An election of all the losers

Who needs a “none of the above” option on a ballot paper? Certainly not the British electorate. It has found a way of delivering that verdict using just the classic old “pick one candidate” form.

The 8 June election was the one everyone lost.

The poor old Liberal Democrats won only a handful more seats, taking their total to 12. That’s far behind the glory days when after two generations of hard work, they peaked at 57 under Nick Clegg, becoming a real force in British politics. Unfortunately, Clegg took them into coalition with the Conservatives, securing himself a cabinet seat on which to park his bum, but turning his party into mini-Tories. Why would anyone vote for a Tory lookalike when they can choose the real thing instead? It’s going to take a long time yet to come back from the car crash the Lib Dems created for themselves under Clegg – who lost his own parliamentary seat on 8 June.

Then there was UKIP. This is the far-right United Kingdom Independence Party which used to be led by Nigel Farage. He made clear what “Independence” meant in his book: he spoke at the Republican Party congress in the US and disappeared up Donald Trump’s fundament at the earliest possible opportunity after the Donald took the White House. Farage is a perfect expression of the Brexit spirit: it removes us from dependence on all those shifty Europeans, instead making us completely subservient to the Trumpiverse.

In one of the better pieces of news from the election, UKIP saw its vote fall from 3,881,099 to 593,852. Essentially a wipeout, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.

Then there was the Scottish National Party. It reached previously unimaginable heights of success in 2015, taking 56 out of the 59 seats in Scotland, reducing the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour to just one seat each. There was, inevitably, only one way for the SNP to go but the extent of its fall was impressive: a loss of 21 seats, leaving it still the largest party north of the border, but much chastened. That was the price of insisting on another independence referendum at a time when the electorate had become tired of the subject.

The fate of the Conservative Party was a joy to behold. Theresa May went for an unnecessary election to convert her small majority into a much larger one. “Strong and stable” was her mantra, repeated to the point of nausea; in the event, she lost her majority altogether, leading to her scrabbling to find a little provisional stability by a pact with Northern Ireland’s pious and bigoted Democratic Unionist Party. That means fumbling to form an enfeebled government within which her own position is substantially weaker.

Theresa May promised strength and stability
but ended up feeble and fumbling

And finally, there was Labour. Most people, and I was very much of that number, expected the leader Jeremy Corbyn to run a weak campaign and take the party to its worst result since 1935 or at least 1983. Well, we were all wrong. Corbyn found an inspiring dynamism that I didn’t expect him to produce and the party did far less badly than expected. It had a huge surge in its popular vote (but even the unhappy Tories achieved an increase, if a far smaller one). Disappointingly, the surge only delivered Labour 32 more seats, leaving it just four ahead of the number it took from the defeat of 2010. However, the 2010 score had one great advantage over that of 2015: it was close enough to a majority to make the victory at a future election a realistic prospect. We are, at least, back in that position again.

In many ways, Labour emerged strongest – or at any rate, least injured – from the election. There’s no denying that it was defeated, but it is on the way up where all its main rivals are on the way down. That’s encouraging but mustn’t lead to complacency. There’s still a mountain to climb: Labour needs twice the growth – 64 additional seats – to secure a parliamentary majority at the next election than it achieved at this one.

That’s going to need some brilliant, inspiring and effective opposition over the next few years. Perhaps not many years: minority governments tend not to last long. But for that time, long or short, we’re going to need to see Corbyn at his best, the dynamic figure who emerged from the election campaign, to consolidate the party’s position today and prepare to take the huge step remaining to get back into office.

In fact, it means winning the confidence of a far bigger tranche of the electorate. So, next time, unlike this one, voters don’t go for “none of the above”. And we don’t see another election of all the losers.

Weak and wobbly failed. Admitting errors and preparing for a different future

Well, I got it wrong. Badly wrong. I expected that under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour would emerge from the British General Election with its worst result since 1983, while the Conservatives would increase their majority.

By comparison, the actual result was far more encouraging. The Tory Party lost its majority altogether. Indeed, nobody won a majority in the House of Commons. The Conservatives emerged as the biggest party, but lost seats, and can only form a government by making a deal with Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland – who may well prove difficult bedfellows.

Even so, my forecast was entirely mistaken. I’ve fallen victim to the trap outlined by the physicist Niels Bohr: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. Simple honesty means I have to admit as much.

