It’s the second week of May in 2015. The TV flashes and murmurs in the background as we write. The weird condensed melodrama of 24-hour news broadcasting is experiencing one of its gala events. Seeking but rarely finding an original and illuminating perspective, the usual pundits, publicists, bloggers and controversialists are queuing up to give the British people their hastily assembled take on the spectacular 2015 general election results. Contrary to the most informed predictions, the Conservatives have secured a small majority in the House of Commons.

In 2010 they had regained power after 13 painful years of opposition, but only with the support of the Liberal Democrats, which enabled the Conservatives to form the first coalition government in Britain since the end of the Second World War. It was not a resounding success for the Conservatives by any means, especially given that the outgoing Labour government had presided over the worst economic crisis in living memory. No matter. They were back and keen to get started.

Everyone agreed that the problems the Conservatives faced were significant. Since the crash of 2008, tax revenues had fallen precipitously, yet barely comprehensible amounts of money had been used to bail out ‘too big to fail’ banks. As the global financial system stalled, these banks found themselves on the verge of collapse and in desperate need of assistance from the state. By 2010 ‘tiny green shoots’ of economic recovery had just begun to appear on the barren post-crash landscape, but the incoming coalition government continued to run a huge deficit. Indeed, this deficit seemed set to cast the British economy in shadow for the entirety of the coalition’s term in office. As the outgoing Treasury Secretary Liam Byrne observed in a note left for his successor, there was, apparently, ‘no money left’ (Owen, 2010).

Members of the Conservative Party held the vast majority of the coalition’s major cabinet posts. What first appeared to be a fragile coalition – composed of two political parties that possessed, on the surface of things, very different views on economic management, welfare and social justice – turned out to be remarkably strong. It was fully capable of coping with the choppy waters of parliamentary life to forge ahead with a radically cautious political programme couched in the language of apolitical pragmatism and ever-so-careful economic management.