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Dealing with a marriage of convenience

By Channel 4 News

Updated on 13 May 2010

Within days political rivals have turned into a double-act. After campaigning against each other, can Cameron and Clegg make the coalition work? Psychoanalyst Susie Orbach speaks to Channel 4 News.

"There are two parts to this problem," relationship counsellor Susie Orbach told Channel 4 News.

"There is the problem between them and there is the problem for us who aren't used to a coalition or we think we aren't used to a political coalition."

Prime Minister David Cameron and his new deputy Nick Clegg appeared as a "match made in heaven" at their first joint press conference yesterday. So is the relationship as friendly behind closed doors and how will the country deal with the new coalition?

Suzie Orbach told Channel 4 News that it was important that Britain embraced the new power-sharing government and saw the change from adversarial politics as positive.

"We've all grown up in families, or most of us have," she said.


"Sometimes we have two parents and we know how we war and we known what a kind of collaborative and yet problematic leadership can look like, we know it in our bones.

"Hopefully there is a lot of work going on right at the moment to enable not just them but the whole nation to rethink what it means to be politically literate and emotionally literate. We've got an opportunity to rethink things.

"There are sharp divisions in British politics but a lot of the time we know, watching things in the house, the differences are manufactured.

"They have some real serious differences, they're going to have to work very hard to find a way to say they still have those differences rather than pretend they don’t."

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