If you'd been asked in May 2010 to come up with two ministers embodying that month's political marriage, Michael Gove and David Laws would have seemed a smart answer. The modernising Mr Gove was so committed to coalition that he publicly said he would gladly give up his cabinet seat to make room for Lib Dems at the top table. For his part, Mr Laws was so immediately at ease with the Conservatives that he scuppered the faint possibility of an alternative pact with Labour by making embrace of Tory-type cuts a precondition.
Four years on, while Mr Laws is schools minister and Mr Gove is his boss, scrapping between the two is reducing the education department to an unruly playground. One source briefed the Sunday papers that the education secretary's costly obsession with free schools approached "lunacy"; hours later, a second source leaked official emails that undermined the Lib Dems' claims that they had figured out how to fund their own pet project, free meals for all infant pupils. Part of all this is the inevitable posturing of rival parties now within a year of a general election. Last week, the Institute for Government highlighted how officials in some ministries are now explicitly asked to restrict discussion to one party. It urged rules of engagement for the coalition's final few months, so that mandarins and ministers could manage the tension without putting sound governance at risk.
But no code of cross-party working will deal with the deeper problem revealed by Messrs Gove and Laws slinging their satchels at each other. Neither wing of this avowed austerity government is any longer prepared to accept the consequences of its own fiscal arithmetic. Sunday's Conservative leak pointed the finger at Nick Clegg for having trumpeted free lunches for little ones at his party conference without having thought through the obvious knock-on costs of re-kitting school kitchens. Free-for-all dinners would certainly have been a nice thing to have had in the good times, especially as they may soothe the stigma felt by poorer children who have always lunched on the state. The Tories, however, could reasonably question whether buying meals for children who are already eating well is the best use of money in cash-strapped times – or, at least, they could have done if they had not originally forced the deputy prime minister to concede their own money-squandering scheme, for a marriage tax break, in return for the basic cost of the lunches. And that is even before the latest £400m bailout of free schools, many of which are failing to fill their places, a bailout that so worries a Conservative-led Treasury that it is now manoeuvring to control the costs.
What is particularly damning is that both coalition parties now stand effectively charged – by each other – of threatening the dispatch of the core duty in education: to provide a school place for every child. The leaked school dinner emails warned that the plan could force the department to "divert money from providing school places to meet basic need or from meeting urgent maintenance" of buildings, whereas Mr Gove's £400m rescue of the free schools' finances is reported to come direct from a fund to ensure that every child has a place. Immune from local democratic control, free schools were never going to be to everyone's taste, but – just like universal free lunches – new institutions to challenge existing ones are something many would have welcomed during the good times. But in times like these, with growing numbers of parents getting refused by their preferred local primary school, such support cannot be assumed.
The early phase of austerity was achieved by raising VAT and savaging capital budgets, the latter a form of cutting that postpones pain until tomorrow. Slowly but surely, however, the effect is shifting on to the services that we all rely on – and this will only intensify over the years ahead. It is an inescapably grim prospect. But it is one made all the grimmer by the fact that politicians who preach about tough choices have lost none of their taste for diverting scarce funds into eye-catching schemes.
