LONDON // Britain's coalition government marks its first year in power today amid mounting doubts that it will survive long enough to celebrate a second birthday.
The country's first peacetime coalition since the 1930s will end "sooner rather than later", Peter Bone, a senior Conservative backbencher, predicted in parliament this week.
Few on either side of the political divide were prepared to bet against him.
It was the Conservatives who won most seats in last May's general election, but fell 20 MPs short of an outright majority in the 650-seat House of Commons.
After five days of horse-trading, the third-placed Liberal Democrats, with 57 seats, agreed to a coalition deal with the Tories, with a five-year mission to balance the books after being left with a record budget deficit by the outgoing Labour administration.
And, despite this unlikely marriage of convenience between the right-of-centre Conservatives and left-of-centre Lib Dems, it seemed at first to be going well.
Prime Minister David Cameron and his Lib Dem deputy, Nick Clegg, appeared joined at the philosophical hip as they set about slashing public spending.
But, from the outset, there was considerable, if only muted, discomfort at the arrangement among the parties' respective memberships, particularly in many rural parts of England where, for years, the Lib Dems had formed the main opposition to the Tories.
By last autumn, things had become measurably worse after Mr Clegg reneged on his party's very public pre-election pledge to freeze university tuition fees and, instead, went along with Mr Cameron's plan to triple them.
Labour, now led by new leader Ed Miliband, took a lead over the Conservatives in the opinion polls for the first time in more than two years and support for the Liberal Democrats started to melt away.
It has been downhill for the Lib Dems ever since, culminating last week when they suffered near annihilation in voting for local councils in England and for the parliament in Scotland.
Worse, the result of a referendum to change the UK's voting system at general elections - a condition of the Lib Dems' agreement to go into coalition - was resoundingly rejected by the electorate amid claims by many senior Liberal Democrats that the Conservatives had funded a dirty tricks campaign to defeat the change.
Further proof of the Lib Dems' fading fortunes came in an opinion poll in The Times yesterday, which showed that two-thirds of respondents believed the party had had no influence on their Conservative partners' policies since going into coalition. Only a third of voters who supported the party a year ago said they would vote for them again.
Consequently, Mr Clegg is now facing very vocal demands from the party faithful that he assert the Liberal Democrat position much more strongly in government.
Simultaneously, an increasing number of backbench Tory MPs are demanding that Mr Cameron make no more concessions to the junior coalition partners following their electoral disasters last week.
Clashes ahead - perhaps ones that could prove fatal to coalition unity - stem from new Lib Dem demands that the Conservatives backtrack on their plans for fundamental reforms of the National Health Service and the supervision of the nation's police forces, and beef up controls on the banking sector.
Another flashpoint will be renewed Liberal Democrat demands for changes to make the upper legislative chamber, the House of Lords, more democratically accountable by having its members elected, rather than appointed.
Such demands have alarmed, if not infuriated, Conservative backbenchers but Mr Cameron maintains that the coalition will see out its five-year mission, while accepting there are problems ahead.
"We are committed to a coalition government because it is the right thing to do. I said I wanted it to last for five years and I meant it," he told The Sunyesterday. "The challenge for the next period is going to be how do you have two parties perhaps wanting to make their voices heard more clearly, but still achieve that coherence?
"I think the Lib Dem top team and the Conservative top team will still work together very well. But that is going to be the challenge."
Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrats' former finance spokesman, has reservations. "We have done a five-year deal. We need to think carefully and work back from 2015 as to how we disengage so that we can be a clear, independent force at the next election."
A senior Liberal Democrat party worker added yesterday: "Right now, we're between a rock and a hard place. Many of us don't like the way things have gone but, were we to pull out now and force an election before the benefits of the past year's painful changes have filtered through, we would face electoral oblivion if last week's votes are anything to go by.
"The past year started full of promise for us but has ended pretty disastrously. Will the coalition survive? For now, yes. As for the future … it's not going to be easy."