Would this be the key question as to What Happens Next?

Let’s suppose that the General Election produces the hung parliament the polls and betting markets are currently indicating is the likeliest outcome. What happens next is partly the consequence of the numbers game - how many MP’s and votes each party won - but also how the various players react to events and to each other.

In politics, as allegedly elsewhere, possession is nine-tenths of the law and Gordon Brown is the man in possession. The initiative would in the first instance be with him to form a government if he tried to do so, as it was with Heath in 1974.

There are several key groups that he’d need the support of: his cabinet, the PLP and (probably) the Lib Dems. If he couldn’t form a viable government - if his senior colleagues told him it was time to go - he probably wouldn’t have any option but to do so, not least because that would compromise support elsewhere. Likewise with the PLP. If Labour win most seats, a Brown government might survive on a Lib Dem abstention on the Queen’s Speech but otherwise would probably need either their active support or that of several minor parties: the veto applies there too.

There’s been talk that the Lib Dems might prop up Labour if they were to change their leader. How realistic is that?

Firstly, Clegg’s been pretty clear that the Lib Dems will regard votes won as a greater mandate than seats in the Commons. That’s inevitably going to cause problems if Labour tries to stay as if it’s a hung parliament, they’ll almost certainly have won fewer votes than the Tories (if not, they’ll be very close to an overall majority and there probably wouldn’t be an alternative viable government available). That goes for any other Labour leader as much as for Brown.

Secondly, there are party mechanisms to go through and rules to abide by. Brown can’t simply be forced out as party leader - Labour’s rules make that nigh-on impossible - so he’d have to be persuaded / forced to stand down, or left in place as party leader while one of his colleagues tried to form a government, a situation close to unworkable.

To some extent, rules can be bent or ignored if the practicalities make it reasonable to do so (eg if the rest of the cabinet were close to unanimous in recommending an alternative) but only with large amounts of goodwill on all sides - goodwill that may not be forthcoming.

Thirdly, even if Brown is somehow prised out of No 10 against his will, what happens to him then? This seems to me to be the big unanswered question. Especially if he’s still party leader but even if he’s not, he has the potential to make life intolerable for his successor in a way that even Heath or Thatcher never did simply because of the parliamentary arithmetic. Would he be offered and would he accept a place in the cabinet for example? The arguments are finely balanced either way. If he chooses to walk away, no problem; if he chooses to stay and fight, major problem.

Stubborn inertia has been a favoured tactic of Gordon Brown throughout his career and has generally served him well, preventing others from challenging him by making it too painful to do so. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him go down that road again, knowing that to do so will force the Lib Dems to choose between keeping him in office and allowing a Tory government to form, assuming the Lib Dems finish comfortably third in seats. Stubborn inertia may yet again be his best, and favoured, option.

David Herdson

538.com

Nate Silver’s view of the Uniform National Swing

Nate Silver, the elections expert behind the renowned US polling site, Fivethreeeight.com, has been taking a close interest in the mathematics of the UK’s uniform nation swing mechanism for converting poll shares into seats won.

He argues: “…. these forecasts are based on a questionable assumption and may understate, perhaps substantially, the magnitude of gains that might be realized by the Tories and by the LibDems. In particular, they are based on the idea of a uniform national swing, i.e., that if Labour finishes 7 points below their standing from the previous election in 2005, their share of the vote will drop by 7 points in each individual district (better known as ‘constituencies’ in the U.K.)….

…..when pressed to its extremes, the uniform swing can sometimes produce results that are manifestly illogical. If, for instance, Labour were to lose 100 percent of its vote, some versions of the uniform swing still have them keeping several seats in the Parliament, or perhaps even several dozen, depending on who that vote is distributed to… “

Nate has produced his own swingometer and produces a number of examples including the one above.

Meanwhile in the betting there’s been a sharp move to the Lib Dems on SportingIndex spread markets. It’s now at 88-91 seats - up seven since the weekend. Even at that level I still think it offers value.

Mike Smithson

Populus May 2005

Can we expect shockers like this from 2005?

At the big pre-election polling conference at the Royal Academy in January 2010 the boss of ICM, Martin Boon, touched on the challenges for phone pollsters of carrying out surveys over bank holiday weekends and referred to what had happened before the last election.

For fieldwork for the most infamous bank holiday poll, the one reproduced above from Populus, took place over the Saturday, Sunday and Monday before the May 5 2005 general election day and came out with a 14 point Labour lead - three days later Blair’s party won with 36.2% to the Tories 33.2% and the LDs 22.7%

This was widely put down to the challenges of finding a balanced sample, particularly enough Tory supporters, during long summer weekends and it has become part of polling folklore that surveys during such periods can produce skewed results.

Last time it did not matter so so much for the result always seemed a foregone conclusion - but what could such poll findings do to the highly febrile political environment next Tuesday, only a week today?

Mike Smithson