General Election 2015: Who will own the post-vote weekend?
Senior Labour figures remember the way Cameron seized the initiative following the 2010 election and made a Lib-Con coalition all but inevitable
Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox
Get our free View from Westminster email
Charting a course through the hours and days after 7 May to try to predict the make-up of the next government based on numbers and hard political facts is a thankless task. But senior Labour figures are concerned that David Cameron will try to subvert all of this post-election maths by driving a combine harvester through the lot of it on 8 May.
It won’t matter, they fear, if Ed Miliband’s party has the largest number of seats, and therefore would theoretically have a greater mandate to try to go first and form a coalition with the Lib Dems or a looser arrangement with other parties. Before bleary-eyed Labour MPs and activists have caught up on their post-election night’s sleep and are settling down to lunch on Friday, goes the fretful hypothesis, Cameron will have delivered a statement in Downing Street talking about national interest and saving the union – keeping out the SNP at any cost, which means keeping Miliband out of No 10. By Sunday evening, the narrative continues, he has stitched up another coalition with the Lib Dems. “There is a risk that Cameron is going to try to ‘own the weekend’,” says one Labour figure.
They remember the way Cameron seized the initiative the weekend after the 2010 election and made a Lib-Con coalition all but inevitable; and at 7am on 19 September last year in the wake of the No vote in Scotland, when he was expected to acknowledge the 45 per cent Yes vote as a moment to focus on giving more power to Holyrood but instead made a game-changing speech about English Votes for English Laws. It left Yes voters even more embittered about Westminster and pulled all the momentum away from the rest of the No camp in Scottish Labour and Lib Dems.
Momentum is the most powerful force in politics, and if it clings to the Conservatives on the weekend of 9 and 10 May, there will be very little Miliband can do to stop it.
Students of Borgen, which remains the best political drama about the nature of coalitions, will remember that in the very first episode, the centre-left party leader, Birgitte Nyborg, has made the most gains and looks as if she will become prime minister of Denmark. Yet in the second episode she is outwitted by the incumbent prime minister, who despite having fewer seats uses the trappings of his power to hold coalition negotiations in his office and, in a sleight of hand, makes it seem as if he has all the momentum and the mandate to form a government. He “owns the weekend” and Nyborg must wrestle power from him – which she does in the end.
With less than two weeks to go, anxiety stalks Labour. It may be that the Conservative campaign has been all over the place, and that Miliband has had the momentum, as well as Milifandom, with him. The next fortnight stretches out ahead like a 200-mile road. For Labour strategists it feels like a very long way to go.
Miliband has allowed himself to be confident for once, and while he wouldn’t make the same mistake as Neil Kinnock and host a triumphant rally days before polling day, people are worried that another 1992 is looming, when Labour lost after looking all along as if it were going to win.
So, you may wonder why some in Labour are choosing to be anxious about post- election negotiations. This might be a luxury compared with the greater anxiety of something that remains perfectly possible: actual defeat for Labour on 7 May.
Are you undecided about who to vote for on 7 May? Are you confused about what the parties stand for and what they are offering? Take this interactive quiz to help you decide who to vote for...
Lethally blond
Boris Johnson thrust himself into the centre of the Tory election campaign last week, with The Daily Telegraph was reporting that the London Mayor will be “coronated” as Conservative leader – even if Cameron ends up with the largest number of seats. While it seems unlikely that Cameron would step down when it was still all to play for, it is becoming all too believable that Johnson will be prime minister of our country one day. Heaven help us.
I get that he has a popular touch, but, at the risk of coming over all Mary Whitehouse, that’s the problem, if you get my drift: am I, and other women, really ready for a prime minister who has been so indiscreetly and greedily unfaithful to his wife and mother of his children? Where are we, France?
It’s not just his infidelity: is he really able to kill off the clown and become the ringmaster? But wait, maybe I am being too moralistic and Boris can show us he’s changed. The other day, at the 145th screening of Frozen in our house, I couldn’t help noticing that one of the songs, “Fixer Upper”, could have been written about the Tory parliamentary candidate for Uxbridge: “Is it the clumpy way he walks… or the pear-shaped, square-shaped weirdness of his feet? So he’s a bit of a fixer upper, so he’s got a few flaws... Are you holding back your fondness, due to his unmanly blondness?”
For now, I hasten to say, I am.
Cutting edge
When I was a girl, I had five Sindy dolls. You might think this was privileged, but actually two of them were hand-me-downs from my elder sisters. One day I got bored of all of them having long hair, so I gave one a brutal chop. I wanted her to look like Olivia Newton-John, but in retrospect my Sindy’s hair was probably more like Boris Johnson’s.
Anyway, I was not surprised when I read that when Nicola Sturgeon was a girl she had cut a Sindy doll’s hair off. The difference is that the future First Minister did this to her sister’s Sindy, not her own. This ruthlessness explains why she is one of the most powerful women in Britain, and I am not.
Blind spot
I was disturbed to read the study showing that short-sightedness in British children has more than doubled in the past 50 years because of society’s shift from playing outdoors to staying indoors staring at screens.
Shocking, but also a handy metaphor for political leaders, who have shied away from meeting real voters during this election campaign. Maybe if they got out more, they will be able to have real vision for how to run the country.
The Independent has got together with May2015.com to produce a poll of polls that produces the most up-to-date data in as close to real time as is possible.
Click the buttons below to explore how the main parties' fortunes have changed:
All data, polls and graphics are courtesy of May2015.com. Click through for daily analysis, in-depth features and all the data you need. (All historical data used is provided by UK Polling Report)
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies