Winners and losers and elections…..and the Newark by election

Even if the Scots have chosen to be liberated like their Irish cousins,  by next May there will still be a United Kingdom…just….

Watching the ghastly coverage on the BBC of the Local and Euro elections made me realise it was time to crank up the political pace and write a essay on the events to come. I do not know whether I will have the endurance or stomach to compose a weekly journal of the sort I did for the US elections in 2012. I’m pretty sure if I can there will be very few who will read them. Anonymity bestows upon me liberation to boldly go wherever the fancy takes me…

First let’s state some obvious points – history tells us governments rarely lose their first election. In my life time only Ted Heath in 1974 has managed that feat. It was forty years ago and so I think it’s safe to say it’s unusual. Secondly, no party polling 30% or less in an election has ever recovered sufficiently to win the subsequent election. Thirdly, no opposition has ever managed to win power with a leader significantly more unpopular than the party itself – though again Ted Heath in 1970 and Mrs Thatcher in 1979 at times were less popular than their party. Fourthly and finally, no opposition with such a small lead over the government a year out from an election has gone on to win the general election.

Therefore the answer to the question posed above ought to be, first prize to David Cameron and second prize to the Conservative Party for obtaining a clear working majority in the House of Commons.

This brings us neatly to the problem – we are not in the usual situation.

Take the Conservative Party as an example. In 2010 it did not win the election despite Gordon Brown being the most unpopular PM in post war history. It achieved power in coalition with the LibDems having won just over 36% of the total vote. Thus in its 13 long years in opposition the Conservative Party managed only to get 6% more of votes cast in 2010 than when it lost catastrophically in 1997. It had a larger percentage of the popular vote when it twice lost in 1974 to Harold Wilson. It had gained a mere 3% more of the popular vote than when it lost to a very unpopular Tony Blair in 2005. This despite Gordon Brown and the largest financial crisis since the banking collapse in the early 1930’s.

To win in 2015 the Conservative Party needs at least to replicate that percentage of the popular vote. Outside Harold Wilson in 1966 no incumbent government has ever won a subsequent election with an increase in its percentage of the popular vote in the last fifty years. Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives won more votes in 1979 – 700,000 more of them – than they polled in their landslide in 1983. Moreover, because of its failure to change the boundaries for this election – the Conservatives will need to be clear of the Labour opposition by about 7% in order to win even a small overall majority. Thus wining 37-8% with Labour on 30% will only just eek out a Conservative victory. It is true they will be able to govern since the NI Unionists will probably given them supply and censure but they will be left at a serious disadvantage in the Lords without the support of LibDem peers. This government – the coalition – has had the advantage of having an effective majority of working peers. Thus, without the LibDems, getting through the cherished boundary changes the Conservatives would need to implement to have a chance of gaining future majorities, looks slim. Long used to being masters of the UK’s political universe, the post 1997 Conservative Party is today a tabby cat by comparison with Mrs Thatcher’s lion.

Labour’s problems are almost the reverse. They have both a voting system working in their electoral favour and they have concentrations of friendly voters in their urban and Northern heartlands. The Labour vote is helpfully concentrated where it does most damage. Does this matter – you bet it does. Michael Foot’s Labour Party got around 28% of the vote in 1983 and won 200 or so seats in Parliament. Brown’s Labour Party got a miserable 29% of the vote and won 255 seats. That’s the difference distribution makes and it matters. Labour’s problems are not rooted in the advantage or disadvantage of a current bias of the electoral system in their favour. This was a problem for the party in the 1960’s and in the 1980’s. No longer, the problems for Labour are otherwise, two fold and inter-linked: their leader and their leadership.

Ed Miliband is many things – including a pretty ruthless operator. He has Mrs Thatcher’s knack of sensing the popular zeitgeist – after all immigration was in the heart of his leadership campaign. He has repeatedly wrong footed the government, over energy prices, over cost of living and famously over the Murdoch press but he does not resonate with the voters and the more they get to know him the less they like him.

From Labour’s viewpoint that is alarmingly most true of the ‘blue collar’ traditional Labour voters drawn to UKIP and least true of the metro-sexual educated who are numerous in London and other cities like Manchester, Cambridge and Oxford. These voters might answer Ed’s knock but the traditional working class vote, never much impressed with Blair, looks likely to leave Ed waiting by the door. It turns out this group likes Ed Balls even less than Ed Miliband. This presents Labour with a second problem – the remainder of the Labour leadership is hardly more appealing – Ed Balls has the charm of of blunderbuss and learned too many of the tricks of the trade from his mentor Gordon Brown. Yvette Cooper has Ed Balls for her husband. The rest don’t light up the TV screens with their presence and in the absence of another obvious choice – like David Miliband – a leadership election is both unlikely and unlikely to solve Labour’s problem. Next time will be different – watch for Chukka Umunna…like Blair he has the self confidence and the easy style to appeal to non-political voters – and to get out the immigrant vote.

Thus, against the odds oddly it’s time for Labour collectively to cross fingers and hope for the best – hope maybe the debates do for Ed what they did for Nick Clegg in 2010. Drowning men tend to hold on to anything that comes to hand.

