The Times Guide to the House of Commons

On the stroke of 10pm, the exit poll commissioned by the BBC, ITN and Sky suggested that the Tories would win 307 seats, Labour 255 and the Liberal Democrats 59, pointing to the first hung Parliament for 36 years. Its forecasting was immediately doubted by psephologists, both amateur and professional, who believed that a survey of 18,000 voters at 130 polling stations would fail to catch the Lib Dem surge. In fact, it turned out to be remarkably prescient.

An eleventh-hour surge of voters, Lib Dem or otherwise, did, however, surprise election officials across the country. Queues of voters, some who had been waiting up to an hour, were turned away from polling stations in Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, Chester, Lewisham and Hackney. There, officials applied the letter of the law and closed the door on anyone who had not been admitted and received a ballot paper. Their counterparts in Newcastle and Sutton Coldfield defied electoral law and stayed open past 10pm to let people vote. The scenes of chaos, to which the police were called in some cases, triggered a review by the Electoral Commission that could have far-reaching implications for the way Britain votes.

Britain woke on May 7 to a landscape unfamiliar to this generation of politicians. There was no clear winner and each party leader had reason to feel disappointed. Mr Cameron had failed to translate an economic crisis and weariness with 13 years of Labour into an overall Tory majority. Mr Brown had polled 29 per cent, only marginally above the party’s disastrous showing in 1983, and had lost 91 seats. For all the enthusiasm that surrounded Mr Clegg during the campaign, he had lost five seats.

Voters had handed them not just the first hung Parliament for 36 years, but the most complicated Commons arithmetic since the 1920s. Mr Cameron, with 306 seats, was well short of the 326 that guaranteed a Commons majority. To soldier on alone as a minority government, he would at least need an assurance of broad Liberal Democrat support, known as a “confidence and supply” arrangement, under which the third party would not stand in the way of a Budget or Queen’s Speech in return for some concessions.

On the other side, Labour, with 258 seats, and the Liberal Democrats, with 57, were also well short of being able to form a Lib-Lab pact that commanded a Commons majority. The only certainty was that the Queen would not be receiving any of the party leaders this post-election Friday. Instead, she, and the rest of the country, witnessed an extraordinary three-act drama played out across Westminster as the three leaders began to play the hands dealt them by voters.

Mr Clegg moved first. Arriving at Liberal Democrat headquarters in Cowley Street after taking the dawn train from his constituency in Sheffield, he said that Mr Cameron had the right to try first to form a government. It was a momentous nod, but one that he had set himself up for by insisting during the campaign that he would respect the rights of the party that won the most seats and most votes.

Mr Brown was not for giving in. He pre-empted a Tory response with a brazen assertion of prime ministerial power, emerging from the front door of No 10 to remind the country that he remained in charge. He said his two leadership rivals should take as much time as they felt necessary to see if they could reach a deal. “For my part, I should make clear that I would be willing to see any of the party leaders.”

Within the hour, Mr Cameron was making what he called “a big, open and comprehensive offer to the Liberal Democrats”. Speaking at the St Stephen’s Club in the shadow of a portrait of Churchill, himself at different times a Liberal and a Conservative, Mr Cameron sketched out a possible deal for “collaborative government” between the parties. He did not use the word coalition. After a night grappling with the possibilities, though, that was what he was pitching.

With theatrical timing, Saturday required the three leaders to attend the Cenotaph for the 65th anniversary of VE-Day. Normal service would have seen the Prime Minister approach to lay his wreath first, followed by the two other party leaders in turn. The occasion was choreographed, though, to reflect the election result: the three approached the Cenotaph together. The body language ranged from uncertain to icy.

The first public sign of the talks came on Sunday when the negotiating teams – William Hague, George Osborne, Oliver Letwin and Ed Llewellyn for the Tories; Danny Alexander, Chris Huhne, David Laws and Andrew Stunell for the Lib Dems – arrived at the Cabinet Office. The arrangement for the use of government property with civil servants on hand to answer questions about policies and costings was a first, codified in advance by Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, in preparation for just such an electoral outcome.

