Letter From Europe: Agreeing With Nick Clegg, When It Suits

PARIS — There was a time when, almost like a mantra, British politicians of all stripes would offer enthusiastic assent to just about everything Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, might suggest.

“I agree with Nick,” they would say in the days of political courtship before the national election a year ago when voters, disenchanted with big party politics, returned a hung Parliament in which neither of the traditional titans — Conservative and Labour — had a majority. The perennially third-place Liberal Democrats became the kingmakers. Agreement with Nick was the passport to power.

Then, after some brief wrangling, the person who agreed most with Nick turned out — counterintuitively, perhaps — to be the Conservative leader, David Cameron, who agreed with Nick so much that he made him deputy prime minister in Britain’s first coalition government since World War II.

Laughing, joking with each other, icons of youthful promise, both svelte and well-spoken, the two men appeared side by side in the rose garden at 10 Downing Street — some pundits even called them clones — insisting publicly that their alliance would work for the good of their battered land despite their wide ideological differences.

But a year, it hardly needs to be said, is a very long time in politics, and ever fewer people seem to agree with Nick.

When he agreed to Conservative plans for a huge increase in college tuition fees, students rampaged in London, blaming him for breaking promises.

In a referendum last week on his flagship policy to overhaul the electoral system, Britons voted by a ratio of two to one against. Across the land, in local elections on the same day as the referendum, the blame for Britain’s harsh austerity measures seemed super-glued to Mr. Clegg, whose party lost hundreds of local council seats, unlike Mr. Cameron’s Conservatives, who had steamrollered the cost savings through Parliament yet survived the vote intact.

In other words, the experiment in what Mr. Cameron once called a “new politics” had stalled.

So the Liberal Democrats are finished, right? Their day in the sunshine of power is over, yes? Britain will inevitably return to two-party politics, eschewing the coalition negotiations and compromises that routinely haunt European alliances from Berlin to Rome?

Well, maybe not. This week, it became the fashion again to agree with Nick, or, at least, to encourage him to stay on as his party’s leader and fight what could be Britain’s biggest political struggle to safeguard its vaunted National Health Service from Conservative changes.

Indeed, the National Health Service has become the potential battleground not just for the survival of the coalition but also for something quintessentially British that many Britons fear will be lost to ruthless Conservative measures that pander to privilege and punish the poor.

As the Conservatives have cast around for ways to cut costs in the face of Britain’s debt, with the Liberal Democrats tagging along — sometimes like children on an outing — Mr. Cameron’s followers already have shown themselves prepared to assault whole pillars of a Britain portrayed by the former poet laureate John Betjeman as a nation of suburban predictability and bucolic charm.

The austerity measures have threatened public libraries and forests — both beloved of middle-class and literate supporters who have resisted the ax of austerity.

But the National Health Service remains Britain’s great institutional conundrum — the only source of free medical care for most people, a central assumption of British life, at once beloved and reviled for its blend of administrative bungling and miracle moments, yet now jeopardized by reformist zeal.

The proposed changes would hand control of most of the ￡100 billion, or nearly $163 billion, annual health budget to the service’s 42,000 general practitioners and, critics argue, they would propel the public health system into the arms of private service providers who would cherry-pick the most lucrative parts, leaving other parts to crumble.

There are clear signs that Mr. Cameron himself believes the changes are too radical.

And now, said Polly Toynbee, a columnist for The Guardian, it is time for Mr. Clegg to reverse his previous acquiescence in the health care overhaul. After his drubbing by the voters, she wrote, “a burning-rubber U-turn is never a pretty political sight, but it is the only option that might, just possibly, avoid sudden death.”

The Liberal Democrats themselves seem to have drawn similar conclusions. Mr. Clegg has promised a “muscular liberalism” to differentiate his party from its coalition partner.

It is not a hard calculation. While some Conservatives want to call an early election, they have no guarantee of surviving a fresh ballot if they are depicted as the dragon-slayers of the National Health Service. Mr. Cameron, indeed, has said he does not want the coalition to collapse, agreeing with Nick who wants it to continue albeit with different ground rules.

“We need to show people where we have a moderating influence on the Conservatives and we need to stand up for our values and say that loud and clear,” Mr. Clegg said.

It is clear enough from the coalition’s mood music that the unease between the parties goes far beyond policy matters.

Lord Tony Greaves, a Liberal Democrat peer, even called Mr. Cameron a “toffee-nosed slimebag.”

Such epithets evoke Britain’s enduring class distinctions, which reserve much opprobrium for those like Mr. Cameron, educated at Eton College, Britain’s most exclusive private school, and Oxford University, where he joined an elite dining and drinking club called the Bullingdon.

In Parliament, the opposition Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has used that record to lampoon Mr. Cameron as Flashman — a fictional 19th-century bully, scoundrel and military officer with upper-crust credentials. (Mr. Cameron hardly helped his own case the other day when he turned to a female lawmaker, Angela Eagle, in Parliament and told her to “calm down, dear.”)

The prime minister has sought to deflect Mr. Miliband’s jibes, letting it be known, for instance, that, in a one-of-the-guys way, he likes to be called Dave.

So maybe, Dave has concluded it helps to have a political partner called Nick, sometimes to agree with, and sometimes to take the fall. Or, as Mr. Cameron put it in public on Thursday, “a strong coalition government” is “what I’m absolutely committed to delivering.”