A remarkable personal victory for the PM
Matthew d’Ancona Lib-Dems won 62 seats under Charles Kennedy’s leadership. Ten years on, Kennedy is one of the casualties of what looks like being the party’s worst result since 1970, when the Liberals, under Jeremy Thorpe won only six seats.
Labour must now concede that its punt on the younger Miliband in 2010 was an error — not in a spirit of regicide but of self-examination. The part y, after all, specifically went for the candidate who rejected New Labour; who insi sted, contra hi s elder brother, David, that the electoral centre-ground had shifted to the Left since the global financial Crash. It had done no such thing, as this result demonstrates. Miliband is a decent, principled man. But the electorate rejected him summarily as a candidate for the top job.
The context was wrong for Ed, too. Too much was at stake for a faddish experiment in progressive policy, “predistribution” and an economic policy that veered hectically between fiscal conservatism and promise-the-earth Keynesianism. Absorbed by the fight in Scotland, Labour also devoted too little energy to Ukip and fighting off Nigel Farage. It is difficult to generalise, but more defectors to Ukip seem to have returned to the Conservative fold than did to L abour. Battered and bruised, Miliband and his party must now decide where their respective futures lie. A leadership contest seems all but certain, and the party must decide whether it wants to please itself or speak to the whole country.
The laurels of the victor go to Lynton Crosby, a contentious pick as Cameron’s election guru who demanded ruthless campaign discipline, and to George Osborne, who has kept a relatively low profile in recent weeks, but masterminded the political plan that bore fruit yesterday.
It was the Chancellor who set the party on its quest for a second term in the 2011 Autumn Statement (which conceded that austerity would continue after 2015) and who made it possible with an economic plan that was strategically correct rather than tactically popular. He now has time to burnish his claim to the leadership once Cameron has gone: Boris Johnson is back and will be a formidable force in the Commons. But there will be no “Boris Coronation” when the moment comes.
That is for another day: difficult times lie ahead, not least as Cameron prepares for a referendum on Britain’s EU membership, enacts further cuts and seeks to tame newly-rampant Tory backbenchers no longer constrained by the etiquette of coalition. Yet only the churlish would deny this is a remarkable victory for the PM personally.
The election was framed as a test of his economic strategy and of him, personally. This, as his former director of strategy, Andrew Cooper, told me last week, meant the public having “faith and trust” in a recovery that had yet to benefit many of them directly.
The entire campaign was explicitly draped over Cameron’s shoulders. Everything depended upon the mains cable of his connection with the British people — this, ten years after he became Tory leader. If he failed, it all failed.
It only looked like a “safety first” campaign. In its absolute dependency upon Cameron delivering, it was actually high risk, a gambler’s flourish. And, as Britain woke up to discover this morning, the gamble came off.