The results: a lot more red than expected

My first error concerned Theresa May. My view was that while she might be a poor Prime Minister, she struck me as an outstanding politician, able to run a brilliant and effective campaign. In the event it was nothing like that.

She was wooden, she was dull. Above all, she launched a manifesto which seemed to attack the very people who would normally be counted on to vote for her. She refused to debate with her opponents, an apparent lack of courage that clashed with her claim to offer “strong and stable leadership” – a mantra she repeated until it became tedious. It was a mantra undermined by the changes she attempted to make when she realised that several of her positions were putting off some of her core votes. “Strong and stable” seemed to be giving way to “weak and wobbly”.

In that context, it was interesting to hear a young voter tell the BBC that he’d been put off the Conservatives by “the number of times Theresa May changed her mind”. 

On the other side of the balance sheet, I admit that Corbyn astonished me by the quality of his campaigning in the last few weeks. He hit the right note again and again, landing effective and important blows on Theresa May. That was perhaps most notable when it came to terrorism – and there were two attacks in Britain during the campaign – where Corbyn rightly, and powerfully, argued that we were paying the price of cuts to police numbers as a result of the fixation an applying austerity policies.

He certainly needs to be given the credit he’s due. He did well. What he now needs to do is to keep that spirit going and turn his dynamism as a campaigner into equal effectiveness as leader of the Opposition.

Because let’s not get carried away. Labour’s done far better that many, including me, expected. But with 261 seats, Labour won only three more MPs than after the disastrous defeat of 2010. So a better result than forecast but by no means a good result. There are no prizes for coming second in an election. Theresa May will form a new government, Labour will again lead the Opposition.

The difference after this election is that Labour is now only 51 seats behind – a large number but a shortfall that could be overturned at the next election. Which may be soon. Theresa May will be leading a minority government and they are notoriously vulnerable. While I don’t want to rush into any more forecasts having got the last ones so wrong, there has to be at least a high probability that there will be another election within a relatively short time.

Preparing for that will need excellent opposition in the meantime. The spirit that Jeremy Corbyn generated in the last weeks of the campaign needs to be maintained in preparation for the next one. Having done so well recently, Corbyn should be encouraged to maintain that style of leadership – and I’ll be delighted if he does.

UK General Election: the real action starts the day after

Exciting times for us in Britain, as we head for another, and rather premature, general election.

Well, moderately exciting. There is a general sense that the actual result may be a bit of a foregone conclusion. But that’s only based on the most recent polls suggesting the government has a lead of around twenty points. That’s only the polls – there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip, even if in this case it would need to be more of an avalanche than a slip.

Indeed, without an avalanche to knock them back, the Conservatives may well be winning by a landslide. Perhaps that’s the most exciting aspect of this campaign: if we can’t block Theresa May’s re-election, can we at least limit its scale and prepare for a Labour comeback in the future? We shall see. The election’s on 8 June. One certainty in this campaign is that a fierce debate will start the following day.

Theresa May. Going to the country
At a time that suits her...

How about the timing of the election?

In 2010, the Liberal Democrat Party, for a long time the conscience of the Centre-Left, frequently sniping from the Left of the Labour Party on civil rights issues, amazed us all by going into coalition with the Conservatives. This put them in partnership with a party that stood against practically everything the Liberal Democrats claimed to believe. They claimed they’d influence the government to enact some of their measures but in fact, and unsurprisingly, pulled that trick off very seldom. Instead, they were simply dragged along behind their dominant partners until their inevitable and richly deserved punishment at the polls in 2015, reduced from 57 MPs to just 8.

Of their losses, 27 went to the Conservatives: after all, if you have to choose between two members of a coalition, you might as well go for the senior partner.

One of the few things they did achieve was the 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act. This was designed to put an end to the custom of Prime Ministers calling elections when it suited them (generally when they saw the best chance of being re-elected), forcing them instead to go to the end of the five-year maximum term for which a Parliament can last. It would take a two-thirds majority of the House of Commons to overturn the measure and allow an election to be called early.

In the event, the vote was 522 to 13 which, in case you don’t want to do the maths, does constitute a two-thirds majority.

