Election 2010: Clegg tempted by coalition with Tories

2010 ELECTION RESULT
LAB 258 (-91)
CON 306 (+97)
LD 57 (-5)
OTH 28 (-1)
After 649 seats declared.

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS leader Nick Clegg has begun tentative talks with Conservative leader David Cameron after the general election resulted in a first hung parliament since 1974.

Mr Cameron called Mr Clegg by telephone to open a dialogue over a coalition after no party was able to win the 326 seats required for a majority in the House of Commons.

The Conservatives are the biggest party with 306 seats after a most extraordinary night of significant gains and missed opportunities for them.

Labour has 258 seats, a loss of 91 seats, while the Lib Dems only have 57 MPs, five fewer than in 2005.

The result, in line with the exit poll, came as a surprise to the Lib Dems after they had enjoyed unprecedented publicity and an opinion poll surge during the campaign.

However, with the Conservatives also missing out on key seats and being unable themselves to form a government, Mr Clegg is still in the position of kingmaker.

The usual convention would have allowed sitting Prime Minister Gordon Brown to make the first attempt at forming a government.

But, during the campaign, Mr Clegg said that if parliament was hung, he would contact the man with the biggest mandate first.

He later explained that the mandate would be dictated by the number of seats and votes each party won.

In this case, that points to Mr Cameron. The Tories polled over two million more votes than Labour who finished 49 seats behind.

But Mr Cameron's opening offer today looked far from appealing for the Lib Dems.

Mr Clegg had hoped to use his party's position in a hung parliament to force the issue of electoral reform and get proportional representation introduced to general elections.

The main problem now is that, while all the polls leading up to the election showed the Lib Dems making significant gains, the reality was rather different.

The results show that they remain very much in third place, despite Labour's woes. It was a night of shattered dreams for Mr Clegg.

And that makes it much easier for Mr Cameron to justify his current offer of dealing with electoral reform - a cross-party committee of inquiry that will get nowhere fast.

Of course, if he agrees on those terms, Mr Clegg must surely fear accusations from his own supporters of 'selling out' to the Tories.

By contrast, Mr Brown has promised a referendum on proportional representation in a bid to woo Mr Clegg.

And there is no doubt about it - Mr Brown's offer is infinitely more generous than that from Mr Cameron. But, at this stage, the current Prime Minister has little to lose.

However, by engaging with Mr Brown, Mr Clegg could still lose.

Having expressed a desire to support the leader with the most seats and votes, any deal with Mr Brown would sit uneasily with great swathes of the public.

Mr Clegg's reputation would be damaged. He would be shown as a man who has gone back on his word, and done so to be part of a coalition of two parties which lost seats at the election.

Some have already suggested that such an arrangement would be called the 'coalition of the losers'.

Pure mathematics also detract from a Lib-Lab coalition. Added together, the two parties only have 315 seats which is still short of a majority.

Tonight, Mr Brown still remains Prime Minister at Number 10 Downing Street but surely not for much longer.

That is not to say that Mr Clegg should slavishly agree to a pact with Mr Cameron on the current terms.

Indeed, Mr Clegg should still hold out for some genuine change to the electoral system or otherwise drop any deals with the Tories while not making any with Labour.

Such a circumstance would still probably clear Mr Brown out of office with the Tories looking for alliances elsewhere or operating as a minority government.

Mr Cameron has said that he does not want to lead a minority administration, arguing that the country at this difficult time needs strong and stable leadership.

But minority governments can work - for a short while at least - under the principle of confidence and supply.

Under such a system, the governing party makes agreements with other parties on key policies so that votes on the Budget and the Queen's Speech can be held without the government being defeated.

Of course, a perceived problem is that this forces the governing party to spend a lot of time on just a few policies - time which Mr Cameron will argue, they do not have.

Confidence and supply also encourages a series back-room deal - hardly conducive to open government - and it is often nothing more than a quick stop-gap before another election.

Despite these issues, it could easily happen. If the Lib Dems do not like what is being offered - and, at the moment, there is no reason why Mr Clegg should - then a Tory minority government would become the next option with another election following shortly.

And, while it could lead to a difficult few months, at least the Conservatives would console themselves that the next election would still be under their preferred first past the post system.


OTHER ELECTION NEWS
*Inquiry after voters turned away
-The Electoral Commission has said it will hold an inquiry after people in Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, London and Surrey were turned away once the 10pm deadline passed.
-Police had to be called to deal with the queues after people had been left fuming by being denied a chance to vote.
-Other areas kept polling stations open after the deadline so that people could vote. There was a lack of consistency between different constituencies.
-One polling station even ran out of ballot papers, while another polling station did not have the updated electoral roll.

