Bernard Ingham: Alexander the great hope for the Lib Dems

Not yet 40, he has been dismissed as a mere one-time press officer for the Cairngorms National Park, as indeed he was for a year before being elected in 2005 for a constituency with scenery to die for – Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey.

He has come a long way from the Cairngorms in seven years. First he was Nick Clegg’s chief of staff. Then he masterminded the Liberal Democrats 2010 manifesto before being one of the architects of the Con-Dem coalition agreement.

His first government job was as Secretary of State for Scotland, only to be drafted at short notice into the Treasury when David Laws fell victim to the Parliamentary expenses curse.

Now he is one of the key men in the coalition taking the tough decisions with David Cameron, George Osborne and Clegg.

I must confess I have never met the lad, but I have warmed to him because of the way he conducts himself. Not for him cheap publicity.

He gets on with his difficult job quietly, occasionally surfacing calmly to explain why something is necessary – for example, public sector pensions reform.

We do not, of course, know how he advises his colleagues and whether they take any notice of him.

But I think we can be pretty certain that if he were a hot-head, with little thought for the cohesiveness of the coalition, we should have heard him raving by now.

This suggests to me that he is a serious politician who should be watched.

It is a pity his Lib Dem colleagues in the Cabinet are not as reticent as him. With the exception of his successor at Scottish Office, Michael Moore, Messrs Clegg, Vince Cable and Chris Huhne have behaved very badly indeed.

Clegg can be relied upon to go off at half-cock on most things, especially when touring abroad. His advocacy of giving 46m people shares in nationalised banks when the taxpayer has recovered his bail-out money does not suggest his eye is on the ball – debt reduction.

Cable repeatedly gives the impression that he wishes he were anywhere but in a coalition with his “ruthless, calculating and thoroughly tribal” Tory colleagues who, he thinks, have incited “racial tensions” because of their approach to immigration. His pet idea of a “mansion tax” may be as dead as Lloyd George but he won’t let it lie down.

As for the desperately ambitious Huhne, he is given to grandstanding, as when he took on the Prime Minister and Chancellor in Cabinet over the Tories’ approach to the Lib Dems’ great lost cause – reform of the electoral system.

He is also a national liability as Energy Secretary because his policies, while enlightened compared with Angela Merkel’s in Germany, mean it is going to be a close-run thing keeping the lights on towards the end of this decade.

In other words, Alexander’s colleagues are nothing to write home about. They are clearly not the sort you would want to go into the jungle with, even allowing for their disastrous by-election performances culminating recently in Inverclyde where they garnered only 627 votes and lost their deposit.

I can understand their consternation and their feeling impelled to try to preserve something of their distinctive approach to that of the Tories.

But, as David Laws has warned Huhne and others, the voters will not thank them for sniping at the Tories instead of seizing the opportunity that a hold on power has given them.

That hold was always likely to be, at best, uncomfortable and, at worst, excruciating, given the coalition’s legacy of debt and national dysfunction.

But, having done their patriotic duty by entering it, the public is likely to judge them in 2015 by how well overall they have performed in restoring Britain’s public finances.

With more than three years to go, their opportunity is far greater than their present slough of electoral despond might suggest.

But it will not be enhanced by regular disparagement of their Tory colleagues or by drawing attention to their obstructiveness on taking Europe down a peg or two, scrapping the Human Rights Act or containing immigration.

I suspect Danny Alexander knows this and behaves accordingly. A man for the future.