Warsi said she could understand why the Liberal Democrats were battling to assert their identity. "Minority parties across the world try and carve out individual identities for themselves because they feel they are going to be swallowed up by the more mature, the more grown-up and stronger party. I am glad what I see from my Conservative colleagues is a more grown-up approach to collective responsibility and to make sure if we come to agreements we try to stick to them."

Result - #Labour HOLD Goresbrook, Barking & Dagenham LBC: Lab 1113, BNP 593, UKIP 91, Con 81, LD 48. Swing BNP>L since May '10: 5.3%

Result - #Tories HOLD Watlington,Oxfordshire CC: Con 865, LD 259, Lab 157, UKIP 110. Swing C>#LibDems since '09: 5.1%

Result - #Tories HOLD Plaistow, Chichester DC: Con 455, LD 408. Swing C>#LibDems since '11: 14.4% (\via @Freddietandy)
Less than half the #Tories May 2011 voters turned out in Plaidstow this time, so the #LibDems came close despite also polling less votes. The #LibDems enjoyed a big swing towards them in Plaistow from May last year, but this is largely due to a huge drop in the #Tories vote. So the #Tories have held Plaistow for the 8th time in 9 years. It seems the 5th by-election since 2003 did have some repercussions though...

The Business Secretary suggested that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats will go their separate ways at some point before the election. This would give both sides time and space to draw up their own manifestos.

However the comments raise the prospect of the Lib Dems abandoning Government after four years, possibly after the party's conference in September 2014, leaving a paralysed Tory administration locked in place.

The Fixed Term Parliament Act which passed into law in September 2011 says that elections are held every five years. This would mean that the next election is scheduled to be held in May 2015.

However Mr Cable said that it was likely the Coalition partners would go their separate ways before then.

Mr Cable was asked on last night’s Pienaar’s Politics on Radio Five Live whether the Lib Dems would break away “just short of the election to give itself a bit more space to establish a independent platform in the run up to an election”.

He replied: “Everybody involved knows that before the next general election - the two parties will have to establish their own separate platforms and identity but how that disengagement takes place, over what time period is very much an issue for the future, certainly not something we’re talking about at the moment.”

He added that “of course” there would have to be a disengagement “because we will be competing as a separate party with a separate manifesto and I am sure the Tories think exactly the same way”.

So effectively the spineless one is saying that in order to preserve some semblance of not being yellow Tories the Lib Dems would just split and hope no-one remembered the previous five years?
They would pretend that they had had nothing to do with the situation the country finds itself in at that time and the party with which they had been in willing coalition.

That's so incredibly cynical they might just get away with it.

Whitehall sources said former investment banker David Laws, who was forced to resign as chief secretary to the Treasury over an expenses scandal two years ago, is now being lined up to come back into the government in an imminent reshuffle to beef up its economic credentials.

As a minister in the Cabinet Office the Liberal Democrat MP would sit in on cabinet meetings and have a "roving role" in government. It is hoped he will be able to drive forward policies to drag Britain's economy out of the doldrums.