Election 2010: surviving election night (and morning)

As we tremulously await the results of this year’s election, join Prospect in raising a glass to the memory of a bizarre campaign–and click here to equip yourself for the murkiest election night (and morning) on record.

“You hear voices?” asks my psychiatrist. “I do. I hear derisory laughter. I hear men and women from other countries jeering at my choices in foreign accents.” He nods slowly: “So you feel a tremendous responsibility, you feel that you are the deciding factor, but that you cannot decide?” “Yes,” I return his nod. “And sometimes, in the dead of the night, I hear Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair performing this beautiful aria together—it’s Mozart, from Don Giovanni. They sing of love.” My voice falls to a whisper. “And I miss them.” Read more of Edward Docx's confession

With election predictions ranging from outright victories to Lib-Lab pacts, Lib-Con coalitions, and even a government of national unity— Prospect introduces a new game for our uncertain times: Fantasy Cabinet. Who is your dream team? For our treasury, Adair Turner’s spirited attacks on “socially useless” banks nudge him ahead of Saint Vince Cable. Even if Nick Clegg doesn’t win he is surely still worth a place as home secretary. Business titans and celebs would be welcome: what of Richard Branson at biz, Bob Geldof at DfID, Emma Thompson at culture, or Jamie Oliver at health?... Read more and weigh in here

As an American, the visceral disdain for Gordon Brown amongst my friends and colleagues in Britain has long perplexed me. Today, the biggest problem facing Britain remains the fallout of the financial crisis. No one can sensibly fault his actions during this incredibly difficult time. Much of the rest of the world followed his lead and the financial crisis, while devastating, did not metastasize into a replay of the great depression." Read more

The BNP vote share has risen in the area (it won 17 per cent in local elections in 2006, making it the official opposition in the borough), while Labour’s fiefdom has collapsed—from 65 per cent in 1997 to around 50 per cent in 2005. And facing the Labour candidate Margaret Hodge on the doorstep, people are quite happy to own up to voting BNP—in fact she opens her spiel with the words “BNP or Labour?” Many of the voters sound as if they are singing from a BNP song-sheet: talking about “coloured people” taking jobs and about their sons and daughters not being able to get housing in the area. But many BNP voters are in work, live in good council housing, and have nice-ish cars. What’s going on? Read more

Not long ago it was just a fantasy, a parlour game for policy types, but in the weeks before the election, it started to look like it could actually happen: that an undecided electorate, a distorted voting system, and Nick Clegg’s moderately impressive performance in the television debates could conjure an unexpectedly delightful result—a full-blooded Lib-Lab coalition. The idea had kept my spirits up even in the dreary phase before the first television contest: a Lib-Lab coda to 13 years of new Labour, a chance to clean up unfinished business from that period and give our politics a less tribal, more reasonable, frame...Read more

For people to extend their idea of 'us' to outsiders, of whatever colour or origin, they have to feel that their interests are not being undermined in any way by those outsiders—and that the outsiders have some commitment to the thing they are joining. That means we have to get the economics right (especially at the bottom of the pile) and we have to get integration right. Alas, although Labour has invented some useful new markers of citizenship, we have done neither properly in the past 12 years - David Goodhart. Read more

Gordon Brown has joined an illustrious tradition, unknown before the era of broadcasting, in which public figures give voice to unacceptable sentiments in front of microphones they don’t know are live.

Since Ronald Reagan jokingly promised to “start bombing in five minutes” before a radio interview, the canon has only got richer. Brown's gaffe was excruciating, but he's by no means alone. Here are five more top blunders… Read more

Despite all the new images—Cameron on his bike, posing with huskies in the Arctic, with his kids in their pushchairs on the Portobello Road—it is still unclear how deeply the changes have penetrated. Cameron looks and talks different: 'vote blue: go green,' 'there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state.' There is a sense that old Tory bugbears like Europe and crime have fallen off the speech card, but are lingering in the wings—Cameron’s rhetoric remains way to the left of his party and most of his MPs.Read more

As head of the executive branch, the PM needs a strong private office to connect him to Whitehall. As head of cabinet, an effective (but not overly large) cabinet office. As shaper of government policy, a policy unit for the short term and a strategy unit for the longer term. Add to this the need for a political office, a parliamentary office, an appointments office, and defence, foreign policy and intelligence advisers. Few, if any, of these roles have been adequately fulfilled by the ad hoc and amateurish structure of offices that exist at present.Read more

Clegg, who recently admitted being 'very, very left wing' when younger, interned at the magazine in 1990, during Christopher Hitchens’s time there. But that is not all: a year earlier one Ed Miliband also joined their internship programme... A friend inside the magazine tells Prospect both men spent time laboriously fact-checking articles—good training for putting Britain’s dubious public finances back in order. Read more

We’ve seen this most unforgiving of media make and break politicians before. Remember Michael Howard’s paralysed discomfiture on Newsnight when asked the same question some 12 times by Jeremy Paxman? In a different sense Tony Blair’s performance in Sedgefield after Diana’s death conveyed that, although the people’s princess might be dead, the people’s politician was in his element channeling national emotion. Some consider these aspects of politics trivial. I do not. The story of the 2010 election debates reinforces this focus on the politician as a representative for our fears and aspirations. Read more

Labour has learnt from the recent bailouts. This is not true of the Tories. Given the differences between the parties at this election, I think, on balance, you should vote Labour - Maurice Glasman. Read more

Every time you turn on the TV or tune into Radio 4, it's chaps, chaps, chaps. Political chaps, expert chaps, chaps as commentators, psephological chaps counting, historical chaps contextualising, journalist chaps inspecting the tea leaves, philosophical chaps unpicking the meaning. I am all in favour of meritocratic expertise—get the best and the brightest in, say I. But this is ridiculous. Read more

Most striking, especially to a time traveller from 1974 (when we last had a hung parliament), is the almost complete absence of speakers from the TUC—or indeed from the working class at all... You get a clearer sense of Britain from the sitcom Outnumbered: the characters are middle class, but unable to aspire to the quality of life that that would have meant 40 or 50 years ago. They are simply ground down by the realities of life in Brown’s (or Cameron’s) Britain. Read more

Alas, there are some men who, when they go for the chest-revealing look, simply look like they forgot to wear a tie. Read more

Tory campaign literature betrays the effect of a serious Green challenge on the other parties. Labour and Lib Dems alike are forced to greenwash their politics and their literature, because green issues are raised constantly on the doorstep and the parties can’t sidestep the issue. Taking a leaf out of the Liberal Democrats’ book before them, the Greens bed down in an area, work hard, and practise old-fashioned grassroots politics. Read more

A public discourse that used to be capable of debating rival analyses, identifying grounds for hope and fear, and working out priorities and policy options is increasingly being taken over by histrionic displays of outraged good conscience. Read more

The other plus point of Twitter is that you can block people, so that they can’t message you directly or interact with you. In comparison, have you ever tried to get a Green party candidate off your doorstep in less than 15 minutes—and then only by promising that they can come back when your partner is in two hours later? And even then, they don’t take the hint—they actually come back to ask you if they can rely on your vote while you hide behind your non-recyclable bin bags. Read more