In 2005, The Sun decided that the general election was so boring that it needed to employ a Page 3 girl to represent each of the three main parties. The paper followed up by announcing support for Mr Blair with a puff of red smoke from an office chimney. Five years on there were no such stunts. Political reporting was re-energised as Labour sought an historic fourth term. As doubts over David Cameron’s prospects of victory increased, editors flooded pages with election copy. In the month before polling day on May 6, national newspapers printed 11,017 stories mentioning the election, compared with 9,263 during the same period in 2005.

After two elections in which the majority of the press supported Tony Blair and new Labour – overwhelmingly in 2001, begrudgingly in 2005 – Gordon Brown entered this campaign without the unequivocal support of a single national daily newspaper. The Sun abandoned Mr Brown in September 2009, defecting on the day of his speech to the annual Labour Party conference. After more than a decade of supporting Mr Blair, the News Corporation publication offered its 7½ million readers the front-page headline: “Labour’s Lost It”. The paper spent the next seven months gleefully capitalising on Mr Brown’s unpopularity. A story in April revealed that even Peppa Pig, the children’s television character, had apparently “turned her back” on Labour.

Less than a week before polling day, The Times came out for the Tories for the first time in 18 years. In a fullpage editorial, the paper said that Mr Cameron had shown the “fortitude, judgment and character to lead this country”. After supporting Labour in the past four general elections, the Financial Times also concluded that “on balance, the Conservative Party best fits the bill”. Less surprisingly, The Daily Telegraph’s 2 million readers were encouraged, for the 18th consecutive time since 1945, to vote Tory, as were the Daily Mail’s 5 million.

In perhaps the most significant change, The Guardian decided to switch its support from Labour to the Liberal Democrats. “Invited to embrace five more years of a Labour government, and of Gordon Brown as prime minister, it is hard to feel enthusiasm,” the paper told its million readers. Even the Daily Mirror, Labour’s most loyal supporter since 1945, urged some of its 3.3 million readers to vote tactically for the Lib Dems.

At the same time, media cognoscenti were calling time on the very relevance of the press. Nick Clegg had supposedly broken the two-party mould with his barnstorming appearance in the first party leaders’ debate on ITV. Like Susan Boyle before him, a virtuoso performance seemed to catapult Mr Clegg into the nation’s consciousness. Unlike Susan Boyle, good first impressions did not translate into votes. The Lib Dem leader’s approval ratings jumped by 11 percentage points but subsequently fell back, with the party winning fewer seats although more votes than in 2005.

Part of that disparity may be explained by the barrage of anti-Clegg stories unleashed by right-leaning newspapers after the first debate on April 15. On the morning of the second debate, the Telegraph used a massive front-page headline to reveal that some Liberal Democrat donors had been paying money directly into Mr Clegg’s bank account. He produced bank statements showing that these were to fund part of a researcher’s salary. The Daily Mail upped the ante with a front page accusing Mr Clegg of a “Nazi Slur”. The story was based on remarks he made in 2002, when he wrote that Britain had a “more insidious…cross to bear” than Germany over Nazism. The scoop drew ire from Mr Clegg’s supporters, who pointed out that the Mail’s website at one point carried no fewer than eight anti-Clegg stories.

Private Eye provided some light relief. “Is Clegg A Poof?” ran a fake Sun headline in the satirical magazine. “Voting For Clegg Will Give You Cancer,” a fake Mail page warned. “And Cause Collapse In House Prices.”

Many journalists expressed excitement at Mr Clegg’s elevation, however, not least because it added to the tantalisingly vague prospect of a hung Parliament. Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, told the Radio 4 Today programme that Cleggmania was “the reason people in our business are getting so excited”. The Sunday Times ran a front-page story on a YouGov poll showing Mr Clegg to be more popular than Winston Churchill.

Whether the attacks on Mr Clegg had a significant effect is arguable. They may have slowed some of his momentum and left voters in doubt as to his party’s ability to govern. Perhaps more likely is that voters showed themselves more influenced by sustained media exposure in the years before an election, which the Lib Dems have never enjoyed, than by a one-off television performance, however impressive. With Mr Clegg as Deputy Prime Minister, that disparity is likely to be corrected.

