long. This is not to suggest that one side is right and the other wrong. Not all Labour money was well spent, but much of it needed spending.

Anyway, something worries me about Boy George. He is now charged with easing the deficit – a big financial problem, certainly, but one which he talked up endlessly for political gain – and yet he has never worked in the City, run a bank or any other major concern, aside from the family’s upmarket wallpaper business. Mr Osborne’s financial experience appears to amount to nothing much at all.

At which juncture a “heaven help us all” is probably called for.