In the morning after Britain’s 2010 general election it’s clear that all three parties have lost. The Labour party has lost nearly 100 seats; they are down from over 400 seats after Tony Blair’s New Labour to about 250 under Gordon Brown’s more Old Labour government. The Conservative party failed to gain a 326-seat majority and seem headed to about 310 instead despite a long and seemingly shrewd three-year campaign. The Liberal Democrats, after shooting up to the top of the polls after their leader Nick Clegg’s performance in the first party leader debate on April 15, finished a poor third in popular votes and seem to have won fewer seats in the House of Commons than they did in the last general election in 2005.
The curious thing is that Clegg, whose party finished farthest behind the pre-election polls, is in a position to choose the next prime minister. Negotiations are going on over television and, presumably, in private phone calls. Right from the announcement at 10pm of the exit poll, which seemed fishy to many political experts but which seems to have held up well, Labour’s number two politico Lord Mandelson set out the position that Gordon Brown, as prime minister, was entitled to remain in office and to seek to form a coalition—and hinted that Labour would accede to the Liberal Democrats’ number on demand, for proportional representation. Some time before 8am Mandelson upped his offer by saying that the departure of Gordon Brown was one of “a number of permutations.” Lots of irony here: Mandelson was a compatriot of Brown in the early 1990s, then backed Tony Blair over Brown as party leader in 1994, then returned to Brown’s side after a stint as European Union trade minister.
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At 10:40 Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg threw cold water (or did he?) on Mandelson’s offer. Speaking outside his party headquarters in Westminster, Clegg repeated his campaign statement that the party with the most votes and the most seats—the Conservatives—should have a chance to form the government first. That presumably means he’ll be on the phone to David Cameron, who is said to be making a public statement at 2:30. But it is pretty much unthinkable that Cameron would agree to proportional representation, which Conservatives believe would prevent their party from ever having a parliamentary majority again. A confrontation over that issue would give Clegg leave to negotiate with Labour, with Gordon Brown or without him.
A lot is at stake here. Proportional representation would change British politics enormously, from a two-party system in which one party or the other has a clear mandate to pursue its policies to a fragmented system in which someone—the Liberal Democrat party leader, as things stand at present—would choose who would lead government, as the Free Democrats did for decades in Germany. This would result, I think, in a ratcheting up of the size of government over the years, as it has in Europe, and it would certainly mean that Britain wouldn’t have a solid Conservative or a solid Labour government ever again. Nick Clegg has enormously more leverage to produce this result in this hung parliament situation than any third party leader would have in ordinary circumstances.
I’m inclined to think that a Lab-Lib coalition is unlikely, for two reasons. Number one is that both Labour and Liberal Democrats lost seats in this election. Having parties that lost seats hold control seems somehow undemocratic. Number two is that Clegg during the campaign period voiced what the election results make clear is the verdict of the people: Gordon Brown should go. Keeping Brown in Number 10 Downing Street would be hugely dissonant with that. As for the possibility, raised by Peter Mandelson, that someone other than Brown could be prime minister, there are practical problems. Labour party rules envisage a lengthy process for choosing a new leader; there’s not time for that, particularly with the financial markets quivering with anxiety. And after an election in which for the first time the three party leaders met in three televised debates, it would be positively weird to install someone who did not participate in the debates as prime minister.
So in the end I expect David Cameron to become prime minister early next week. But this is a tantalizing moment, when many unthinkable things seem possible.
