Crunching the numbers in Westminster

The final battle lines are becoming clearer as election day looms. All parties are offering coded hints about what coalition deals they may favour without limiting their room for manoeuvre after the election.

It seems that Labour and the Conservatives will come in roughly level with somewhere around 280 seats in a parliament that needs 326 for an outright majority. The Conservative advantages of both incumbency and geography — as the constituency boundaries slightly favour their areas — are being harmed by a more confident Labour leader Ed Miliband. As the votes are counted on Friday morning (May 8) the exact difference between the two will be very important indeed, as it will define who they need to talk to in order to form the requisite overall majority.

Both large parties have ruled out a coalition with the Scottish Nationalists who are expected to get anything between 45 to 55 of Scotland’s 59 seats. This disdain has played hugely to Nicola Sturgeon’s tactical advantage as she has shouted all across Scotland that the Scots voted to stay in the union in the referendum but now the union does not want their votes. Nonetheless, if the numbers don’t work out for a coalition with an overall majority, the Scot Nats may end up doing a deal to support a minority government, which they would prefer to be Labour.

If the Liberal Democrats get anything near 20 seats (down from their current 57) they may be kingmakers between Labour and Conservatives, and they are working to make sure that the voters know this. Unlike the Conservatives and Labour, they are not afraid to openly discuss possibilities since that is the only way they will get back into government.

Nick Clegg has been clear that the Lib Dems will not deal with the SNP or Ukip, or any government “held hostage” by either of them. He told the Financial Times the Lib Dems have no “meeting point” with them because Ukip wanted to withdraw from the EU, and the SNP want to “pull our country to bits”.

Clegg has also said that the party with the “greatest mandate”, even if that is not a majority, should be given the first chance to form a government. This reinforces what happened in 2010 when all party leaders accepted that a larger vote was more important than the earlier convention that the incumbent party should have the first chance to form a government.

Nigel Farage of Ukip may well be very disappointed on Friday. His party will be lucky if it wins three to five seats, which should condemn his xenophobic crowd to irrelevance because they will not be strong enough to offer any coalition much certainty, despite having taken away some important votes from incumbent Tories.

This means that the coalition talks will revolve around one or other of the big parties talking to the Liberal Democrats, Ulster Unionists, Welsh Nationalists, and anyone else required to find the key 326 majority. In these circumstances, the smallest differences will be very important.