Mr Cameron and Mr Brown were convinced that newspapers move votes. Yet as Roy Greenslade, Professor of Journalism at City University, points out, the press has been mostly pro-Tory since 1945, but Labour has won more elections. According to an Ipsos MORI poll cited by Professor Greenslade, between 20 and 30 per cent of Daily Mail readers consistently voted Labour between 1997 and 2005, despite the paper’s protestations. In 2010, however, the result may have been more similar to 1992, when only 14 per cent voted for Neil Kinnock.

Times readers appear to be even more independent: 64 per cent agreed with the paper when it advised them to vote Tory in 1992, according to Ipsos MORI, but in 2001, when the paper came out for Labour, 40 per cent of readers still said that they would support the Tories.

About 45 per cent of Sun readers pledged to vote Tory in 1992, when the paper put Neil Kinnock’s head in a light bulb on polling day and ran the headline: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain turn out the lights.” In contrast, only 29 per cent said that they would vote Conservative when the paper supported Mr Blair in 2001. A similar swing back to the Tories this year may have carried influence, especially in marginal seats.

Readers themselves do not consider newspapers to be influential at all. A survey by Press Gazette in March suggested that nine out of ten voters believed that their vote would be unaffected by any media organisation. Editors have to hope that Anthony Wells, a political commentator for YouGov, is right when he says: “The real impact is more subconscious, the long-term drip-drip of positive or negative coverage.”

The great irony about reporting this election is found in the numerous editorials warning voters against a hung Parliament. In the event, the actual outcome of 2010 was one that no newspaper, save The Independent, endorsed.

And the winner is…television

Andrew Billen

Television Critic

The sky was dusty with volcanic ash and the airwaves thick with politics. Yet for a while the electorate refused to inhale. In a multichannel world, it is easy to avoid the news, easier still the election specials. ITVI’s studio debates, Campaign 2010 with Jonathan Dimbleby, lost rather than gained audience as the election wore on. The regular political gabfests, BBC One’s Question Time and The Andrew Marr Show, suffered dwindling not growing viewing figures. It was like soccer fans turning off Match of the Day during the World Cup.

If, like the grounded aeroplanes, the campaign was going to take off, it would take something new, and something different. It was supplied by three live, 90-minute election debates agreed between the politicians and networks after tortuous discussion. Their order having been decided by lottery, the first, ITV’s on April 15, centred on domestic policy. Its MC, Alastair Stewart, proclaimed it historic. Its 9.5 million viewers – a figure that would not disgrace a Saturday night Britain’s Got Talent – apparently agreed. But even Stewart could not have predicted that the commentariate and the focus-grouped would independently declare a clear winner in the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg or that his party’s trend in the polls would go vertical. The debate was declared a “game changer”.

As talent contests, the following debates on April 22 and April 29 were less decisive, mainly because, what by now could be seen as Clegg’s challengers, Gordon Brown and, especially, David Cameron got better at them. Mr Cameron particularly mastered the “trick” of addressing the camera lens directly, a technique pioneered more than 50 years ago when hosts of Sunday Night at the London Palladium realised that faced with the choice of addressing the stalls or the nation’s sitting rooms it was wise to talk to the many not the few.

The second debate, focusing on foreign policy and held by Sky News, was a success for a channel whose political editor, Adam Boulton, had campaigned hard for them to happen. Its 4.4 million viewers was a record audience for a Sky News production. Ofcom, the regulator, received many hundreds of complaints, however, mainly because Boulton, as chairman, broke protocol by asking a question of his own. Most confidently staged was the BBC’s final “economic crisis debate”, although it attracted fewer viewers than the first. Its experienced host, David Dimbleby, intervened more than either Stewart or Boulton, but only to repeat his audience’s questions. In future such debates may have less constricted or more varied formats. It is, surely, impossible to imagine an election happening without them.

With even Jeremy Paxman’s traditional roastings of the leaders producing few headlines, only once outside the set-pieces did television change the agenda, and then it was by accident. A Sky News radio mike was left on and attached to Mr Brown as he sped from an unsatisfactory encounter with a pensioner supporter. She was, he told an aide, a “bigoted woman”. Within hours, his remarks were played back to him on Jeremy Vine’s Radio Two show. The camera showed him head in hands. After a self-immolating visit to Mrs Duffy’s home in Rochdale, Mr Brown emerged before more cameras bashfully declaring himself a sinner but a penitent one. The mini-soap looked a disaster for Mr Brown, but, as it turned out, his ratings had nowhere further to fall.

