This choatic Coalition risks being eclipsed

With just days of this parliament left the Coalition is at last cracking up.

Not in the sense of the Conservative and Lib Dem elements pulling apart, but leading members of the Government seem to be buckling under the pressure of the impending election and acting as mad as March hares.

George Osborne’s well-received Budget has yet to budge the poll ratings significantly.

That leaves the Lib Dems facing electoral oblivion.

In an effort to avert this, Danny Alexander decided to unveil his own Budget the day after the official announcement.

It showed shockingly poor political judgment.

Those not simply bemused by the sight of the Treasury No.2, who’d signed off on the previous day’s decisions, disowning them and talking up his personal package of measures instead were amused, if not by the sight of Alexander brandishing a yellow Budget box on the steps of the Treasury, then by the plethora of Photoshopped mock-ups that followed.

They included replacing the yellow brief case with a children’s lunchbox, Spongebob Squarepants and a box of crayons.

Danny will almost certainly lose his seat in May. But he has been one of the more colourful Coalition characters and the daft stunt felt like a fitting finale to his time in government.

The Prime Minister knows his coat’s on a shoogly peg in No. 10 too and he appeared to be feeling the strain when he summoned a select group of journalists for a chinwag around the Cabinet table last week.

It used to be shorthand in cartoons to dress a character up as Napoleon to denote they’d gone crazy.

So what to make of the David Cameron comparing himself to the Duke of Wellington?

He deflected a question about what would happen if he didn’t get a majority in May by declaring: “I don’t think the Duke of Wellington spent all the time before the Battle of Waterloo answering questions about what he was going to do if he didn’t win.”

The Iron Duke famously claimed the Battle of Waterloo, at which he vanquished his French foe 200 years ago this year, was won ‘on the playing fields of Eton”.

Cameron, an Old Etonian, must be hoping the same will apply to the electoral contest ahead.

But if he’d paid attention in history at the super-posh private school he’d know the Duke of Wellington’s political career was short, messy and ended in personal unpopularity.

It was questions about another battle that saw the PM really lose his rag.

Quizzed on whether George Osborne’s announcement of £1 million to commemorate Agincourt and his Budget boast that the battle saw an English army overcome “renegade Scottish nationalists” was an admission that the Tory party had all but given up on trying to win over Scots voters, he leaned back and let rip a derisive volley repeatedly asking the reporter: “Do you really, really believe that?”

He added: “Did you wake up this morning and think: you know what, I think the sun is going to rise, there’ll be an eclipse next week and because someone made a joke about Agincourt the Tories have given up on Scotland?”

Of course the journalist in question had the last laugh by failing to correct the PM on the timing of the eclipse which was in fact on Friday.

This gave rise to the worrying thought that the PM, confused about the date of the celestial blackout, would be charging around Downing Street on Friday morning calling an emergency Cabinet meeting because the sun had been switched off.

His outburst may seem trivial but it gives an inkling why he wants to avoid debating Ed Miliband.

If the bullying and condescending side of the PM’s personality were to peep out from behind the usually-congenial faade during a TV head-to-head it would be David Cameron facing his Waterloo on May 7.