Whoever wins, British politics will never be the same again
The MPs’ expenses scandal rocked Westminster to the core last summer and unleashed a public backlash of such ferocity that record numbers of voters were expected to boycott this election in protest.
But as the campaign has exploded off tangent in various unexpected directions – the TV debates, Cleggmania, the collapse in the once mammoth Tory lead – turn-out is likely to rocket from the 59% in 2005.
With polls showing that between 25%-40% of voters have still to make up their minds, all is to play for – but whoever wins, British politics will never be the same again.
With Labour staging a last minute comeback the party is living on its nerves. Exhausted after 13 years in power, it has gone back to where it started in 1997 – hoping for a realignment of liberal-left politics that will shut the Tories out.
Tony Blair had planned to bring the Lib Dems into his Cabinet when he ended 18 years of Tory domination in 1997, but the swing towards him was so massive it delivered a Commons majority of 179 and his hopes of a permanent centre-left block were dashed as his party demanded power for itself.
Instead Labour became arrogant with the ease with which it had banished the Tories. Blair’s first term and its historic Commons majority was largely wasted, the second term was dominated by the disaster of the Iraq war and the third term saw Blair finally cede power to Gordon Brown after their titanic 10-year feud.
But Blair would continue to dominate Westminster from beyond the political grave and the taste of victory for Brown was short-lived as the country became overwhelmed by the economic slump.
And to add insult to injury, Brown realised that he had banished Blair from his own party only to see a Blair-lite Tory leader emerge in the shape of David Cameron to savage him from across the bear pit of the Commons.
Cameron’s crusade to make the Conservatives electable once more may have been dubbed “Are we Blair yet?” by detractors, but for a while at least he looked as if he had captured some of the former Labour leader’s magic.
It was deeply ironic that the Tories had been forced to ape Blair after he himself had been dismissed as “Tory Blair” by so many in Labour as he tried to modernise it through the 1990s.
But his great political achievement was to move Labour so convincingly to the centre that he marginalised the Conservatives into an insular anti-immigrant, pro-Pound party that spoke to no one but itself.
Cameron believed he had found a way out of the wilderness, but his great tactical mistake of the campaign was to demand TV debates.
The move suddenly gave the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg an equal platform and the electorate warmed far more to his change mantra than to that of Cameron’s.
Now as little as four points separate all three parties in the polls and the outcome rests on a knife-edge.
The Tories may scrape a slender majority, but more likely remain on course to be the largest party in what the British revel in calling a “hung parliament”.
This in itself could trigger a constitutional crisis as Mr Cameron has said he will not follow convention and give the outgoing Prime Minister a week’s grace to try and form a new administration.
As things stand, if Mr Brown cannot put together a coalition able to vote through his Queen’s Speech proposals on May 25, he will tender his resignation to the Queen and she will ask Mr Cameron to try and put together a workable alternative.
But Mr Cameron fears giving Mr Brown first chance will rob him of the momentum he would need to take power as a minority Tory administration. Britain has not faced such a crisis for 36 years, so no one is quite sure what will happen next week.
One certainty is the Lib Dems will claim the moral victory. If they get up to a third of the vote, and yet just 100 seats in the 650 member Commons, the bizarreness of the British voting system will be exposed as never before.
That is the moment a bruised and battered Labour will fulfil the Blair doctrine and embrace PR and re-align British politics so that it can be driven by the liberal-left for the next generation.
Brown will not survive leading his party to such electoral humiliation – and his old enemy Blair will have bested him one last time.