Odd, isn’t it? The vast majority of MPs voted for the election, even though a great many of them are at serious risk of losing their seats. Sound like turkeys voting for Christmas? The reasoning seems to be that you must never let the other side think you’re afraid of facing an election. Political machismo, it seems, comes first, even at the cost of letting the Prime Minister play the system to her advantage.

It also shows another accomplishment of that sad coalition government between 2010 and 2015 failing at its first test.

Ah, well. At least we’re now only seven weeks out from clearing the political air. By then we should know some of the questions that have been troubling us for the last couple of years.

Can Labour put up any kind of reasonable showing against the government?

Has the electorate swung massively over to the Conservatives?

What are the prospects for rebuilding a progressive alternative?

A new phase of interesting times starts on 9 June.

Too soon to write off Labour. If we learn our lessons

There seem to be frequent reports at the moment of the death of the British Labour Party. I’m inclined to consider them greatly exaggerated.

Listening to a recent programme on the BBC – What’s Left, chaired by the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley – I was amused to hear speakers declaring the 2015 results the worst for Labour since 1918. Two of the panel were Labour MPs, the rest journalists or academics. Even the MPs shared the doom-laden view.

It just feels way over the top to me. Certainly, it was a lamentable result. We were beaten, and still worse, we weren’t even able to prevent David Cameron and his Tories winning an overall majority – right up to polling day, the opinion polls were suggesting he would at most emerge as leader of the biggest single party in parliament, only able to cobble together a minority administration. Instead, he took a small but working majority.

So it was lousy. But the detail suggests things were less dire than the prophets of doom claim. Perhaps I should say, like to claim.

Labour’s share of the vote was actually up on 2010. By only 1.4%, it’s true, which is anaemic, but that was marginally more than the Tories managed – they only increased their share by 0.8%. That still left them 6.5% ahead of Labour, which is certainly a sound defeat, but hardly catastrophic.

The biggest failure of Labour was to protect its Scottish heartland. From 40 seats in Scotland, it feel to just 1. Hugely damaging. On the other hand, overall it lost only 24 seats – in other words, outside Scotland it added 15 seats to its tally. With Scotland still heading inexorably for independence, Labour was going to have to wean itself from its reliance on Scotland in any case. The fact that it has been able to increase its number of seats in England and Wales is a necessary step towards guaranteeing its long-term success.

And let’s not forget that Labour hadn’t put itself in the best possible position to win. Ed Miliband is principled, insightful and probably great company. But he’s virtually unelectable: he’s accident-prone, constantly making disastrous gaffes, and with his lieutenant Ed Balls, apparently unable ever to get off any fence. They would repeatedly dodge the hard questions, preferring to appear a little Tory to Tories, a little socialist to lefties, and convincing nobody.

Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Mary Creagh, Tristram Hunt, Liz Kendall
Will one of them turn Labour's fortunes round as the next leader?

Peter Mandelson rightly points out in today’s Observer that, under their leadership, they failed to answer such opportunistic policies as Chancellor George Osborne’s proposal to devolve more authority to local government in the North of England. That was a policy Labour should have adopted before the Tories, but it failed either to adopt it or to respond to it. The result? Losses to the Tories in the North, another heartland area, including Ed Balls’s own seat, and deep inroads by another adversary, the far-right UKIP.

If despite these self-inflicted handicaps, Labour could still improve its standing outside Scotland by fifteen seats, and marginally improve its popular vote, what could it do with a more effective, more dynamic and, above all, more assertive leadership?

It strikes me that this is no time to throw one’s arms up in despair and talk about defeat on a historically unprecedented scale. Instead it’s time to take stock sensibly of where we stand, without understating the scale of the debacle but also without ignoring the more reasons for encouragement. And make sure we never again saddle ourselves with leaders so hopelessly out of touch with the needs of the day.

Because if we shoot ourselves in the foot like that again, then we would indeed be in serious trouble.

A very British spaghetti Western: the good, the sly and the downright inept

I spent the first couple of hours after the BBC exit poll for the UK General Election was announced at 10:00 last night doubting its accuracy. I wasn’t alone: former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown publicly swore to eat his hat on live TV if it were proved right. Fortunately for him the exit poll did indeed prove wrong. Unfortunately, things turned out to be even worse than it suggested.

