A Pint of Bitter: a hung Parliament, and a new kind of government

This has been a truly unusual, historic week in British politics. As I delivered Labour’s final leaflet in my London constituency, I felt Labour was coming back slightly. Not enough to win, perhaps, but enough to stave off disaster. Election night itself was reasonably dramatic – we spent hours wondering whether the Conservatives might still gain a majority in Parliament – but it was a night that teased us. By dawn it was clear that the Tories hadn’t quite made it. We would have a “hung Parliament”, no party having a majority. With 306 of the 650 seats, David Cameron’s Conservatives would have great difficulty governing as a minority; Labour, with only 258 seats, would have no chance of doing so. The only stable majority could be formed by Conservatives and Liberal Democrats somehow working together – and that was the truth that politicians grasped early last Friday.

Prime Minister's Office | CreativeCommons

Nick Clegg was first, saying the Conservatives – with more seats and more votes than anyone else – had the right to prove they could govern in the national interest. David Cameron acted quickly and more boldly than expected, making a comprehensive offer to open talks about forming a stable government. Gordon Brown emerged from 10 Downing Street to say the other parties could take what time they needed – and that he was ready to talk to Nick Clegg if Tory-LibDem negotiations foundered. The horse-trading began.

The BBC's Nick Robinson reporting on Cameron's "big offer" | Tom Page | CreativeCommons

On Saturday it looked as though agreement could happen very quickly. Tory and Liberal Democrat teams got on well and were clearly engaged in real detail. The mood music was so good that, by Sunday, we wondered why a deal hadn’t been closed. And on Monday, it seemed almost to fall apart when the LibDem MPs met and asked for clarification on various items. At that point, Gordon Brown’s machiavallian instincts showed one final time, as, announcing his own departure as Labour leader, he in effect invited Liberal Democrats to speak to him instead. Was it a last, desperate throw by a man clutching at a last few months of power? Or was it just a low tactic to poison Tory-LibDem relations and damage the new government from the start? We may never know. But for a moment it did throw everything into confusion. Most Liberal Democrats dream, in truth, of an arrangement with Labour, not the Tories, and they found siren Labour calls hard to resist. What killed it was partly the arithmetic – Labour and the LibDems together would still be a majority, dependent on the tolerance of Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalists – and partly the resistance of a number of prominent Labour MPs for whom clinging on to power would damage Labour and give the country unstable government. Reality took hold again yesterday, when the Tory-LibDem contract was finally signed.

Gordon Brown left Downing Street to offer his resignation to Her Majesty – early on Tuesday evening,  in a final touch of spin, to deny David Cameron a “new dawn” arrival at Number 10. Even before his deal was signed, David Cameron was clearly the man most likely to command a Parliamentary majority, and was summon by the Queen to form a new government as Prime Minister. And we now know the rough shape of that new government. Under Cameron, Nick Clegg will be deputy Prime Minister, and a number of Liberal Democrats will be in Cabinet, including Vince Cable as Business Secretary and David Laws as Chief Secretary to the Treasury – the cutter-in-chief role.

Downing Street | CreativeCommons

The political significance of this week is huge. It marks the end of New Labour, at least in this manifestation. A political era that began with the death of Labour leader John Smith in 1994, and dominated by Tony Blair and his modernising philosophy, will be over. It is the first time Conservatives have defeated Labour to return to power since Margaret Thatcher in 1979. But much, more more historic is the fact that this will be the first peacetime coalition, and the first time Liberals have been in government, since 1935. The political effects are likely to be enormous, too. The Conservative party has survived the civil war that has lasted since Margaret Thatcher was removed from office, and has finally recovered enough to take office. But it remains damaged, without the swagger and confidence it once had. How it fares from now will turn on how well  ministers deal with the serious fiscal position they face, and on David Cameron’s performance as Prime Minister. There’s an upside to the compromises he has had to make to Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats: he is free from the shackles of his own campaign pledges, and can discard his less popular policies. He’s been dealt an unusual hand, and has the chance to play it with skill.

The Liberal Democrats have achieved office for the first time, a development that marks their coming of age. I expect their popularity to decrease somewhat as they lose their opposition identity and are tainted by power. I also think there’s a risk they might even split: tensions are bound to surface in a party divided between the left-leaning majority and the more genuinely centrist group around Nick Clegg. They’ve also lost their dream of proportional representation, not just this time but I suspect for some time. Britain has tasted, this week, what coalition politics is like, and most people have disliked the backroom wheeler-dealing it involves. Exciting though the spectacle may be, it seems undemocratic. I’d be surprised if, at the next election, the two main parties do not increase their share of the vote. There’s a vocal lobby for proportional representation, but I doubt many people support it. We can probably forget it for a while.

President Obama calls David Cameron | Prime Minister's Office | CreativeCommons

Labour is defeated, but not crushed, to the relief of many of its supporters, and its leader Gordon Brown – a divisive and poor leader – is leaving. Opposition to a government making deep cuts and facing certain difficulty gives it a big opportunity to rebuild, and opportunity made all the greater with the effective removal of its competitor on the centre-left. Ideally, Labour would take some time to rethink its new direction. Gordon Brown, with his last-ditch resignation as leader to lure the LibDems into talks, may have done Labour a final bad turn by accelerating its leadership contest unnecessarily. David Miliband is the front runner already, and most expect the fight to be between him and Ed Balls. I’d caution, though, against ruling out Jon Cruddas, who I think stands a good chance of leading Labour by this autumn.

If the British constitution is a fine old stately home, this week we’ve revisited a disused and dusty wing. Absence made the heart grow briefly fonder. I expect, though, that we’ll only visit again if we must.