@Steaming Willie (has anyone else looked that up in the Urban Dictionary?)

This is not a legitimate government. The Lib dems campaigned on a platform of opposition to the cuts plans of the conservatives. They then ratted on those election pledges. That is a fraud on the electorate. It undermines the central idea of a compact between the government and the governed that legitimates rule. Go back and revise your constitutional law.

Further, the formalist argument is that the parliament (not the same thing as the government) has an avenue to remove the government in order to form a new one or that the electorate has a path to remove the government by elections. But almost the first thing the Con-dems did was to start planning to escape those controls - by tilting the playing field on votes of confidence with a view to getting a full 5-year term no matter what. That fatally undermines, in my view, any claim for this government to be called a legitimate government.