What? What? The Tories on 316 seats?
I couldn't believe the scale of the victory

The next hour or so I spent trying to adjust my mindset to a completely different outcome from anything I’d been expecting. For weeks – months even – we’d all been forecasting a hung parliament (no party with an overall majority) and weeks of negotiations to put a coalition together to govern the country. That’s what the polls were telling us, after all.

Incidentally, I don’t believe the polls were wrong. What seems to happen is that a small but crucial number of people tell pollsters that they plan to vote Labour. They may not even be lying. That may be their intention when they say it. But then they go into the polling station and vote Tory.

In my mind, these so-called “shy Tories” are people who feel they really ought to vote Labour, perhaps because they know it represents their interests. So that’s what they tell the polling organisations.

But the Labour leaders are not unlike the Tories: educated at similar schools and universities, less wealthy perhaps but still far wealthier than anyone on the median wage or less. In the loneliness of the polling booth they think about these two sets of people, both representatives of what they may perceive as a kind of master class. If they are to choose one such person, why not make it the one born and bred to be a master – in other words, a Tory?

The final batch of polls had the following standings for the main parties on the eve of the election:

• Lord Ashcroft: Conservative 33%, Labour 33%
• Ipsos MORI: Conservative 36%, Labour 35%
• Populus: Conservative 33%, Labour 33%
• ICM: Conservative 34%, Labour 35%

All tight. And all of them adding up to a total, for the two main parties, of 66-71%.

The actual result was Conservative 38%, Labour 31%. A total of 69%, but a substantial lead to the Tories. All it takes, however, to get there from what the polls were showing is a switch by about 3-4% of the electorate. That’s probably about the extent of the “shy Tories” out there, and they determined the outcome last night.

It’s against that background that I set my British Spaghetti Western, The Good, the Sly, the Inept.

First, the good. That has to be the Scottish National Party, the SNP, and its leader Nicola Sturgeon who had an excellent campaign – rewarded by a near clean sweep of Scotland. There was a time that we in the Labour Party would laugh at the Tories for having only one Scottish seat. Now the laugh’s against us: as well as the Tories, we too, as well as the Liberal Democrats, only have a single Scottish seat.

The other 56 have been won by the SNP. It has even managed to win the election of the youngest MP for 350 years, Mhairi Black, a twenty-year old student who has to fit in finishing her degree in the next few weeks, around taking up her newly-won position at Westminster. She unseated Labour’s Foreign Affairs spokesman, Douglas Alexander, in Paisley and Renfrewshire South.

Next, the Sly. This is the only prediction I got remotely right. The Tories are like the Sandman: get too close and you’re likely to fall asleep. Back in 2010, when they didn’t have enough seats to form a government, they approached the Liberal Democrats who then had 57 seats, to join them in coalition. The Lib Dems said yes, much to the amazement of many of us who had regarded them as a party of the centre-left, much more naturally allied to Labour than to the Conservatives.

We predicted that the electorate would take a terrible vengeance on them, reducing their numbers to a level from which it would be impossible to recoer for a generation. Even so, again guided by polls, most of us felt that they might hang on to 20-30 seats. In fact, they now have just eight. Some of the party’s biggest hitters have gone, including David Laws, one of the main architects of the coalition. The leader Nick Clegg clung on, but he’s leader no more, having resigned this morning.

And finally, the Inept. My own party. Our arcane constitution allowed the Trade Unions to foist on us a leader, Ed Miliband, who is I’m sure immensely likeable, principled, honest, decent and lots of other great things. But a no leader. He appointed as his Finance spokesman Ed Balls, and together they crafted a message to the effect that they, like the Tories, would impose a policy of austerity, but they’d do it more nicely.

Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP pointed out that this stance presented the British electorate with the choice between Tory austerity, and Labour austerity-lite. Not exactly inspiring.

Working to get out the vote around Luton, I had someone tell me that she had voted Labour, but against her instincts – she felt little confidence in the party. One even said that she might not vote at all, because Labour hadn’t cleansed itself of the Blairite tendency that took us into war in Iraq.

As Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon’s predecessor as leader of the SNP, last night told TV presenter Jeremy Paxman in a master class on how to handle aggressive questioning, if Ed Miliband had “fought the sort of campaign that Nicola Sturgeon fought in Scotland, then he’d be in a much better position this morning.” Indeed. Though he might also have had to learn to handle the media the way Salmond and Sturgeon do.

