Richard Hayton: Happy together for now but will it turn out to be a shotgun wedding?

For: In the end, most General Elections come down to a choice between change and continuity. As the results came in on election night, it soon became apparent that continuity had lost the election, but what form of change had won was far from clear.

After quite an extraordinary week of post-election bargaining, the change that has resulted is one that few had foreseen before polling day. The coalition between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats marks a historic watershed as the embodiment of the emergence of a genuinely multi-party politics at Westminster.

The fact that it has happened at all is also a tribute to the political dexterity and leadership skills of both the new Prime Minister and his Deputy. As polling day approached, David Cameron could have been forgiven for allowing himself to dream in quieter moments of entering Number 10.

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After 13 years of Labour government, the most severe economic downturn for a generation, and seeking to replace a weary and unpopular incumbent, the Conservative leader must have felt that the ultimate prize in politics was tantalisingly close.

Little could he have imagined that he would find himself standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the Downing Street garden with the rival who had threatened to derail that ambition through his own sparkling performance in the first televised leadership debate. But politics makes for strange bedfellows.

By entering into this partnership, Nick Clegg and Mr Cameron have made an audacious leap into the unknown. For both men it will be a trial of their abilities to carry their parties with them into territory which many of their backbench MPs and party members will find alien.

But each has shown the capacity to seize the moment to make virtue out of necessity, and by doing so, created the momentum to propel their parties in their chosen direction. Whether this unity can be maintained will be a sterner test.

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For David Cameron, this provides an opportunity as well as a threat. In his four and a half years as Leader of the Opposition, he succeeded in presenting himself as a much more appealing and electable figure than any of his three predecessors.

Yet, like William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, he struggled to change negative public perceptions of his party as a whole (about a fifth of voters claim to like Mr Cameron but not his party).

By forging a "progressive alliance" with the Liberal Democrats, Mr Cameron has staked a claim to the political centre-ground, and will have to facedown any challenge from his party's Right-wing. Such a public confrontation could provide him with the "Clause Four moment" he has so far lacked, demonstrating his willingness, like Tony Blair,

to take on and change his own party.

The risk for Mr Cameron of such a strategy is that his leadership will be weakened and more exposed than ever to vagarious backbenchers if the Liberal love-in fails.

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On the Liberal Democrat side, the stakes are higher still. Having waited decades for a hung parliament to hand them the balance of power, many in the party were dismayed that this was not the opportunity for a radical realignment of the Left against what Mr Blair used to call the "forces of conservatism".

The Parliamentary mathematics suggested such a rainbow coalition was barely possible, the attitude of the Labour backbenches made it entirely unworkable. Mr Clegg played his hand cleverly, securing through dual negotiations additional concessions from the Conservatives, crucially for his party on electoral reform and reform of the House of Lords.

But he faces an uphill struggle to maintain the confidence of Left-leaning MPs and activists uneasy about coalescing with their traditional enemies.

To preserve their trust and support, Mr Clegg needs to demonstrate his capacity to rapidly deliver radical political reform from within a Conservative-dominated administration – a truly Herculean labour.

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Messrs Cameron and Clegg have proclaimed their arrival in office as the dawn of a new type of government, promising a "seismic shift" in British politics. But the spectre that looms over their administration is the yawning budget deficit. The tax rises and public spending cuts that inevitably will soon be upon us in earnest will test this new politics to its very limits within months of its beginning.

In his retrospective of post-war Prime Ministers the historian Peter Hennessy identified self-belief as the key attribute found among successful officeholders.

If they are to successfully guide their parties, and the country, through the next five years together, Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg will need a unity and resolve rarely seen within political parties, let alone between former adversaries. They appear to believe they can do it. Their challenge now is to demonstrate to the people that they can.

Richard Hayton is Lecturer in Politics at the University of

Huddersfield.