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.