To the background clatter of news helicopters overhead, a crowd of political tourists joined reporters outside the teal door of 70, Whitehall, to await news of who would govern and how. The parties left after nearly six hours without a deal. Meanwhile, ominously for the Tories, Mr Brown returned from Scotland and went almost immediately into a meeting with Mr Clegg at the Foreign Office. Cabinet ministers, including Lord Mandeslon, Lord Adonis, Alan Johnson, Ben Bradshaw and Peter Hain were offering increasingly vocal support for the idea of a “rainbow coalition” of Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the nationalist parties and independents. It was clear that Mr Clegg was making Mr Cameron sweat.

Tory perspiration turned to desperation on Monday when Mr Brown played his final card. After two further conversations with Mr Clegg, he stood in Downing Street to announce that the Liberal Democrats wanted to open formal talks with Labour and that he intended to step down. His announcement reversed the chronology of his discussions with Mr Clegg. The Liberal Democrat leader had made clear during the campaign that he could not prop up a defeated Mr Brown in Downing Street. The Prime Minister’s departure, even if at a later date, was a pre-requisite for the start of Lib-Lab talks.

Nonetheless, Mr Brown’s bombshell took the Tories by surprise. Labour, it turned out, had sent its own team of negotiators – Lord Mandelson, Lord Adonis, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband – to talk to the Liberal Democrats on Saturday. Throughout the weekend senior Liberal Democrats, including Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, Charles Kennedy, Sir Menzies Campbell and Vince Cable, had been urging Mr Brown to budge and thus usher in the “progressive alliance” or realignment of the Left that they, in varying degrees, had devoted their political lives to achieving. The message received in Downing Street from the senior Lib Dems was clear: we do not want to go into coalition with the Tories.

Mr Cameron and those around him had woken on Monday believing that they were heading to Downing Street. Despite offering Mr Clegg a referendum on the alternative vote system and Cabinet seats, they went to bed fearing that they were out of the game. The proposed Lib-Lab deal hit immediate problems, however, on the Tuesday morning. First, senior Labour figures including David Blunkett and John Reid hit the airwaves to warn that the country would not wear what was being dubbed a “coalition of the losers”. The maths were also against it: adding the three Welsh nationalists, four non-Unionist Ulster MPs, one independent Unionist and Britain’s first Green MP to the Labour and Lib Dem ranks gave such a coalition only 324 MPs, hardly the basis for stable government.

Secondly, the two parties’ negotiating teams fared badly. Labour subsequently accused the Liberal Democrats of making unrealistic spending demands; the Liberal Democrats accused Labour of posturing and failing to take them seriously. The upshot was that shortly after lunch, the Tory and Liberal Democrat negotiating teams were back in the Cabinet Office. There, they hammered out terms of a seven-page document that expressed where they agreed and where the Lib Dems would be allowed to opt out of government policy, such as on the future of Trident.

With every passing minute it became clearer that whatever emerged, Labour had lost the negotiations as well as the election. Mr Brown gathered his entourage in Downing Street for his farewell. With the sun beginning to set, and stung by accusations that in fulfilling his constitutional role to remain Prime Minister until an alternative emerged he had tried to cling to office, Mr Brown’s dignity could wait no longer.

In a telephone conversation with Mr Clegg, witnessed by the photographer Martin Argles who was in No 10 to record Mr Brown’s final hours for posterity, the Prime Minister said: “Nick, Nick, I can’t hold on any longer. Nick, I’ve got to go to the Palace. The country expects me to do that. I have to go. The Queen expects me to go. I can’t hold on any longer.”

In Downing Street he ended 13 years of Labour rule that had begun with Tony Blair being cheered from Whitehall to the front door of No 10. In a moment of poignant self-awareness, he said that the job had taught him about the best in human nature and about its frailties “including my own”.

He and his wife, Sarah, walked to the waiting car holding hands with their two sons, John and Fraser, a very rare sight of the family together after years in which the Browns had protected their sons’ privacy.

Within the hour Mr Cameron travelled from a Buckingham Palace bathed in late evening sunshine to the gloom of Downing Street at dusk. He arrived as the youngest Prime Minister since 1812, the twelfth to serve under Elizabeth II and the first Tory for 31 years to depose a Labour prime minister.

