And the winner is….

The election is over bar the waiting, quite a lot of waiting since the consensus opinion is that we won’t have a government until Monday at the earliest. This hiatus between the closing of the polls and the start of whatever comes next is a good time to make a few final observations about the election just gone.

Thanks to the televised debates between the leaders of the three main parties, an unlikely ratings success as it turned out, we now know who Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg is. In fact for a while it seemed like a large section of the public really did agree with Nick. As it turned out both Clegg and his party peaked too soon and the orange surge failed to translate into either votes or seats, that said the Lib Dems could still play kingmaker in the negotiations to form a coalition and will be able to demand more serious treatment from the media in future.

As expected Gordon Brown imploded on the campaign trail, the Labour Party campaign was a lumbering mess and the Bigotgate scandal robbed Brown of much of his personal authority. It is ironic that he made the only halfway decent speech of the election to an audience of community activists gathered in Methodist Central Hall at the start of last week, his passion may well have been genuine but few people listening would have been able to believe that his moral compass isn’t irretrievably broken.

If there is an award for running the most energetic campaign is should probably go to Conservative leader David Cameron, for four weeks he seemed to be just about everywhere. This could have led to a bad case of over exposure, in fact it saw him emerge from the dust of the campaign as that most rare of things a fully functioning human being who also happens to be a full time politician. If, as seems likely, he ends up leading a government obliged to start taking unpopular decisions from day one that may prove to be a valuable asset.

Election Day threw up some surprises, some of which were comic while others left this observer fearful for the safety of our democracy.

Former UKIP leader and full time scourge of the EU Nigel Farage emerged from a Dick Dastardly style plane crash to do battle with commons speaker John Bercow. Sadly he lost that particular dogfight but has cemented his place as a ‘character’, the next logical step for Mr Farage is surely canonization as a fully fledged national treasure.

There was much less to laugh about in the exclusion of thousands of people who turned up to vote in the hour before the polls closed at ten o’clock. Yes many of the people involved probably could have voted earlier in the day but the inability of the Polling Clerks at the stations where the problem occurred should have been more organised. Voting is a fundamental right and it should not be denied to people due to incompetence on the part of public officials.

The result, as the polls had for once been accurate in predicting, was the first hung parliament in the UK since 1974. Since the early hours of Friday morning our democratic system has taken on a distinct similarity to the sort of ‘photo-romance’ that used to appear in Jackie and other teen magazines. Should Nick give his heart, or his fifty seven seats in the commons anyway, to sporty Dave or brooding Gordon; decisions, decisions, what is a party leader to do?

By this time next week a decision will have been reached, in all probability David Cameron will be head of a government about to set sail into economic waters stormy enough to make the shocks and scares of an election seem like child’s play. There are interesting and probably dangerous times ahead.

Gordon Brown experiences his ‘horseshoe nail’ moment.

Politics, particularly during an election season, can be a strange business, one where great changes of fortune are heralded by seemingly minor events. As the nursery rhyme has it, the most historic of battles are often lost for the want of a horseshoe nail.

This week saw one such event and the almost certain ending of any hope that Gordon Brown will still be Prime Minister this time next week.

It took the shape of an, as he thought, private comment about Rochdale pensioner Gillian Duffy, who Brown had met on the campaign trail and described to his aides as a ‘bigoted woman’ because she had the temerity to mention the unmentionable subject of immigration. In a piece of the bad luck that has dogged his tenure in Downing Street from day one our soon to be ex premier still had his microphone on and the whole sorry exchange was recorded and then played back to him live on national radio.

To his credit Brown looked horrified when his words were played back to him and made a personal apology; it was, though, too little done far too late. An ugly truth about his character and that of the party he leads had been brought out into the open.

Behind the carefully constructed PR and the pose of being a pretty straight bunch of guys; the brave talk about having a ‘moral compass’ and wanting to reach out to ordinary voters New Labour is a seething mass of paranoia totally divorced from the experiences and concerns of their core voters, or of anyone else living outside the Westminster bubble. At some level everyone who voted for them knew this, and I include myself in this group, but so long as we acknowledge it things could go on as they always had. Now we have seen their true colours they can no longer claim out vote and nothing will ever be the same again.

Bigotgate, as the incident was quickly dubbed by the media, wasn’t the only thing that went wrong for the Labour Party this week; just the most graphically damaging.

In a moment of pure slapstick the party’s charmless schools secretary Ed Balls was snubbed by Peppa Pig, a cartoon character much admired by the under fives m’lud, who refused to appear alongside him at the launch of the party’s children’s policy.

On a more serious note two broadsheet newspapers withdrew their support form Labour, it isn’t, perhaps, such a surprise that the Times prefers the Tories, but the news that the Guardian is backing the Liberal Democrats because they share its stance on electoral reform is, in terms of condemnation, roughly equivalent to the Tablet dropping the Vatican in favour of Lambeth Palace.

