Bernard Ingham: Cameron is on the back foot over the police front line

Life is now apparently so complicated that the Home Secretary, Theresa May, has problems defining the front line in police terms.

HM Inspector of Constabulary seems to have some idea what it might be because he has found one-third of police officers do nothing that could be considered front-line work. Then we hear that Warwickshire Police are taking coppers out of the front line to fill back-office jobs left vacant by people made redundant.

None of this reflects very well on the management of police resources but it doesn’t get us much further in defining what is and isn’t front line.

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Nor does it explain why people complain about never seeing a policeman – or that when they do, they do such daft things as threatening a schoolboy with common assault for chucking a marshmallow at another – while the thin blue line has such a remarkable record in protecting us from terrorists, given Britain’s infestation by fanatics.

But that is by the way.

You would have thought that the coalition would have had a very clear idea what the front line meant before it tried to reassure us that the cuts should not affect it.

Anybody with the slightest acquaintance with the political games people play in the public sector could have told David Cameron that his assurance was an open challenge to local councils and agencies to do their worst.

An undefined front line is an immensely elastic concept for the embarrassment of No 10. It is now open season for the tormenting of the Prime Minister and his Chancellor, George Osborne – as if government wasn’t tough enough with Gaddafi and UN resolutions round your neck.

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Which brings me to the trials of our Con-Dem Government. I reckon it is fast approaching a crisis. Apart from the consequences of “government cuts”, there are two potential breaking points.

One is the referendum on changing the electoral system. While a “Yes” vote would probably end any prospect of a Tory Government for the foreseeable future, it would give the Liberal Democrats a seemingly permanent place in a coalition – in other words, a fate worse than death is riding on the outcome for both parties. That alone spells trouble.

At the same time, if the polls are any guide, both are likely to come a cropper in the local elections, with the Lib Dems being battered most.

Many of them will ask whether coalition has been worth it if they lose both the referendum and their hold on local councils.

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But – and this is a very big but – what would the electorate make of either party if they plunged us out of pique, as it might seem, into an unwanted election just when they are painfully getting to grips with the overriding national problem: a deficit of £150bn?

Labour will, of course, make a fuss about their travails but they will have no appetite for making it terminal. They have no economic credibility, an unimpressive new leader and no money.

I conclude that neither next month’s referendum nor thumping – and simultaneous – losses at the local elections will result in a Cameron/Clegg divorce.

But life is going to get much tougher for them. How’s this for a list? The acute worries about NHS reform; the uncertain attempt to shake up education; the upheaval from the redirection of the welfare state, the already controversial approach to criminal justice reform; the desperate need to secure our energy supplies; the impending retreat from Afghanistan while we seem to have little idea where we are going in Libya; and the unresolved unrest across North Africa and the oil-rich Middle East.

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Even during its honeymoon, the coalition never had a sure presentational touch. It is all too prone to be at odds with itself – and not just Tory v Lib Dem.

We have a coalition that is attempting something approximating to the Labours of Hercules.

To be less of a walking crisis, it could do with being far more fly than is evidenced by its inabilility to define the police front line.