ANALYSIS:Conservative blunders have narrowed their lead and increased likelihood of a hung parliament
STEPPING INTO the mid-morning sunshine in Downing Street yesterday, British prime minister Gordon Brown, fresh from meeting Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace, was flanked by his cabinet – more than a few of whom would have dearly loved to see the back of him several times over the last few years, and some do still.
However, Brown, helped by the Conservatives’ failure to convince the British public that they are the ones best fitted to take the reins in the stormy years ahead, has a chance of staying in No 10 once the results of the May 6th vote are known. It is, it must be said, a small chance, but it is more than many would have given him a few months ago.
David Cameron’s Tories must get a 7 per cent swing – the biggest in postwar history, and bigger than anything ever achieved by Margaret Thatcher – to win 116 extra seats, a result that would offer just a majority of one. Cameron needs to secure a swing of 10 points or more if he is to have a majority sufficient to last a full term, and sufficient to take the kind of action that will be necessary to bring order to the UK’s public finances.
The bureaucrats, such as the most senior civil servant, cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell, are erring on the side of caution, as they have set down a 12-day gap between voting and the first sitting of the new Commons – unusually long in British terms, but time that might be needed to form a minority or coalition government
A few phrases are likely to imprint themselves on the public’s memory before it is all over. Firstly, there is the “shallow hung parliament” where the party with the most seats is just a few MPs short of a majority but can realistically hope to act as little more than a caretaker administration before deciding on the most opportune moment to call a second election later this year.
Secondly, there is “deeply hung parliament” where neither Labour nor the Conservatives get more than 300 seats. Such an outcome puts the Liberal Democrats in play – either supporting a minority administration in return for policy victories, or sitting around the cabinet table. Here, Labour has the advantage, because it will be prepared to concede more.
The campaign will be a long one, and more than a few unpredictable ingredients have room to influence the final outcome. Opinion polls for now offer little guidance, since they oscillate wildly, though the majority declare that the lead Cameron has enjoyed for two years over Labour has shrunk.
A health warning on the polls has to be given, though. Firstly, there will be four more seats in the Commons next time, and many constituencies were redrawn in the last boundary review. Under the new figures, a party will require 326 seats to secure an overall majority, with Labour’s overall majority falling if it loses just 24 seats.
A telephone poll by ICM yesterday put the gap between the Conservatives and Labour at four points, with the Tories standing at 37 points, while Labour rose to 33 points. However, the fact that it was a telephone poll on a bank holiday weekend – when many comfortably-off Tories would be away at the beach – is likely to have affected the figures.
In addition, the pollsters are finding it difficult to get a proper handle on smaller parties’ support – and not just the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems stands at approximately 20 per cent in a poll of polls conducted by the London School of Economics, though support for parties such as British National Party, the UK Independence Party and regional ones, such as the Scottish Nationalists, has fallen to 12 points.
Given the brutality of the British first-past-the-post system, the largest parties enjoy a major advantage, and, indeed, a very high percentage of the outgoing crop of MPs never enjoyed a majority of even those who voted in 2005, let alone a majority of all of their electorate.
However, the British disenchantment with politics after the MPs’ expenses scandal must, surely, produce a few eruptions on polling night.
Should he win, Cameron – younger even than Labour’s Tony Blair was in the heady, sun-filled days of 1997 – will become the youngest British prime minister since Lord Liverpool took over after Spencer Perceval was assassinated in 1812. Liverpool, it may be remembered, went on to become one of the longest-serving of prime ministers.
Brown, on the other hand, is fighting for an unprecedented fourth Labour term; more importantly, he is fighting for his own election mandate. Greeted with months of positive public reaction, Brown thought seriously about calling an election in late 2007 just months after he had finally ousted Blair from office, but, ever cautious, he pulled back at the last minute.
His leadership has never really recovered, and his chances of victory now depend as much on his own performance as on Conservative shadow chancellor George Osborne’s failure to convince the public that he is the man to whom the keys of No 11 Downing Street and the treasury should be given.
Last September, Osborne, to his credit, tried to be straight as any politician facing the voters can be, warning of an “age of austerity” and outlining £7 billion worth of cuts. He learned a lesson that the public may want honesty from their politicians, but they rarely thank the bearer of bad news.
The cuts proposed were but a drop in the ocean, given the scale of the UK’s problems, but the decision to be even as stark as this was enough to put Labour back into the race, and the Tory problems were multiplied in the months since by policy blunders – over what the Tories would do for married couples, for instance – creating doubt about whether the Cameron/Osborne team are fit for office.
Mark Hennessy is London Editor