How the polls really got it right

Andrew Cooper

Founder of Populus

The 2010 general election saw more opinion polls published than ever before – more than 90 polls during the course of the campaign: a rate of about three per day. Nearly half of these were from one organisation, YouGov, who produced a daily poll for The Sun, but during the campaign 11 different research companies produced voting polls.

The polling organisations between them used every conceivable mode of interviewing voters and deployed a wide range of ways to weight and adjust their data. These differing approaches, however, produced a fairly consistent picture as the election campaign kicked off, with the Conservatives 7 to 10 per cent ahead of Labour and the Liberal Democrats about a further 10 per cent behind. The polling story of the campaign was the subsequent abrupt surge in Liberal Democrat support, and its failure to materialise on election day.

Several polls picked up a growing frustration among many voters during the first week of the campaign. Even before the first TV debate the Populus poll for The Times published on April 14 found that more voters were hoping that the election would result in a hung Parliament than in a Conservative or Labour majority. The same poll found 75 per cent thinking that it was “time for a change from Labour”, but only 34 per cent that it was also “time for a change to the Conservatives”; two fifths of the electorate wanting change, but unsure which party, if any, they trusted to deliver the kind of change they wanted. Furthermore, only 6 per cent of voters felt that the main parties were being completely honest about their plans for dealing with the deficit and only 4 per cent that they were being honest about their tax plans. These findings to a great extent defined the mood of the voters.

The first debate resulted in one of the most dramatic swings in party support ever seen, with the Liberal Democrats jumping by about 10 per cent more or less literally overnight, with the gain coming slightly more from the Conservatives than from Labour. There were nearly 40 polls published between the end of the first debate and the end of the third debate and the Lib Dems were in the lead in five of them and in second place, ahead of Labour, in all but four. When, on the stroke of 10pm on election night, the exit poll predicted that the Liberal Democrats would end up with fewer MPs than at the previous election it was met with widespread incredulity because it seemed irreconcilable with the consensus of pre-election polls. The exit poll turned out, of course, to be right.

Close analysis suggests that Lib Dem poll support was always frothy: it relied heavily on strong support from younger voters and people who had not voted at the previous election, groups that in past elections have been disproportionately likely to end up not voting at all. Most polls are weighted to take account of how likely respondents say they are to vote, but there is a tendency for people to overstate their own probability of voting and there is little or nothing pollsters can do systematically to compensate for those who insist that they are certain to vote and then do not.

Polls during the campaign also consistently suggested that Lib Dem support was softer: those saying that they were going to vote Lib Dem were also consistently more likely than Labour or Conservative voters to say that they had not definitely decided and may end up voting differently. The implication of these findings was that the election result was always likely to be worse for the Lib Dems than the mid-campaign polls implied. But voting polls are heavily modelled these days, applying adjustments intended to project what the result will look like, not just present a snapshot of responses. This means that by the end of the campaign the polls ought to have reflected the underlying softness in Lib Dem support in a lower vote share, and that did not happen. Furthermore all the opinion polls overstated support for the Lib Dems: if the polls overall were performing properly they should have scattered either side of the result, with some understating Lib Dem support, and that did not happen either.

There is some evidence that the swing away from the Lib Dems mainly occurred in the final 24 hours, too late to be properly reflected in the final pre-election polls. The Times poll published on election day, for example, put support for the Conservatives on 37 per cent (which is what they got), Labour on 28 per cent (they got 30 per cent) and Lib Dems on 27 per cent (they got 23.5 per cent). Fieldwork for this poll was done on the Tuesday and Wednesday before the election and the two halves of the sample produced revealingly different results. The 1,500 interviews conducted on Tuesday, May 4, would, if presented separately, have shown the Conservatives on 35 per cent, Labour on 26 per cent and Lib Dems on 29 per cent. But among the 1,000 people interviewed on Wednesday, May 5, the Conservatives were on 38 per cent, Labour on 30 per cent and the Lib Dems on 24 per cent. Conducting fieldwork over a longer timeframe – two or three days, rather than one – generally improves the chances of a poll sample being properly representative, capturing the views of busy and harder-to-reach voters. In this case it may have helped to obscure a very late swing away from the Lib Dems, principally to Labour.

