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After spending five days of demonising the Liberal Democrats, the Daily Mail is finding it hard to stomach the idea of a coalition government. The Mail’s reaction to the share of the LibDems in Cameron’s new government is symptomatic of the “traditional” reaction to power sharing deals that result from coalitions.

It is hard for the politics of the personal to adapt to this new reality where your political adversary before the election could be sharing the corridors of power with you the next. That too is a not so often cited advantage of proportional representation. Smear mongering is potentially reduced because unless it is really justified and unless it is definitely part of the political reasoning (as in exposing criminal links or something of the sort that provides a service to the voter), every participant has to remember that his interlocutor might be part of the government forming majority come post-election day.

The Mail – caricature that it is – still contains articles calling the LibDems “harlots” and hardly manages to hide its disdain at the share of the cabinet won by the LibDems (and don’t forget that Nick Clegg is deputy PM). You’d expect a pro-Tory paper like the Mail to avoid jabs at coalition partners so early in the day. It shows an inability to adapt to the new realities of sophisticated politics where the much maligned “compromise” is really a result of complex dealing and thrashing out based on reason and not presumptious one party rule by constitutionally guaranteed (or electoral law engineered) parliamentary majorities.

A coalition partner is, in a way,  an opposition party in power – an additional check and balance to the prudent use of legislative authority by the administrative branch of government. The Mail may view the LibDems as a harlot – quite an expensive one to maintain – but my guess is that they will get used to this harlot much more quickly than they like to think (especially if the fixed-term parliament proposal is included in the Queen’s speech).