At last the waiting is over. Gordon Brown has left Downing Street, tendering his resignation to the Queen. A new administration is imminent. Despite the prevarication, the doubts and the ideological differences, David Cameron and Nick Clegg have struck the deal that will give Britain a government.

It had to happen. Any other outcome except a Conservative-Lib Dem arrangement of some kind was surely unthinkable. A coalition between Labour and the Lib Dems, even without Gordon Brown, was simply unacceptable. We will get the least bad option following an inconclusive election.

So, how will it play here in the West? There will be compromises and many policies important to both Lib Dem and Conservative voters will be kicked into the long grass in order to make this unlikely alliance work. There must be doubts, too, about how long it can hold together. MPs are not – despite occasional indications to the contrary – mere lobby fodder. They will vote according to their consciences and on some issues divisions are unavoidable. Lib Dems will hold their noses and back the Conservatives only so far. Another election, perhaps this year, is likely.

But with those two caveats firmly in mind, the Westcountry, which is broadly divided – at least in rural areas – between Conservative and Lib Dem supporters, should be able to extract at least some benefits from having both of those parties in a power sharing deal.

Lib Dems have, for decades, been on the frontline of the battle to get a better crack of the whip in our part of the world. On everything from water charges to fairer funding for schools, Liberal Democrat councillors and MPs have rightly complained that the West deserves better than it gets. Now, if Lib Dems do prop up a Tory administration, they must turn those complaints into action and demand their new "friends" in government deliver.

The Conservatives, for their part, have bent over backwards while in opposition to style themselves as supporters of rural England and of agriculture in particular. They must stick to their promises and follow through on the most important of those policies, including authorising a cull of diseased badgers as part of the battle against bovine TB. It is, after all, the least they can do to reward those voters in our region who backed them at the General Election.

As they wrestled with the question of which way to jump, right towards the Tories or left to Labour, many Lib Dems faced a head versus heart conundrum. The head said Conservative, because that delivers a guaranteed Commons majority; the heart said Labour because Labour is politically closer to most Lib Dems.

The head had to win over the heart, however. The alternative would have condemned Nick Clegg to justifiable attacks that he was propping up the losers at the election. A marriage with the Tories was the only option. It might not last but while it does it is up to us here in the West to make the most of it.