This is how the New Labour project that began with such high hopes in 1997 ends, not with a bang or a whimper; just endless bitter recriminations. That and a deep sense of betrayal felt by people all over the country for whom socialism is more than just an ideological pose, even if they don’t use the word it is the code by which they live their lives, they are the people New Labour let down by taking their support for granted.

Gordon Brown, like any senior politician, must have considered what his place in history might be, this week he found out. He will be listed alongside Lloyd George, not in the sense of being a ‘great’ prime minister, but in the sense of being a venal man who led his party into political irrelevance. It is a verdict the events of this week show he richly deserves.

The knives are out for Nick the nice guy.

One week on from his surprise win in the first televised debate between the leaders of the three main parties the knives have come out for Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg; and with a vengeance too.

As party colleague Chris Huhne put it every right wing newspaper, meaning most of the British press, ‘has a splash attacking Nick- I wonder why.’

The splashes, or ‘smears’, as his supporters have described them, have mostly concerned claims made in the Daily Telegraph that Clegg received up to £250 per month of donations into his own account from three businessmen during 2006 and the unearthing by the Daily Mail of comments he made about Britain’s relationship with Europe in 2002, which prompted it to run the headline ‘Nick Clegg in Nazi slur on Britain’ yesterday.

As Nick Clegg wryly commented to the BBC this week: ‘I must be the first politician to go from Churchill to being a Nazi in the space of a week,’ referring to the comparison made after his triumph in last weeks debate between a man most people thought of as a political also ran and the nation’s iconic wartime leader.

On the subject of claims that he had serious questions to answer about his expenses Clegg said ‘I have done nothing wrong. In the next few days I will publish figures to prove it.’

The Liberal Democrats have also come under a more general attack for everything from their attitude towards Trident, a laudable endorsement of scrapping a costly nuclear deterrent that hasn’t deterred anyone since the Berlin Wall came down and their less than popular stance in immigration; much of which has taken the shine of the nations’ newly installed political poster boy.

To a large extent this is only the close examination of policy that any party hoping to enter the political mainstream should expect, but there is also an added element of vindictiveness that says as much about the fears of the political establishment as it does about the shortcomings of a party seen until recently as little more than a repository for protest votes.

As Chris Huhne told the BBC this week: ‘British politics needs a fundamental rethink and a real change and the Conservative Party doesn’t offer that and never did,’ the question lurking in the background being do the Lib Dems offer that change?

Last night’s debate proved to be something of a score draw with David Cameron appearing more relaxed and as a result seeing his standing in the polls improve; expect him to throw everything at winning next week’s final round and Gordon Brown was as dreadful as before; for him things can only get worse now. The truth remains though while the Liberal Democrats, as I pointed out during conference season, lack the fire in their bellies necessary to force open the doors to the political big time their success in this election could provide much needed encouragement for those individuals and parties that do.

And another thing:

What a difference a week makes, last week the skies were a blue dome free from any blemish save the odd cloud, now they’re crowded with planes once more. While I’m glad that the stranded holidaymakers are finally able to make their way home I can’t help feeling that the resultant vapour trails look a little too much like graffiti on the roof of the Sistine chapel.

After almost fifty years of battling international super villains and their henchmen armed with claw hands and deadly bowler hats James Bond had been done in by his most deadly adversary; the accounts department. MGM, film distributors for the Bond franchise are in financial trouble and so work on the latest movie has been indefinitely suspended.

You can imagine how the conversation went:

Bond: (tied to a table with a circular saw spinning uncomfortably close to his family assets) ‘Do you expect me to talk?’

Evil Accounts Exec: (stroking a white Persian cat naturally) ‘No Mr Bond; I expect you to produce receipts.’

And finally, a good friend who keeps his eye on such things told me yesterday that calls to the Samaritans have risen threefold since the start of the election; never mind Gordon, not long to go now.

All talk; no real debate.

Did the earth move for you last Thursday, during the history making television debate between the leaders of the three main political parties; it didn’t budge so much as an inch for me.

The whole thing with its over rehearsed sound bites and ludicrous rules that prevented the audience from clapping, groaning or giving any sign they hadn’t slipped into a coma was a huge disappointment. It told us, the voting public, nothing we didn’t already know about the three privileged men standing on the stage.

Gordon Brown is awkward and more often than not rather cross, how dare anyone doubt that he and he alone saved the world in the autumn of 2008. His inability to communicate with his fellow debaters demonstrated all you need to know about his inability to communicate with the wider electorate.

David Cameron gave a solid, rather presidential, performance, he was a little too sure of himself and left viewers with the distinct impression that he is only pretending to understand how ‘ordinary’ people live. While he did less well than many people expected him to Cameron has at least kept the momentum of his campaign going, something at which the Labour Party have so far failed miserably.

