It has been revealed in the last couple of days that former Scottish Secretary, Borders MP Michael Moore, had been offered the opportunity to resign – but chose to be sacked.
Angry friends of Mr Moore have made it known that Deputy Prime Minister and Moore’s Liberal Democrat party leader, Nick Clegg, gave him that option.
To his credit – and in further proof of how wrong a decision it has been to remove Moore – the Scottish Secretary said that he would have no part in any ‘political charade’ and would wish simply to be sacked.
It is a gross misrepresentation of his very real abilities and achievements in a tricky job, that Moore was the sole Cabinet Minister to lose his job in the reshuffle.
However, this revelation goes far beyond the fact of the offer to Mr Moore in his replacement by Fred Flintstone, aka Alistair Carmichael, Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland.
It was Mr Clegg who made the decision; who informed Mr Moore – and presumably Mr Carmichael; and who executed the replacement.
So are we looking at a coalition which is effectively not a coalition but two camps, each managed independently by its own leader and with a Prime Minister who appears not to be architect of his own cabinet team?
Each ‘side’ has clearly been allocated specific jobs, with Cameron and Clegg respectively filling and refilling their ‘own’ posts.
This means that the best possible candidates for each jobs are not necessarily those who are placed in them – nothing new there, of course; and that, more seriously, the Prime Minister is not in charge of the specific performance profile of his own cabinet.
Back in 2010, the Liberal Democrats negotiated an astonishingly preferential deal in exchange for the support for the Conservatives they had no responsible alternative to delivering.
