…or you just might get it’ could be applied to Nick Clegg and anyone who voted for him out of an anti- motive rather than any love of the Lib Dems.
At the time of writing (12.45pm) the Tories have 294 seats, Labour 252, Lib Dem 52 and The Others 27, including the admirable Caroline Lucas’s win for the Greens in Brighton. This means that a joint Labour-Lib Dem coalition is still 22 short of a majority and is only 10 ahead of the Tories as a whole (with 25 mostly large rural seats yet to declare).
This means Clegg can only deliver a majority to the Tories. It’s fairly likely that any Labour-Lib Dem deal would need to get the support of some of the smaller parties. They might be able to get some support from the Greens on an ad hoc basis but they’d still have to go to the self-interest of the nationalists.
Should Cameron and Clegg come to some agreement then this would be undoubtedly the most stable outcome — even allowing for some dissent within both parties. A joint Tory-Lib Dem cabinet might also have the happy result of perhaps sidelining a liability like George Osborne and replacing him with Vince Cable.
Yet Clegg and Cameron will probably engage in some brinksmanship. The Tories will be extremely reluctant to endorse proportional representation — but Clegg should probably treat his new putative best friends Milliband, Balls, Harman and Brown’s sudden conversion to the cause with the contempt and suspicion it deserves. He’d be a fool unworthy of holding the balance of power if he trusted politicians whose main motivation seems to be to stab their leader in the back in order to succeed him. The Tories will reject the more leftish policies that Clegg stood on — quite a lot of them, such as the immigration amnesty and Trident.
I guess Cameron will reject most of Clegg’s demands and he could justify this by the poor showing overall for the Lib Dems, which seeing as Clegg was apparently still popular must have been influenced by their policies. He will probably see if Clegg has the nerve to make the so-called ‘coalition of the defeated’ with Brown.
This might please many of Clegg’s casual and tactical supporters but would be an insult to his party activists and loyal voters — who must already be demoralised, having fought against Labour and, in most cases, have not succeeded in removing many Labour MPs themselves. Brown is also likely to have to make disproportionate concessions to the nationalists as the Lib Dem support seems unlikely to produce a majority in itself. It would also be political suicide if there was an election in the near future as those who voted tactically anti-Tory would probably return to Labour if they had been seen to be able to not lose this election.
If Cameron was quite cynical, he’d probably not be too disappointed to rebuff Clegg and see what kind of ramshackle coalition Brown (or those who seek to dispose of him in his own party) could put together. Remember this government is going to have to finally face up to dire economic reality and institute massive public spending cuts as well as raise taxes. The Tories might think it cuter to let Brown face his own music and bank on his Commons arithmetic falling to pieces (think of the rebels on the Labour benches if the hatchet is taken to public spending) and expect there to be another election within a year or two.
Of course, Clegg may also take the same view and realise that it would be electoral suicide for the Lib Dems to prop up an inevitably unpopular government — perhaps getting proportional representation would then be their only chance of avoiding obliteration.
Overall, Cameron’s best strategy is probably to offer Clegg very little and try and call his bluff into propping up Brown. If the Lib Dems either have to support him or be complicit in helping Brown try and dig himself out of his huge hole — either propping up someone who’s currently pulled in 29% of the popular vote or replacing him with someone too gutless to have tried to replace him before the election.
This is all in the context of Cameron’s undoubtedly disastrous campaign — sabotaged last year by Osborne’s ‘Age of Austerity’ and more recently by his baffling ‘Big Society’. Brown got away with outrageously negative campaigning — effectively ‘vote for us or you’re more likely to die of cancer’ — and he was the incumbent of thirteen years. Cameron was stiff, aloof and complacent and hardly tested the massive own goal presented by Brown’s and New Labour’s monumental incompetence.
If this posting is marginally less lucid and more discursive than normal it’s because I watched the 11.5 hour BBC coverage of the election night non-stop with Sky and ITV streamed on laptops and making frequent reference to the BBC website (which seemed to lack information in favour of clever animations) and, more frequently, to the Guardian’s web pages on each constituency.