It was not all bad news for the pollsters. All but one of the nine organisations that produced a poll on electioneve came within 2 per cent of the Conservative share, five were within 1 per cent and two got it exactly right. All but two of the final polls came within 2 per cent of the Labour share and two were within 1 per cent. Overall it was not as good a performance as 2005, when the polls as a whole were more accurate than ever before, but it was better than at many other elections.

A tremor that changed the political landscape

Peter Riddell

Chief Political

Commentator

The general election of May 6, 2010 was one of the most enthralling and exciting in living memory. Yet the dramas of the televised leaders’ debates and of the negotiations leading to the creation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government have tended to obscure the big changes in voting patterns.

Although the Conservatives failed to secure an overall Commons majority, they still gained 100 seats and one of the largest swings of votes ever recorded. There were big variations in party performance in different parts of the country, and all three main parties both gained and lost seats. In detail, the election was notable for a big increase in turnout of 3.7 points up to 65.1 per cent. This was still well below the levels familiar before 2001 (a range of 71 to 79 per cent between 1955 and 1997) but it partly reversed the sharp decline in 2001, down to 59.4 per cent, with just a small recovery to 61.4 per cent in 2005. The Conservatives boosted their share of the vote by 3.7 points to 36 per cent. With the higher turnout, this gave them nearly 2 million more votes, up to 10.71 million. This was a clear 2 million ahead of Labour, which suffered a decline of nearly 1 million in its vote to 8.6 million. Its share of the vote fell by 6.2 points to 29 per cent, its lowest since 1983.

Many Labour MPs were relieved that the party had not done worse, partly because of fears towards the end of the campaign that it might come third in share of the votes and win only 200 to 220 MPs. Labour also did well in the borough elections in inner London and in district elections in some northern and big cities. But May 6 was still the party’s second worst performance since 1918 and most of its gains achieved since the early 1990s in the Midlands and southern England outside the big cities were reversed.

More than a third of voters, 35 per cent, voted for parties other than the Tories and Labour, the highest proportion since 1918. Conversely, the creation of the coalition means that, together, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats won, at 59 per cent, the highest percentage of the vote for any new government since 1945. The Liberal Democrats managed to raise their vote by nearly 850,000 to 6.83 million, an increase of 1 point to 23 per cent. The Democratic Unionists are now the second largest opposition party, although with just eight MPs after Peter Robinson, their leader and the First Minister, lost his seat to the Alliance party, which gained its first Westminster MP.

The Scottish Nationalists were unchanged on six seats (although they did lose a by-election gain) with Plaid Cymru on three seats. The UK Independence Party did, as usual in general elections, much less well than in the previous European Parliament elections, but boosted its vote by a third to 917,832, an increase of 0.9 points to 3.1 per cent. This partly reflected a rise of 62 in its number of candidates up to 558.

The British National Party, with 220 more candidates, at 339, nearly tripled its vote to 564,000, a rise of 1.2 points to 1.9 per cent. The Greens, who gained their first MP, maintained their vote in absolute terms at 286,000, but had a 0.1 point decline in share to 1 per cent.

The Conservatives always faced an uphill struggle to win an overall Commons majority. Their starting point of 198 MPs was less than Labour at its lowest point in 1983 of 209. Even after adjusting for the boundary changes that came into force in the May 2010 election and produced a notional gain for the Conservatives up to 209, the party still faced a huge mountain.

The swing of 4.9 per cent from Labour to the Tories was the third largest since 1945, exceeded only by the huge 10.2 per cent swing to Labour in the Blair landslide in 1997 and the 5.3 per cent swing to the Tories under Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The May 6 swing was exactly the same as the late Sir Edward Heath achieved when winning office in 1970, but it was still not enough to produce an overall Conservative majority, given the number of seats that had to be won.

