LIBERAL DEMOCRATS:The "Cleggmania" phenomenon only served to fuel unrealistic expectations, writes MARY FITZGERALD
“EVER TRIED. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
As a self-professed Samuel Beckett fan, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg might seek comfort in these lines from Beckett's Worstward Ho, as he contemplates a hugely disappointing general election performance that left his party with five fewer seats.
The poor showing is all the more galling because it follows a campaign electrified by Clegg’s adroit handling of at least two of the three televised leaders’ debates.
The resulting buzz – or Cleggmania, as the tabloids swiftly dubbed it – gave the Lib Dems a national prominence of which they once only dreamed. It also inspired what turned out to be unrealistic expectations that the party’s polling surge would translate into a raft of new seats, at the very least.
In the end, the Lib Dem scorecard featured only four of the 30 most winnable target seats they had set their sights on. In southern England, the gains the party expected to make from the Conservatives did not materialise. In Scotland, Wales, and northern England, seats the Lib Dems believed were within their grasp fell away as voters considered Clegg’s much-vaunted possibility of change only to decide to stick with the politics of red and blue.
In one of the party’s most ignominious losses, Lembit Opik, its MP in the mid-Wales constituency of Montgomeryshire since 1997, was ousted by his Conservative challenger. Opik, a colourful and rather eccentric figure known for dating one of pop group The Cheeky Girls, was defeated on a swing of almost 14 per cent to the Tories.
“Even though more people voted for us than ever before, even though we had a higher proportion of the vote than ever before, it is of course a source of great regret to me that we have lost some really valued friends and colleagues and we have returned to parliament with fewer MPs than before,” Clegg said yesterday.
But the party could take some comfort in a number of notable gains, including Ian Swales’s shock unseating of long-standing Labour MP and solicitor general Vera Baird in Redcar, a Teesside town knocked sideways by the loss of 1,600 jobs when the nearby Corus steel plant was mothballed earlier this year.
The Lib Dems also snatched Burnley and Norwich South from Labour and wrested Eastbourne from the Tories. Sarah Teather, the party’s housing spokesperson, was victorious in Brent Central, beating Labour’s Dawn Butler.
Many believe the writing had been on the wall in the days leading up to the election, with polls indicating that the dizzying Lib Dem surge was beginning to unspool.
As the Lib Dems go through the inevitable postmortem, there are mutterings already that Clegg’s bullish statements on the looming prospect of becoming kingmaker in a likely hung parliament played a significant role in the party’s undoing at the ballot box.