Well, that’s all in the past now. Ed Miliband has also stepped down. And Ed Balls was defeated for re-election in his parliamentary seat.

Crafted the economic policy that contributed to Labour defeat
And paid by being beaten himself

They always say businesses should hire slow and fire fast. Labour elected Miliband to the leadership rather quickly. It became clear soon after that he wasn’t going to inspire enough of the electors he needed to reach. But we fired him slow. It took four years for him to go, and the price for the generosity which let him have a go at becoming Prime Minister is going to be paid by a lot of other people, during five years of continued Tory rule.

Italian spaghetti Westerns leave you feeling entertained. This British one, on the other hand, leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth. I suppose it’s like the contrast in weather between the two countries.

Ed Miliband: coming good at the end. Now let's get the goal right

The last stage of a campaign is the most important, and with the British General Election three weeks away on 7 May, we’re into that last stage now. So it’s good to see that Ed Miliband is growing in stature in the final straight. “You want to exploit people’s fears rather than address them,” he told Nigel Farage of UKIP during the televised debate on Thursday, and it was heartwarming to hear him speak out so forcefully, effectively and succinctly.

The BBC Election Debate

Gone is the Miliband who seemed frankly accident prone – the worst accident coming when he simply forgot to mention the hardly insignificant matter of the economy in his speech to the final Labour conference before the election. Today, he speaks with real authority, with confidence, even with humour – he has a winsome smile and he’s making use of it these days.

This is causing consternation in the ranks of his Tory opponents. They were counting on Miliband imploding – metaphorically forgetting the economy again – and he’s stubbornly refusing to do so. They’ve tried flinging personal abuse at him and, as I pointed out before, he’s deflected their insults calmly and to powerful effect. Now, after years castigating Labour for unfunded campaign promises, they’re trying to throw money at the electorate – £8 billion more a year for the NHS being the latest wheeze – while still maintaining their commitment to savage spending cuts.

Miliband’s coming good at the end, and congratulations to him.

Sadly, however, while he’s holding off any Tory challenge, he’s not opening up any kind of commanding lead in the polls. In response, he’s adopted what is a time-honoured – or perhaps time-shaming – tactic of all politicians: trying to steal his opponents’ clothes. So he’s gone along with the austerity agenda too, if in a less draconian way. He backs the renewal of Britain’s nuclear arsenal. And today he’s been getting tough about immigration.

It’s certainly true that no party can win an election without attracting support from outside its core. That undoubtedly means that at times it has to adopt policies that will attract people who previously voted for others. The problem arises when that means abandoning one’s own core principles.

The saddest form that problem takes is the fragmentation of one’s own side. That was strikingly illustrated at that same debate last Thursday. The Welsh Nationalists, the Scottish Nationalists and the Greens had to speak up for traditional Labour values, desperately needed today, whenever Labour fell silent on them.

Labour’s roots are in the Trade Union movement, emasculated in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher. Today, as in the US, the unions are a shadow of their old selves and, surprise, surprise, the rights of the workers they used to represent have been eroded almost to oblivion. The greatest abomination now is the zero-hour contract, which Miliband has rightly denounced. It ties an employee to a company, but without guaranteeing any work or pay. Nearly 700,000 people in Britain now have zero-hour contracts in their main employment (perhaps that should be “employment”).

That kind of phenomenon makes a return to campaigning trade unionism vital. To quote from Thursday’s debate, the problem in Britain isn’t excessive migration, it’s the deliberate undercutting of wages:

There are real issues in terms of the driving down of wages, and that has to be addressed. The way to address that is to raise the minimum wage to the living wage, and to strengthen Trade Unions. We should be looking at repealing the Trade Union legislation that Margaret Thatcher brought in, because if you have stronger Trade Unions, then you have a stronger protection of our public services and against the exploitation of workers.

Curiously, that piece of pure Labour rhetoric wasn’t pronounced by Miliband, but by Leanne Wood, leader of the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru.

More generally, the problem of child poverty was one of the great political themes of the previous Labour leader (and Prime Minister), Gordon Brown. You might expect the party leadership to share the concern that “…we have experts saying that if we continue with austerity cuts, by 2020 there are going to be one million more children across the UK living in poverty…”

Sadly, it wasn’t Miliband who said that either, but the Scottish Nationalists’ Nicola Sturgeon. And yet that’s the central issue: how do we prevent millions more of our most vulnerable being sacrificed on the altar of Conservative austerity?

The most shocking moment was when Sturgeon directly called on Miliband.

Tell me tonight, is it the case that you would rather see David Cameron go back into Downing Street, than work with me?

It’s true that Miliband didn’t rule out collaboration short of a coalition, and maybe on 8 May when, as seems likely, it emerges that he will need SNP support to form a government, we’ll finally get a positive response to that question. We certainly didn’t on Thursday.

Miliband is looking increasingly prime ministerial. He’s developed an image people can respect and even like. He’s left it late but there may still be time. Now he needs to be clear about the goal: we need the Tories out of Downing Street before they wreak the kind of damage their austerity policies have promised. Again, Nicola Sturgeon got it right:

We have a chance to kick David Cameron out of Downing Street. Don’t turn your back on it. People will never forgive you.

Nor should they.

When you dine with the devil, take a long spoon

The results of Thursday's British General Election continue to fascinate and entertain.

I’m wondering whether we’re about to witness what I’d think of as a ‘Ramsay MacDonald’ moment.

Some of us are longstanding supporters of the British Labour Party. I say this with some pride because it certainly isn’t easy. The Labour Party does everything it can to put us off giving them their support, like having senior figures describing themselves as ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’, which is an interesting re-interpretation of the principles of egalitarianism that are supposed to inspire the party, or going to war in Iraq for no better reason than being told to by an American leader who combined deeply right wing views with unparalleled incompetence.

To those of us who maintain our tribal loyalty to this difficult party, the name ‘Ramsay MacDonald’ has powerful echoes even today. He was the first Labour Prime Minister. In office in 1931, he decided to form a coalition with the Conservatives and headed a government in which they had a majority of the ministers. This action split the Labour Party and left the Conservative Party, the Tories, in power either alone or in coalition until 1945.

Curiously, this wasn’t the first time in the century that a party of the Centre-Left had split itself over collaboration with the Tories, leaving them the ultimate victors. In 1906 the then Liberals (today’s Liberal Democrats being essentially their heirs) formed a government with a colossal parliamentary majority. In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, with the government failing to impress, the Prime Minister Asquith was toppled by his Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George, who formed a coalition with the Tories, splitting his party in the process. That government stayed in power after the war, until 1922 when the remaining Liberals were unceremoniously dumped by their Tory ‘partners’.

Getting into bed with the Tories doesn’t seem to be designed to do much for the health of progressive parties in this country. On the other hand, it does the Tories a world of good. I once had the ‘privilege’, if that’s the word I’m looking for, of having lunch at the Carlton Club. This is one of those leftovers of a bygone age, a gentleman’s club where members can lunch, dine or even stay the night. The Carlton Club is the one particularly favoured by the Tory Party, another leftover of a bygone age which, like the Club itself, continues to thrive to the despair of the rest of us.

As I was being shown around, I was told with pride ‘we have the portraits of all the Prime Ministers on the walls’.

I looked around and spotted a few gaps.

‘Surely only the Tory ones?’ I asked innocently.

‘Prime Ministers are Tories,’ I was told with all the charm that real smugness can inspire.

Sadly, the implication of what he was saying was right. For 66 of the 100 years of the last century, the Tories were in power, alone or with a partner. The other 34 years were shared by the other two parties, Liberals and Labour.

Today we’re contemplating a landscape in which the Tories have more MPs than any other party, but lack a majority. In coalition with the Liberal Democrats, they would have the votes to form a majority government. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, is in negotiation with them. He knows, however, that there are huge areas of disagreement between his essentially progressive party and the Conservatives. He knows that he will have terrible trouble selling a coalition with the Tories to his fellow party members. He could even split the party and find that he has given the Tories a huge hold on power, for the sake of little more than a brief period in a seat at the cabinet table.

Will he do it? Will he resist? Think Lloyd George, Nick. Think Ramsay MacDonald.

And a postscript

There was a portrait of Margaret Thatcher in the Carlton Club when I went there – naturally: for most Tories, she remains one of the iconic leaders of their Party. But she herself was only granted the status of ‘honorary member’ – it really was a gentlemen’s club. Only in 2008 were women given the right to become full members (if I can stretch the word ‘right’ that far).

