Successful politicians are driven by an instinct to embrace success and run away from failures, especially their own. Nick Clegg certainly has these instincts, but the wrong way around. His most memorable speech was an apology for trebling tuition fees, ensuring he is now indelibly linked with the idea. And yesterday, he decided to attack his Governments welfare reforms just as it became clear that they are working better than any Tory dared hope.
In his defence, its hard to keep up with the pace of the British jobs miracle. Each month, the figures confound the predictions of even the most optimistic economists. In last years Budget, for example, George Osborne set out an ambitious target of getting 900,000 more people into work by 2018. This figure will now be reached next month.
All this is nothing short of phenomenal: more jobs are being created in Britain than in the rest of Europe put together. And it is also troubling the Bank of England, whose own forecasts have been proved as wrong as everyone elses. Mark Carney, its governor, said last summer that he would not think about raising interest rates until unemployment fell below 7 per cent which he expected to take three years. It took six months.
There has clearly been a game-changer, something that none of the economists had incorporated in their models. And senior figures inside the Bank are beginning to conclude (and openly hint) that this is Iain Duncan Smiths welfare reforms.
What confounded the eggheads was that the number of workers is growing four times faster than the number of working-age people: in other words, Britons have become far more likely than pretty much anyone else to look for and find work. Why? Its hardly the dazzling salaries on offer, since wages are still being outpaced by inflation. Nor is it immigration: thats still continuing, but the dole queues are shrinking faster. Fewer people now claim the three main out-of-work benefits than at any time during the Labour years.
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For the Welfare Secretary, all of this will be a welcome distraction from the ongoing saga of Universal Credit, a massive upheaval of the entire benefits system billed as his flagship reform. Its supporters (myself included) have been dismayed at the delays, setbacks and prospects of massive write-downs. His plan to have a French company, Atos, assess the sick was also a calamity. To the people caught up in the chaos of such failures, the mayhem is unforgivable. And the jobs boom is not all down to IDS: much of it may come from the depressing fact that salaries remain stubbornly low, which makes it more tempting to hire extra bodies.
But still not since Churchill presided over an economy recovering from war have so many Britons found so much work so quickly. At present, the Prime Minister intends to fight the next election on deficit reduction. But that strategy was decided before the scale of the employment bonanza was clear. So instead, his message should be: jobs, jobs, jobs. After all, this is as clear a success as you can get in politics a radical gamble, based on basic Tory principles, which has made us an oasis of job creation in a beleaguered continent.
It could have been a Liberal Democrat triumph, too, had Nick Clegg been minded to take credit for it. But he has decided that all of this is just too Tory for his grassroots to swallow. One of Cleggs aides confesses that, given the popularity of welfare reform, the Deputy Prime Minister considered boasting about it on his leaflets but his team decided that they couldnt, because their activists would refuse to post them.
So the Coalition has split, appropriately, on one of the fundamental points of conservatism: that docking benefits and imposing sanctions may sound cruel, but doing nothing is by far the greater cruelty.