Mention of Mr Clegg and drowning men takes us neatly to the LibDems. In power for the first time in seventy years they one more entered into a coalition with the Conservative Party in order to get there. History has not been kind to Liberals in Conservative led coalitions. The Liberal Parties were virtually wiped out in the 1940’s because of their toxic association with Baldwin and Chamberlain. Mr Clegg clearly intended to buck this historical trend. However, two things probably have conspired against his noble ambition: Tuition Fees and NHS reform. The irony is Mr Clegg need never have let either happen. He was intoxicated by his own heady brew of taking tough decisions and taking himself way too seriously. He took decisions which a wiser head might have left undecided  –  and for the decidedly silliest of reasons – just to be seen to be as tough as the Tories. In that vanity glass the LIbDem brand lost its public reflection.

Since then the LIbDem performance in every national election has been dismal. This last set were in many ways no worse than the first in 2011. For the LibDems coalition was meant to be the dawn of the brave new world they had worked for for but for which they were strangely unprepared. Inexplicably the only party well prepared for this political novelty of coalition was the Conservative Party. It seized its advantage and has cleverly held the LIbDems to it since. The LibDems thought all would be fair and electoral sweet reason would be seasoned with the Alternative Vote by 2015.  Unreasonably voters took a different view. The whole enterprise now seems and feels doomed. Like risk-averse Brown and Major before, Clegg clings on for fear of losing everything. It is rarely a good springboard for electoral success.

However, just when this collapse of stout third party seemed ready to hand Ed the keys of the kingdom, enter the 21st century’s authentic cheeky chappie – yes, Nigel Farage and UKIP.

It is a mistake to believe because someone is a fool and a knave no one will ever vote for him or her or his or her party in significant numbers. History actually teaches us the contrary –  fools and knaves are made to win elections. Mr Farage has stamped his personality all over the post-coalition politics and in a world where every novelty is a celebrity opportunity Mr Farage has not disappointed on the downside. The electorate accustomed to fads sees no harm in following one and voting for it.

UKIP under Farage might win an election – and not just one about Europe. It might certainly win a by election or two or three or more. Survation polling has UKIP within 8 % of the conservatives in Newark. With a majority of 16,000 Newark is one of England’s safest Conservative seats. If last week’s electoral tremors betoken an earthquake wait and see the panic if the Tories loose Newark.

Realistically, however, the political system runs against UKIP and Farage. Nationwide UKIP gained 168 Councillors last week. Labour gained over 2100 – 350 new ones to boot. Even the LibDems had over 400 seats at the night’s gloomy end. Hard truth is it’s hard to win seats on First Past the Post in any circumstances; harder still for for small parties; hardest of all for new parties without local organisation. LibDem success when it came in 1997 was built of three decades of hard slog on the streets of council wards.

That, however, is not the last word on the matter. We live in an age of Media hyperbole and celebrity. Politics like much else is viewed and consumed through these prisms. Farage has a traction that might pull down the old three party system…

Evidence – well who in politics does Farage most resemble. I suggest a name, Boris Jonson. Boris has won two elections in London. This is very significant – London is becoming a less and less Conservative city. In London last week Labour had its best results since 1971 – outdoing even the glory days of the 1990’s. Still in 2012 it lost London mayoralty to Boris for a second time. To win in addition to overcoming the fact of being a Conservative, Boris had to overcome the handicaps of being an old Etonian and being extremely bright.  He has hidden his privileged bright lights from the public gaze by  giving them something else to look at – Boris has cultivated a certain affected clownishness. He cultivated this television image before he ran for city-wide office. The image was a-political and it worked for Boris, the politician….

Farage has the same effortless ease on camera – a natural, one might say. Modern politics – fairly or unfairly – turns much more on how you say something than what you say. Blair like Bill Clinton were class acts being able to do both – both natural performers on TV and politicians with something to say. Others like Thatcher, Wilson and even Churchill  sculpted a public persona from their own clay feet and shaped images the public were willing to buy. Others like Hague, Kinnock and even Heath never quite got their image fired in the ovens of popular imagination.

UKIP therefore should be treated less as a phenomenon of right wing demagoguery – though it has plenty of nasty demagoguery in its train – and more as a phenomenon of the consumerist politics of celebrity and novelty which has a powerful undertow in modern political life. The politician most likely to succeed is the one who appears to be the one with the X-Factor; the one who puts voters at their ease –  more Ant or Dec than Bill or Benn….as Bill’s wife Hilary found to her cost in 2008 when running against the easy, charming Barak Obama.

So here we have it all – an election in the offing – and a choice between Cameron, Miliband, Farage or Clegg. Mr Farage will probably have to be allowed into the leaders’ debates. Mr Farage will most likely give a good account of himself and UKIP will get a boost much as Jeremy Thorpe got a boost in 1974. Mr Clegg’s army will be reduced to tears but probably half the LibDems will survive. UKIP could win 10 seats but unless it polls in percentage terms in the higher twenties it is unlikely to make a breakthrough in Parliament. There will be nationalists and there will be unionists and there will be a government – probably like the 1970’s a government which will duck and dive to survive.

Who will be PM my head says Cameron….my heart says…..just remember sometimes unlikely people win elections – ask Ted Heath, Harold Wilson in February 1974 and John Major…