If anyone emerged as the ‘winner’ of the debate it was Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, mostly because he came across as a, comparatively, normal human being. As a result his approval ratings have soared and at least one newspaper has claimed that he is now more popular than Winston Churchill; pay dirt for the leader of a party that is all too often pushed to the sidelines. Little of this new found popularity will translate into seats won on May 6th due to the cold mathematics of the electoral system, but it might strengthen his hand in the negotiations surrounding a hung parliament.

The awkward question waiting to be asked is did the media circus surrounding the debate improve public understanding of and engagement with the political process? Somehow I doubt it. Part of the problem was the awful way the debates were staged, the set looked like it had been borrowed from a third rate daytime quiz show and the camera work was at best amateurish and at worst downright incompetent. The main problem though is that due to the dire state of current affairs programming on British television the debates aren’t, as those in the US always are, backed up by the candidates being subjected to regular in depth interviews by respected journalists, rather than soft focus stuff sandwiched between people plugging books and films done by someone who used to be a journalist until they found out that talking bilge on the box pays far better.

The debates, of course, had to compete this week with a story that pushed the election off the front pages, by which I mean the grounding of every plane in Europe by the eruption of an Icelandic volcano with a name even the locals can’t pronounce.

It is a curious, and curiously satisfying, experience to be able to go outside and look up into a sky totally free of the vapour trails left by jet planes. All of a sudden we are in a world of mail boats and birdsong where the humble train is no longer the Cinderella of the transport world. If things go on like this for much longer the only way to travel across Europe will be on board the Blue Train or the Orient Express, good news, I suppose, for spinsters who write Golden Age detective novels.

We have, for the moment at least, been spared the thoughts of the three men who would be prime minister on the power of a volcano with a name that looks like a losing hand at scrabble when written down to bring a whole continent grinding to a halt. Perhaps they’ve been embarrassed into silence by the realization that when it comes to making headlines Mother Nature always steals the show.

That old Blair magic returns to the campaign trail.

Tony Blair, the great actor manager of modern British politics returned to centre stage this week by giving a speech to Labour Party members in his former constituency of Sedgefield.

In the speech he expressed optimism for Britain’s future saying ‘We are not out of the woods yet, but we are on the path out. This did not happen by chance; but by choice.’

The choices in question, he implied, were those made by his successor and one time rival Gordon Brown.

Unsurprisingly the opposition parties were critical of Blair’s return to something like centre stage, Tory Chairman Eric Pickles said the speech told people ‘nothing about what Labour has to offer this country.’ On a more cutting note usually absent from his party’s attack Liberal Democrat spokesman Danny Alexander said the speech would only serve to ‘remind people of the failures of Labour over the last thirteen years.’

Quite so would be a reasonable answer to both points, but of course the intended audience for Blair’s one night only comeback tour wasn’t the wider British public, it was the membership of the Labour Party. As such it, along with the fact that Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell are to play prominent roles in the forthcoming election campaign sends an unhappy message about the health of the party.

Tony Blair’s performance at Trimdon Labour Club on Tuesday exhibited all the old familiar tricks, the catch in his voice to show strong emotion only just being held in check and the odd chopping motions with his hands, added to these were a orange tan straight from a bottle and an accent that sank somewhere in the mid Atlantic. It was rather like watching a pop star who used to be big a decade or so ago doing his act in Vegas, fascinating in the sense that he can still hold a crowd but also rather sad because it highlighted how completely the dark arts of PR can overwhelm an individual’s personality.

The reason Tony Blair, who has been busy making himself very rich over the past three years, has been brought back is as simple as it is misguided, the Labour Party high command think that he and the fellow architects of the New Labour project will be able to scatter a little of their ‘magic dust’ over what looks likely to be a lacklustre campaign. It won’t work of course because one person’s magic dust is another’s toxic fall-out.

The media treated Blair’s speech as what it was, a minor distraction unlikely to sway floating voters one way or the other. Where the real harm will be done is through the reaction of Labour’s fast diminishing army of active members and that, I fear, fear will not be at all positive.

To all but a tiny majority of these people Tony Blair is an unwelcome reminder of how completely the heritage of their party has been sold off in order to win three elections. They find it hard to feel the optimism he expressed about the future of a country they see as being increasingly divided, over taxed and spied on to the point of paranoia by a largely ineffective bureaucracy. Staged events of the sort at which New Labour excelled won’t reconnect these people with a party that seems to take their support for granted, only an honest and at times unavoidably hurtful discussion of what the Labour Party stands for in a world that has changed out of all recognition since it was founded will do that, but, sadly, a party hierarchy obsessed with clinging on to power at all costs has little enthusiasm for such an exercise.

Gordon Brown deserves a small amount of respect for eating the large portion of humble pie involved in bringing a man for whom he has little love back on side to fight his corner, not least because for all his faults Tony Blair possesses many of the social skills he so clearly lacks. Doing so won’t though do anything to alter the course of the election that will in all likelihood provide a sad coda to his political career.