[Image by Paul Kehrer under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic]

Two or three months ago, if you’d told me Nick Clegg would be deputy Prime Minister in a Con/Lib coalition, I’d have invited you to pull the other one.

This is a spectacular result for a party whose distributed support around Britain means that they have on average to achieve three times as many votes as Labour and the Conservatives do to get a single seat in parliament. In February I would have put money on a Conservative PM with a decent majority. It seems churlish to be disappointed in the Lib Dem position now.

I am disappointed by Labour, though.

If this morning’s Guardian story is accurate, Labour chose the security of opposition – and the knowledge that the coming years will make government a very unpleasant place to be – over the opportunity, however unpopular and slender, to form a rainbow coalition and push ahead with an agenda of progressive democratisation. Reportedly, the things which stuck in their throat were: moving towards PR, abandoning ID cards & the third runway at Heathrow, and increasing Britain’s renewable energy generation.

I’m a floating centre-left voter. I look at that list and I see either a party which believes in paternalism, surveillance, and pollution, or a party which chooses political security over its belief that the fiscal policies of the opposing party will destroy our economy. So, fine. I didn’t vote for Labour in this election, but I might have voted for them at the next one, especially if it comes in the next few months as a consequence of the collapse of this coalition, which remains a possibility.

But not if that’s what Labour are at the moment: snooping and cravenly unable to face the economic challenges of global warming, and determined to cling to the artificial polling advantage afforded to them by manipulation of the First Past The Post voting system. Perhaps they really do need a spell in opposition to rediscover their identity.

So what about Nick and Dave?

Or I should probably say “Dave and Nick”.

Well, they’ve really been handed a poisoned chalice. Bonne chance, boys. This will, in many ways, suck.

That aside, though, I understand that the coalition agreement will be released later today. It is absolutely vital that it be released in full. There must be no tacit pledges, no private clauses. All and any commitments the parties have made to one another in order to become our government must absolutely be public. The British power structure has an addiction to secrecy. If this really is to be a new day, the basis of it must be open to scrutiny. What have the Lib Dems traded for those cabinet posts? And what have the Conservatives given in exchange? We need to know. Apart from anything else, when all this comes tumbling down – and it probably will; historically, coalition government isn’t stable here – we need to know who wasn’t able to stick to his word.

[UPDATE: the agreement has now been released, and it's, er, exhaustively sketchy. Obviously it was never going to look like a legal contract as such, with clear, stated definitions, but there's wiggle room hither and yon, and there will be some tense moments when the cloudy bits are brought into focus. The precise contents of the Great Repeal Bill, for example, may be a flashpoint - the name, to my linguistic delight, already sounds more William Pitt and less Campaign For Plain English - but it'll need close watching to make sure it doesn't neglect any important areas now that its proponents are in government. The other thing I'd really like to know is what the agreement doesn't say; what areas did they not dare get into with one another?And what tacit assumptions have they left vague? What deals have been done by omission? On Europe, for example, I heard a couple of self-described 'inner circle' Tories - no one I'd ever heard of, but hey, I wouldn't have - who believed in the EU, agonising over the possibility that David Cameron's aggressive stance on various bits of legislation was intended to provoke a crisis with the EU which would inevitably lead to our withdrawal from it. Rough stuff, politics...]