*Sunderland quickest to declare
-For the fifth general election in a row, a Sunderland seat was first to declare. Indeed, this time, the three Sunderland-based seats were the first three to announce their results, all for Labour.
-However, slightly higher turnout and boundary changes meant that Houghton and Sunderland South missed out on the record (22:44), having to settle for 22:52.

*Mixed fortunes for the Tories
-David Cameron's Conservative Party enjoyed some outstanding gains such as Carlisle and Kingswood which were not even on their target list for a majority.
-The Conservatives also continued their recent recovery in Wales with five gains but they still have just one seat out of 58 in Scotland.
-However, their major downfall was in failing to take key seats such as Frome, Eastleigh and Birmingham Edgbaston, all of which were meant to be easy gains.

*Labour suffer in the south
-The Labour Party has just 11 seats in the south of England outside of Greater London after strong Tory advances.
-Labour also lost several seats in the Midlands but their vote held up more strongly in the North, in Yorkshire and in Lancashire where some Labour MPs even received increased majorities.
-Not a single seat in Scotland changed hands, meaning Labour still sends 41 MPs to Westminster from this area of the UK.
-Despite taking a trouncing, Labour still managed to make three gains - in Bethnal Green and Bow (from Respect), Blaenau Gwent (from independent), and Chesterfield (from Lib Dem).

*Lib Dems shocked at poll failure
-After some opinion polls during the campaign had even suggested that the Liberal Democrats could win more than 100 seats, they actually have five fewer MPs than in 2005 with 57 in total.
-Although the Lib Dems made strong holds in the likes of Torbay, Eastleigh and Frome, they still lost out to the Tories in their traditional battleground - the South West.
-The Lib Dem mood was not helped by a couple of seriously shocking seat losses. Labour unexpectedly gained Chesterfield while Lembit Opik lost his comfortable majority in Montgomeryshire to the Tories after concentrating too much on his media career.

*Former Home Secretaries booted out
-Two former Home Secretaries, Jacqui Smith and Charles Clarke, lost their seats to the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats respectively.
-Ms Smith, who had been MP for Redditch in the West Midlands, was infamously implicated in the expenses scandal when she mistakenly claimed for pornography after her husband had included them on a bill. She almost in tears after her fate became known.
-Mr Clarke also seemed rather ungracious in defeat. An ardent critic of Gordon Brown, Mr Clarke became a thorn in the side for the Labour government, and faced a strong challenge from several parties in his seat, Norwich South.

*Northern Ireland First Minister loses
-The previously unknown Alliance Party, allied with the Liberal Democrats, produced an early shock in Nortern Ireland when deposing Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson.
-Democratic Unionist leader Mr Robinson had been embroiled in an extraordinary scandal after his wife had used public funds to invest in a cafe business, owned by a 19-year-old with whom she was having an affair.
-Only one other seat in Northern Ireland changed. The Ulster Unionists lost their only remaining seat, Down North, to a independent candidate.

*Scottish/Welsh Nationalists fail to make inroads
-As mentioned previously, no seats changed in Scotland meaning the SNP remained on six seats, well short of the ambitious total of 20 set by leader Alec Salmond at the start of the campaign.
-In Wales, Plaid Cymru gained Arfon from Labour but, even with that gain, they still only hold three Westminster seats.

*Greens get first ever seat in Brighton
-Caroline Lucas won the Green Party's first ever seat at a general election after victory in Brighton Pavilion.
-Party leader Ms Lucas gained the seat from Labour with an 8.4% swing, giving her a slim majority of 1,252.

*Speaker sees off UKIP challenge/Farage injured in air crash
-Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage was badly injured on election day after a light-jet crash left him in hospital with broken ribs.
-Mr Farage had been attempting to unfurl a banner as part of some last-minute campaigning in Buckingham where he hoped to take the seat of the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow.
-Mr Bercow retained his seat with a big majority of 12,529 while Mr Farage could only manage third place.

*Indepedents fail to prosper
-This was meant to be an election where people voted against the mainstream parties and, possibly, gave the independents a chance.
-However, there was only one win for an independent candidate (in Northern Ireland) while the sitting independents in Wyre Forest and Blaenau Gwent were beaten by the Conservatives and Labour.
-The biggest-name independent, campaigner and journalist Esther Rantzen, failed miserably, gaining just 1,892 votes and losing her deposit.
-It did not help Ms Rantzen's cause that she stood on an anti-MPs expenses ticket when the member implicated, Margaret Hodge, decided not to contest the seat.

*British National Party fall flat
-Once again, Nick Griffin's vile British National Party failed to gain a single seat at the general election although, worryingly, they polled more than half a million votes.
-The BNP's highest hopes had been in Barking where Griffin was standing but he came a distant third. It is a backward step for the BNP as the party had finished in second place in that seat in 2005.
-In even better news, the BNP lost all of its seats on the Barking Council in the English local elections, and are down from 36 council seats to just 14.