The Tory share of votes cast, at 36 per cent, was the party’s lowest lower for a century and a half, apart from the three Blair victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005. The most comparable performances were in the 1920s, another era of three-party politics. The Tories won 37 to 38 per cent of the total votes cast in three of the four general elections in the 1920s.

Nevertheless, the Conservatives gained a net 96 seats, rising to 306, only 20 short of an overall majority. This involved 100 gains and four loses (all but one to the Liberal Democrats). This is the largest number of seats gained by the Conservatives at a single general election since 1931 after the collapse of the Labour Government. It exceeds the 62 seats gained by Mrs Thatcher in 1979 and the 58 gained in 1983; and, in its turn, is exceeded only by Labour’s 236 gains in 1945 and 147 in 1997.

Labour lost a net 90 MPs, with 94 losses and four gains (including from independents in Blaenau Gwent and Bethnal Green & Bow). This is by far the worst Labour performance since its debacle in 1931, when it was reduced to just 52 MPs. Since the 1945 election, the biggest Labour losses of seats have been 78 MPs in 1950, 76 in 1970, and 60 in 1983.

The Lib Dems suffered a net loss of 5 seats, down to 57. This involved a loss of 13 seats (all but one to the Tories) and a gain of 8 (5 from Labour and 3 from the Tories).

One of the most striking features of election night was how the Tories won seats very high up on their target list but failed to win ones lower down, the mirror image of the Labour performance. For instance, the Tories captured Cannock Chase on a 14 per cent swing, but failed to take Birmingham Edgbaston, which required a swing of only 2 per cent. Gisela Stuart, the victor in Egbaston, was one of the heroines in being an early winner in the Blair landslide of 1997 and, apart from a brief period as a minister, she has been an independent- minded backbencher, notably on Europe.

Of the 116 gains needed to win an overall majority, the Tories failed to capture 34, nearly half of which were successfully retained by the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems’ net loss of seats was disappointing to them after the high expectations produced by Nick Clegg’s success in the television debates. Yet the party did well in resisting the broader pro-Tory swing, notably in some of the top 30 Tory targets, such as Cheltenham, Somerton & Frome, Eastleigh, Westmoreland & Lonsdale, Carshalton & Wallington and Taunton Deane (three held by future ministers in the coalition Government). The Tories also failed to win any of their target seats from the SNP.

The other Labour seats to hold out against the trend were Westminster North (held by Karen Buck against the controversial Tory barrister Joanne Cash), Eltham, Bradford West, Hammersmith, Halifax, Gedling, Poplar & Limehouse (where Jim Fitzpatrick easily saw off George Galloway, the former Respect MP), Elmet & Rothwell (where Ed Balls held on after a fierce campaign), Tynemouth, Bolton West and Bolton North East.

Labour did worse in England (down 7.4 points) and slightly worse in Wales (down 6.5 points) than it did nationwide (down 6.2 points), but managed to improve its relative share in Scotland by 3.1 points compared with 2005. In England, the best Labour performances were in London, where the swing to the Tories was just 2.5 per cent, half the UK average. This explains its success in holding on, against the trend, to the seats mentioned above, as well as in seeing off Lib Dem challenges in Islington South and the new Hampstead & Kilburn seat (where Glenda Jackson beat her Tory challenger by 42 votes in a tight three-way contest).

Labour’s vote fell by 2.3 per cent in London, but 8.2 per cent elsewhere in England and, apart from Battersea, the Tory gains were concentrated in a band on the northwest of the capital, from Brentford & Isleworth, via Ealing Central & Acton, up to Harrow East and Hendon. Labour did well in seats with a large Muslim population, where the party suffered in 2005 because of the Iraq war, such as some in East London where Respect had done well in 2005 (East Ham, West Ham and Bethnal Green & Bow).

