LONDON. My Examiner column this morning is on the British election, headlined “a pox on all three parties.” I covered my first British election in 1997, when Tony Blair’s “New Labour” party swept the Conservatives out of power after 18 years. The atmosphere was very different then. There was genuine enthusiasm for Blair, a sense that his reformed party was something genuinely new and promising, a bright new dawn feeling. Labour did not run as far ahead of Conservatives as the polls suggested (British polls over the years have tended to overstate the Labour vote) but the result was utterly unambiguous. Labour won over 400 seats in the House of Commons, to fewer than 200 for Conservatives; political patterns that had remained pretty steady in the 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 elections vanished utterly.
Nothing quite like that looks like happening tomorrow. The British press this week has been full of speculation about what will happen when the votes come in if no party has a majority of seats in the House of Commons. In 1997 there was no such problem. Around noon on the day after the election, I saw John Major drive into Buckingham Palace in the prime minister’s car. Less than an hour later he drove out in another car. He was no longer the prime minister; he had advised the Queen to call on Tony Blair to form a government, and she had done so. In the United States the transition period lasts more than two months, from the first week in November to January 20. In the United Kingdom it ordinarily takes less than 24 hours.
Maybe not this year. If Labour were to win more seats than any other party—theoretically possible, but looking highly unlikely—Gordon Brown would remain prime minister and would try to form a government, presumably with support from the Liberal Democrats. They would presumably try to get him to commit to a proportional representation system, which would make it exceedingly unlikely that Conseratives or Labour would ever get a House of Commons majority again and which would leave the choice of government in the hands of the Liberal Democrats—a horrifying result in my opinion, considering the eccentric character of the Lib Dem party and its determination to turn the power of the British state over to the European Union. It was reported yesterday that the chief civil servant Sir Gus O’Donnell has advised Brown that he can remain prime minister for a week even if Labour does not have more seats than any other party.
Conservatives were squawking over this, and it seems to me highly unlikely that Brown will attempt to block Conservative leader David Cameron in this way. The Conservatives have let it be known that Cameron will form a government without a coalition with the Lib Dems, even if Conservatives lack the 326-seat majority. They can count on the support of at least a few MPs from Northern Ireland (the British national parties do not run candidates there), where Cameron touched down briefly yesterday just before flights to Ireland were blocked by an inrush of Icelandic ash. More important, it’s considered unlikely that the other parties will combine to defeat the Conservatives on a vote of confidence, which will come after the Queen’s Speech of May 25 (which is written by the prime minister) and in votes on the budget.
More important, it’s not clear that Labour and Lib Dems will have a combined total of 326 seats or more. If not, Lib Dems will be in a very weak bargaining position with Conservatives, for they won’t be able to threaten to join Labour now or in the future. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has declared he won’t join Labour if it trails Lib Dems in the popular vote or if it means that Gordon Brown remains prime minister. After all, it would be odd to have a party of change keep an unpopular current prime minister in office.
So the likelihood is that Cameron will become prime minister and that another general election will not be called until next fall at the earliest. This is what happened in 1974, when Prime Minister Edward Heath’s Conservatives trailed Labour by 4 seats. Heath spent several days trying to form a government which could get the support of the Liberals (as they were then called) and failed; Labour’s Harold Wilson formed a government with Liberal support and called an election in October, in which Labour won a House of Commons majority.
One of the mysterious things in British politics is the role of the Queen. So far as I am aware, no British prime minister has ever revealed anything about his or her weekly meetings with the Queen, and press reports are scrupulously in saying that she would never do anything that would amount to improper political favoritism. But she does have to be consulted and while it is always said that she must accept the advice of the prime minister, there is a sense hovering in the air that she might not accept what she would regard as improper advice. She has conferred regularly with prime ministers starting with Winston Churchill in 1952 and has overseen transfers of power from one political party to another in 1964, 1970, 1974, 1979 and 1997. It looks like she will do so again Friday.
