STRATEGY:THE GRUMBLING has already started in the Conservative Party, though it will be kept under control while David Cameron attempts to put flesh on the bones of an administration over the weekend.
With an unpopular prime minister and general public fatigue after 13 years of Labour rule, the Conservatives had been ahead by double-digits up to a few months ago, apparently ready to cruise into Downing Street.
Instead, the party has ended up just seven points ahead of Labour, and increased its share of the vote by just four points on their 2005 outing under his predecessor, Michael Howard.
The strategy followed by Cameron and his close team of advisers, who largely ignored everyone else in the parliamentary party, has produced significant gains in England and Wales, though Scotland remains a barren outpost.
However, Cameron’s determination to force candidates upon constituency associations has backfired spectacularly in places. The highly regarded black community worker Shaun Bailey, for example, failed to unseat Labour’s Andy Slaughter.
Joanne Cash’s failure in Westminster North is a significant blow, particularly since the Conservative leadership had to waste valuable time and political capital sorting out endless rows about her selection. Clearly unhappy with her loss, she rounded yesterday on the local press in the constituency when the result was declared, accusing them of telling lies about her husband, an Eton contemporary of David Cameron.
In the southwest, where the Conservatives did well overall, Annunziata Rees-Mogg, who was once told by a Conservative staffer to change her name to “Nancy”, failed to get through, despite the attentions of Conservative Central Office, though her brother did.
In Bolton West, Cork-born Susan Williams’s attempt to stop Labour’s Julie Hilling winning a seat that had previously been held by an MP forced to stand down after the MPs’ expenses scandal failed by just 92 votes.
Bolton West had occupied the 114th spot on the party’s near-mythical list of target seats necessary to put the Conservatives back into office.
Labour is down 100 seats, while its vote share struggled to reach 29 per cent – a better result than looked likely at some points during the campaign, but one that will depress Gordon Brown, who so desperately wanted a mandate of his own, given that he took over from Tony Blair mid-term.
Now his election figures will be mentioned for years to come in the same breath as those achieved by Michael Foot – the man whose legacy Brown and Blair did so much to erase – in his disastrous 1983 campaign against Margaret Thatcher.
Nevertheless, Labour will take some heart from the rise in its support in the final days of the campaign, where public servants appear to have drifted back to the party. “Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas,” grumbled one Conservative yesterday.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats struggled yesterday to come to terms with their result. The days when all seemed possible had disappeared into thin air.
Left with fewer seats, and divided about whether they should go into coalition with Labour or the Conservatives, the Lib Dems must pray that coalition machinations will secure victory from defeat.
Nick Clegg’s post-debates performance during the campaign was coming under the spotlight yesterday from some in his own ranks, with a belief growing that he had shown hubris, where humility would have better served the party’s needs.
In particular, his declaration in the final days that it was “a two-horse race” between his party and the Conservatives may have sent some past Labour voters back to their fold, while his barbs at Gordon Brown provoked if not sympathy or anger, then at least a degree of irritation.
Most especially, Clegg was caught on the hook on which he now remains, since he did not really know which of the two larger parties he wanted to go into coalition with, or would be allowed to join up with by his party.
Rejecting Labour calls for tactical voting in the final two days of the campaign has already been privately deemed unwise by some of his own, leading to the fall of some Lib Dem candidates in Conservative/Labour pincer movements who might otherwise have survived.
When riding high in the polls he set a high bar, saying he would not do a deal with Labour if it came third in the popular vote share, while Cameron was told that electoral reform was a deal-breaker.
Clegg, who had come to the public’s notice because he sounded different to other politicians they had heard, began to lose some of his currency, since he began to sound just like the rest.
The danger for Clegg is that he can never again be the “new boy” in British politics. The party will struggle to dominate the agenda in the way it has in this campaign in another election, particularly if it should happen quickly.
