Never. Going. To. Happen.

Sunder Katwala has a feature in the latest New Statesman suggesting that the Liberal Democrats should join a coalition with Labour for the run-in and then campaign together in 2010. Gordon Brown is Prime Minister, Nick Clegg becomes his deputy and Alistair Darling makes way for Vince Cable at the Treasury.

To his credit, the president of the Fabian Society more or less talks himself out of the idea before the end of the column. But he suggests that such a coalition would be the only way Brown could survive as Prime Minister following the election and the best way to maximise Lib Dem influence.

The theory goes the Liberal Democrats would be in a lousy position after the election, regardless of the result. In a hung parliament with Labour the biggest party, they would not countenance propping up a PM who lost his majority. And they would never go into coalition with the Conservatives if they were the biggest party.

To make it happen, Labour drops ID cards, commits to electoral reform along the lines of AV voting and fixed term and shares out the big departments.

But surely this Labour Government would never do such things? Much of it’s home affairs legislation in the past five years has made right-wingers balk. And the Lib Dems would still be propping up an apparently dead-duck administration.

Most importantly, a sizeable portion of the party’s 63 MPs – not least possibly Nick Clegg himself – would likely find themselves more at home in the Conservative Party.

Aside from the fun of making the coming election more competitive, there is no way this will happen. (probably.)

Let’s make a fight out of this? Please?

Surely someone should tell Gordon Brown how infuriating it is when he doesn’t answer questions? He’s getting worse at it, replacing answers with tired sound bites which all the polling tells us are not working.

It shouldn’t be this difficult. Many of the Conservative ideas should be easy to pull apart or at least criticise convincingly. They aren’t proposing to ‘do nothing‘. The public may agree or disagree with the plans, but people can see ‘do nothing’ is not true, regardless of how many times Brown repeats the line for the evening news.

This all means David Cameron gets three of four free hits every week. He’s not even having to try very hard to land the punches. Of course PMQs isn’t really relevant outside the village, but I think it does set the tone. It determines the way the media view the Brown v Cameron dynamic.

The more times he dodges the ‘do you still claim to have abolished boom and bust’ from Cameron, the more times the media is going to ask him. They’ll also ask his ministers, over and over again, anything to find someone who’ll slip up and give them the line.

Just in an effort to make this competitive and more entertaining during the long run-in to the election, surely Brown’s operators can up their game?