Last week Ian Duncan Smith (IDS) became the first Conservative cabinet minister to resign over party policy since the Tories returned to power in 2010.

As Secretary for Work and Pensions, IDS oversaw a wide range of controversial changes to welfare provision before offering his shock resignation in response to last week’s Budget announcement.

On Sunday’s BBC Andrew Marr Show he accused the Prime Minister and Chancellor of going too far in their quest to tackle the nation’s fiscal deficit. The juxtaposition of tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) to those with disabilities, he said, were indefensible.

During the same programme former Liberal Democrat minister David Laws told of the divisions between Mr Osborne and Mr Duncan Smith throughout the last parliament.

Despite five years of very public Tory reservations over sharing power, if IDS’s claims of conscience are to be believed and accusations of political motivation disparaged then having the Lib Dems in government to veto Osborne’s agenda must have been a god send.

So, are we better off with coalitions?

For a country said to be so used to one-party rule, throughout the last Westminster mandate of 2010-2015 the only one-party majority government to be found across the UK was the SNP-dominated Executive in Scotland, elected in 2011.

Even there the SNP majority was a surprise, garnered within an electoral system actually designed to prevent any one party from dominating. In Wales, the current government is a minority Labour government.

Coalition requires political parties to compromise, to complement and even sacrifice manifesto pledges for the sake of forging agreeable programme for government.

Between 2010 and 2015, depending upon the Lib Dems to wield power at Westminster a Conservative Party sceptical of power-sharing and divided over Europe displayed rather impressive party discipline.

Now, having upped their representation in the House of Commons and won a surprising though slim majority of 17 seats, amazingly the Prime Minister and Chancellor have never looked more vulnerable.

Backbenchers are rebelling over welfare and cracks ahead of June’s EU referendum have been blown wide open. Some pundits are predicting all-out Tory civil war.

In Northern Ireland, mandatory coalition often comes under criticism but, really, our ways of institutions are more stable than we give them credit.

Power-sharing is a fact of political life here. Elsewhere too, given the fragmentation of parliaments across the continent, inter-party governments are becoming more commonplace.

Previously, if our two biggest parties agreed to a Programme for Government and smaller groups refused to take their seats at the Executive, pundits would have predicted the political equivalent of Armageddon. Now, not so much. Despite the rhetoric, compromise is at the heart of Stormont.

Following May’s elections, should the Ulster Unionist Party and SDLP choose to go into opposition together at the Assembly such a move may be viewed more with interest than anxiety.

Whatever you believe Ian Duncan Smith’s reasons for resigning may be, there is no doubting that the presence of another party in government vetoing his own Chancellor’s demands kept him from quitting earlier.

No form of government is perfect, it seems, but compromise is the prerequisite for good governance.