And another

It’s a curious reflection on British attitudes that since the election commentators have been regularly saying that the only two-party coalition that would command a majority would be one between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. This is patently untrue. Another that would have a massive majority would be a coalition between Conservatives and Labour. I don’t favour it, in particular for the reasons I’ve mentioned, but it’s fascinating that no-one in Britain even considers the possibility: after all, there have been two such coalitions in the past, and Germany was most successfully run by an equivalent ‘Grand Coalition’ of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats from 2005 until just last year.

Britain, land of the elect

What fun we’ve all been having here in Britain!

Those of you sadly denied the privilege of inhabiting these shores may barely have registered the fact that the UK had a general election last night. For us, we’re barely aware of anything else. Of course, we realise that there’s been some sort of unpleasantness in Greece, and the Yanks seem to be terribly upset – but then when are they not? – about one of our revered British institutions, BP, and are being beastly to them for pouring oil and making troubled waters. But apart from that, well it’s been the election, the election and nothing but the election.

And what a marvellous election it’s been! It’s actually quite a shock to realise that the word ‘Schadenfreude’ isn’t English since it describes our favourite pastime: we delight in other people’s misfortune. So what could possibly be better than an election where everyone lost?

First the Conservatives. They peaked in the opinion polls at about 125% some time last year and then adopted a brilliant electoral position of telling voters that they were going to cut everything and cause everyone lots and lots of pain. As a result they ended up polling about 36% and failed to secure a parliamentary majority.

That hasn’t stopped them claiming all day that this election is their best and Labour’s worst since 1931. At that election they took 473 seats (306 today) and the Labour Party 52 (258). It’s reassuring to know that people this good with numbers are likely to be charged with getting us out of our financial mess.

Then Labour. They took 356 seats in 2005. That gave them the kind of majority that just can’t be wiped out in one election (the Conservatives had 198 MPs). Well, nothing is beyond Gordon Brown. If you really make every mistake in the book, dithering about when to hold an election, being denounced by your colleagues as a bully, getting caught dissing a voter on a live mike, then it doesn’t matter how good you may be at trivial things like getting the country out of recession, you can overcome every obstacle to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

And what of the Liberal Democrats? Well, they had what was called a ‘surge’ in the course of the campaign. Whenever I hear that term ‘surge’ it conjures up the image of what might happen to an adolescent boy in his bed at night: it takes a special kind of dream to bring one on, it’s over in a flash and it makes a bit of a mess that needs to be cleared up in the morning. So it proved with the Lib Dems. It was fun while it lasted, but then all the grand hopes evaporated and the party ended up with just a percentage point more votes than last time and actually lost seats.

So all three the major parties lost, and nobody won.

And there were lots of other losers, to make our delight complete. The United Kingdom Independence Party or UKIP – I always feel that the abbreviated name sounds like something to line a cat’s litter tray – failed to win a single seat and, oh joy unconfined! so did the British National Party. The BNP have had to be forced by not just one but two court orders to open their membership to non-Whites. Even though they’ve changed their Constitution to comply with the law, I can’t imagine any Black or Asian person joining the BNP even if if it was a matter of life of death, which it probably would be if they ever did. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t join the BNP if my life depended on it, and I’m White.

The BNP won two seats in the European Parliament last year, which was ironic since no-one can possibly be more anti-Europe than they are. They thought it was that anti-Europeanism that chimed with the voters and gave them their success, and imagined they might pull the same feat off in the General Election. In the event, their leader, Nick Griffin, took 6000 votes, which is about 6000 too many, but saw his Labour opponent hold her seat with an increase in her own support, against the national trend.

What were you thinking, Nick? Listen to your own propaganda: the Brits hate Europe. That’s why they don’t give a damn who they send there. That’s how even the BNP can win seats in the European Parliament. But in a UK election? To our Parliament, the one in Westminster? The one that matters? Think again, pal.

Then there was a success. Caroline Lucas won Brighton Pavilion (winning a seat in Brighton Pavilion sounds like being offered a plush spot to sit down in a quaint location, doesn’t it?), the first ever seat won by the Greens. But then she’s her Party’s only representative in Parliament, so really that’s a defeat too.

Defeats all over the place. Brilliant isn’t it? What a boon for a country that loves to moan about its losers that it suddenly has so many, all at the same time.

Happy days.