Outside London and the big industrial cities and towns of the North Labour did very badly along the motorway belts and in the East and West Midlands (together accounting for a third of their losses). Labour lost Middle England (but not Scotland and, partly, Wales) where Tony Blair’s new Labour did so well in the 1990s. The map shows vividly how Labour was wiped out in the Medway towns, where it just held on in 2005 (Chatham & Aylesford, Dartford, Gillingham & Rainham); and on the other side of the Thames in Essex (Basildon South & Thurrock East, Thurrock, and Harlow); in its 1997 gains along the South Coast (Brighton Kemptown, Dover, Hastings & Rye, Hove, and Dorset South); in the southern East Midlands (both Milton Keynes and Northampton seats, Nuneaton and Rugby); in a belt of more than a dozen seats from Worcestershire up around Birmingham and into Staffordshire, Derbyshire and the northern East Midlands (such as Burton, Cannock Chase, Corby, Derbyshire South, Erewash, High Peak, Leicestershire North West, Lincoln, Stafford, Tamworth, Warwick & Leamington, Warwickshire North, Wolverhampton South West, Worcester and Redditch); in South Yorkshire and Humberside (Brigg & Goole and Cleethorpes); and then in an unbroken group on either side of the Pennines (Colne Valley, Dewsbury, Keighley, Pendle, Pudsey, Rossendale & Darwen and South Ribble).

This analysis is reinforced by a social breakdown by Ipsos MORI, based on its campaign polls weighted to reflect the final result. This suggests that Labour lost the support of skilled manual workers, the C2s, by a huge 18 points on the 2005 election. The switch was even sharper among C2 women. This is classic aspirational Britain, highlighted by Lord Radice, the Labour peer and former MP who produced a detailed analysis for the Fabian Society after Labour lost in 1992. Entitled Southern Discomfort, this showed why the party was out of touch with the interests and hopes of this group: a problem that Mr Blair successfully addressed in 1997.

One of the perennial complaints of the Tories is that the electoral system is biased against them because of the way that boundary changes work. They point to the much larger number of votes required to elect a Tory MP compared with a Labour MP, and hence the much larger vote share required for a Tory majority.

This is only partly true. On average, seats won by the Conservatives had larger electorates than those won by Labour by a margin of 3,750: 72,350 to 68,600. But there is an uneven pattern: only four of the ten constituencies with the largest electorates are Tory held, six are Labour held. The main explanation is differential turnout where there is a much larger gap. For instance, the turnout in seats that the Tories won was 68.4 per cent, but it was only 61 per cent in those held by Labour. Hence the proposal by the Conservatives, reaffirmed by the coalition agreement, to equalise the size of constituencies will only partly address the imbalance in the system against the Tories because it will not and cannot address the issue of differential turnout.

The three safest seats in the country are held by Labour in Merseyside: Liverpool Walton, Liverpool West Derby and Knowsley. The safest Tory seat is Richmond, North Yorkshire, held by William Hague. (All three of the main leaders at the election had above-average personal results in their constituencies.) Five seats have majorities of under 100: Hampstead & Kilburn (Lab, 42); Warwickshire North (C, 54); Camborne & Redruth (C, 66); Bolton West (Lab, 92); Thurrock (C, 92); and the narrowest of all in Northern Ireland, where Sinn Féin held Fermanagh & South Tyrone by only 4 votes.

The election saw a further slight improvement in the gender and ethnic balance among candidates, even slighter among MPs. Just over a fifth of candidates were women: at 20.8 per cent, this represented a slight improvement on the figure of 20.3 per cent in 2005. About 30 per cent of Labour’s candidates were women, against 24 per cent of Tories and 22 per cent of Lib Dems.

Just over a fifth (22 per cent) of the new MPs are women: at 142 the highest number and share ever. There are 48 Tory women MPs, 31 more than in 2005. The number of Labour women MPs is 17 less than in 2005 because of the party’s overall losses but, at 81, it is still well over half the total. The Lib Dems continue to perform poorly, with just seven women MPs.

A total of 26 MPs are from minority ethnic groups. The Tory total rose from two to eleven, while Labour numbers rose by two to fifteen. There are still no Lib Dem ethnic minority MPs.

The inconclusive result of the 2010 election leaves intriguing prospects for the next one. The Tories require a further two-point swing from Labour to gain an overall majority and Labour requires a swing from the Tories of 5 per cent to return to power with an absolute majority (exactly the same as the swing against it on May 6).