David Marr Friday 8 May 2015
Muddle and indecision are abandoned on election night as opinion polls dramatically lose face
Ed Miliband resigns as Labour leader after losing the general election
David Cameron: we can make Great Britain greater still
Britain’s reputation for restraint is shot. The results that began rolling in from Scotland after 2am were not the least moderate. Commentators were left floundering for metaphors. Alex Salmond in his trademark growl declared: “There is a lion roaring in Scotland tonight.”
The country has set new standards for political annihilation. Few countries have ever done it with such determination. The Scots chucked Labour out. And with almost equal determination, the Scots and English discarded the Liberal Democrats. They were ruthless.
Where is the Britain of muddle and indecision? The BBC hardly needed those clever graphics – the piazza map and the Big Ben swingometer – to show what was going on. Swings of 30% don’t need much illustration.
But the numbers don’t explain themselves. There’s no war, no famine, no economic catastrophe in Britain to account for such electoral slaughter. What it’s all about will be argued for years. But it seems driven very little by policy and a lot by a visceral exasperation with old, failed parties.
Election 2015 live: results day – as it happened
Shock results deliver Tories overall Commons majority and claim leadership scalps of Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage
Trail round with SNP canvassers up north, and it’s clear how incoherent are the hopes invested in that party. “Stand up for Scotland,” was about the best candidate Patrick Grady could manage on the doorsteps of Glasgow North. He took an old Labour seat with a majority of 9,000 votes.
That political carnage on this scale is carried out with such dignity seems particularly British. There are the mayors in chains and behind them, like children at speech day, are the candidates waiting for their fate to be announced.
They know what’s coming. Nick Clegg approached the platform as though walking to the guillotine. He had survived but he owed the air of tragedy to his party. By that time the Lib Dems were losing hard and losing everywhere. He was heckled as he hinted at his resignation and swiftly disappeared.
The oddball parties know this is their only moment. Months of work have gone into these few seconds of fame. Names have been changed by deed poll. Deposits have been paid and lost. And as their risible vote count is announced, they pump the air. Mission accomplished.
But in seat after seat, the Lib Dems suffered the ultimate humiliation of losing their deposits too. The joke dies with them. What comfort can there be for the Lib Dems that in some seats they seemed almost to join the fancy-dress fringe, with pathetic vote counts in triple figures?
Could the universal catastrophe of the polling of the last weeks also be put down to pranksters? To the inner mischief of the British people? Did they become so tired of the phone calls from Ipsos Mori and YouGov that they invented the logjam scenario of the last weeks just to amuse themselves?
The loss of face for the opinion polls is not the least dramatic outcome of the 2015 election. Perhaps there was a last-minute change of heart across the country that yielded such a strong result for the Conservatives. Perhaps the polls were just wrong. They may never be trusted again, as they were until polling day.
Pundits are nervously checking their columns to make sure they left a little wiggle room in their predictions. The polls were saying the same thing for so many weeks even the most careful commentators began to drop the usual warnings that the figures may change before the contest was finished.
This time the whole story changed between morning and night. Over breakfast Miliband was in with a chance. But by the time the exit polls were published at 10pm, it suddenly seemed possible for David Cameron to survive. By breakfast the next day, it was clear he would govern in his own right.
The business of prediction is itself now suspect but I’ll venture this: Australian tacticians Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor will be around in Britain for a long time. They did their work for their clients damn well, delivering what Britain hasn’t seen since 1992: a clear cut Conservative victory. They even took Nigel Farage with them.
After a campaign when so much was ventured, so much political blood spilled and history made, the outcome was so old fashioned, so comfortably British. The country is once more in Conservative hands but with the party beholden in government to no one but themselves, their backers and their people.
The bill will soon fall due for Cameron’s victory. He has made noises about addressing the fragile state of the union after a campaign that focused, more than anything, on the horrors Scotland might inflict on England. As he left for London, he said the sort of thing divisive leaders always say: “I want to bring our country together, our United Kingdom together.”
Election 2015: Britain sets new standards for political annihilation | Politics | The Guardian
