The Coalition That Gaffes Together…

Were America's 24-hour newsrooms not so enthralled over LiLo's mug shots or when Mel Gibson gets his next one, they might have picked up on these two nuggets that occurred during Prime Minister David Cameron's trip to Washington this week.

First, the Prime Minister admitted to Sky News' Adam Boulton that Britain, while not a pushover, was the junior partner in the special relationship with the U.S. What really irked British media though was not Cameron's admission of this generally accepted reality, but how he qualified it.

Cameron suggested that the UK was also the junior partner in 1940. While this might play right into the hand of my jingoist compatriots who to this day insist America saved Britain's hide in World War II, there's a slight historical problem with this.

As 'The Few' took to the air to defend Britain's skies against Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe, the States remained on the sidelines, limiting itself to not-so-covert assistance of the Allies by way of the Lend-Lease Act. The resolve of 'The Few' prevailed when Germany formally abandoned the Battle of Britain in December 1940, months before Roosevelt and Churchill would meet off the coast of Newfoundland to promulgate the Atlantic Charter, and a solid year before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Even after America's "day of infamy", the United States only declared on Japan, which resulted in an invitation to the European theatre through Germany and Italy declaring on the U.S. on 11 December 1941.

Doesn't sound like a senior partner to me.

The staffers at 10 Downing, though, were more pressed into action over another gaffe that had occurred 12 hours earlier at the lectern of the House of Commons. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, standing in for Cameron during this week's Prime Minister's Questions, tussled words with Labour's Jack Straw, who served as foreign secretary and Lord Chancellor during Labour's past 13 years at the helm. In an effort to score a political one-up on the opposition amid a charged climate lacking decorum, Clegg declared: "Maybe he one day - perhaps we will have to wait for his memoirs - could account for his role in the most disastrous decision of all, which is the illegal invasion of Iraq."

Slight problem: a majority of Conservatives, including a freshman MP from the constituency of Witney named David Cameron, backed Tony Blair's government in joining the U.S. in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Liberal Democrats, when Clegg was representing Yorkshire in the European Parliament, were the largest party in Britain to oppose the war and declare it illegal.

What followed was a stark lesson for everyone running the Coalition government. 10 Downing attempted in vain to qualify Clegg's comments as his own, and then refused to counter them as Conservatives went on the counter-offensive. This also generated confusion over who exactly will declare whether or not British involvement in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was illegal, as a spokesman for the inquiry looking into the lead up to the conflict said its findings will not include an explicit statement of legality. Further, Clegg's statement from the dispatch box, were it to become a legal reality, could provide grounds to pursue criminal cases against current and former Government officials and even British troops who served in Iraq since March 2003.

While this may not prove too much a dent in the viability of the Cameron-Clegg Coalition, the slip-up in putting party platform over Government position, alongside the repeated yet draining efforts of Commons Speaker John Bercow to maintain order during the first PMQs with a Liberal party member at the lecturn, will give the Coalition reason to re-assess their strategy when dealing with a regrouping Labour opposition and disgruntled backbenchers. For Clegg, it is a stark reminder of the importance to represent the views of the Coalition as a whole when he speaks in place of the Prime Minister. Besides, there now exists a once-monthly session for questions directed to the Deputy Prime Minister, where leeway may occur for where his views as the "junior partner" of the Coalition may differ from the Prime Minister.