The election night programmes for the first time featured an exit poll jointly paid for by the BBC, ITV and Sky. Its prediction of a hung Parliament, with Mr Cameron short of an overall majority by 19, was initially treated with scepticism by the studio pundits, mainly because it insisted that the Lib Dems’ representation in Westminster would decline. It proved almost uncannily accurate. The result was so close that BBC One’s election programme, which began at 9.55pm on the Thursday did not end until 8.45am on the Friday. David Dimbleby, showing stamina uncommon in a septuagenarian, resumed his anchorman’s seat at 11am and carried on until 4pm. His efforts, showcased in a huge glass set built in Television Centre, earned the BBC more than 4 million viewers overnight. ITVI’s show, hosted by Alastair Stewart, attracted only an average of 1.26 million and was beaten by a satirical commentary on the results from Channel 4. Sky News did worse than it had five years before, its 111,000 viewers probably depleted by its new-fangled HD transmission causing its sound to ride out of synch.

And so, like the old politics, the senior mass medium endured. Just as there was no decisive breakthrough for the third party, there was none for multichannel or the blogosphere. Had television turned the election into a beauty contest? By the end it appeared more likely that its debates had found a new way to scrutinise not only character but policy and that those of each contestant had been found wanting. The Friday after polling day, Sandy Toksvig, chairwoman of Radio Four’s The News Quiz, made the Nick Clegg/Britain’s Got Talent comparison explicit. We saw someone new, liked what we heard but, in the end, decided to vote for someone else. At least, however, by then we knew whom we were voting for. After a foggy start, it was a good election for television.

It will never be the same again

Daniel Finkelstein

Executive Editor

On Friday, May 7, 2010 David Cameron, the Leader of the Opposition, woke from a very short night’s sleep and made an historic decision. It was one that would propel him into 10 Downing Street within five days and would change British politics for ever. He was, he determined, going to attempt to form the first coalition government since the Second World War.

Mr Cameron had long thought a hung Parliament rather likely. The number of seats that the Tories would have to win to have an overall majority was daunting. But his team had not, as Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats had, spent a great deal of time agonising over what to do if it actually happened. Mr Cameron did not unveil a carefully developed plan. He acted on instinct.

But it was not just Mr Cameron’s instinct that changed history. It was also the maths and Mr Clegg had always believed that the maths would be crucial. On May 7, the cold fact was that the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives could together form a government with a majority of more than 80, but the Lib Dems and Labour would not have a majority even if they voted as a single block on everything.

So just before lunch on Friday, Mr Clegg arrived back at Lib Dem HQ and announced that he was sticking to the plan he had formulated before the election, one designed precisely for the sort of numerical position he was now in. He regarded the party with the largest support as having earned the right to seek to show that they were able to govern in the national interest. And that meant opening talks with the Conservatives.

What Mr Clegg had almost certainly not expected was Mr Cameron’s response. The latter had quickly won support for coalition from his team, starting with his closest ally, George Osborne. Working with his adviser, Steve Hilton, he prepared a statement in which he said that while a mere pact with the Lib Dems was possible, he wanted to make a “big, open and comprehensive offer” to the third party. His aim: full coalition.

The negotiations began quickly, with the teams meeting that afternoon at the Cabinet Office for an initial session. Mr Osborne selected the venue. He wanted the Lib Dems to be able to see power out of the window. And so, looking over the Downing Street garden and in a sweltering room where the central heating had broken, the teams began to talk. Danny Alexander, David Laws, Chris Huhne and Andrew Stunnell for the Lib Dems quickly came to see that Mr Cameron was serious. They realised that his negotiating team – Mr Osborne, William Hague, Edward Llewellyn and Oliver Letwin – had come ready to make big concessions. Perhaps they did not quite realise why. From the word go, Mr Cameron realised that he needed a deal, but he also saw the whole thing as an opportunity.

First, the necessity. The Cameron team thought that a minority government was a very grim prospect indeed. Having introduced unpopular measures to deal with the deficit, the Government could be turfed out at the worst possible political moment.

There was raw political calculation in this, of course, but also consideration of the national interest. A minority government would not survive for long. It would need, or be forced, to fight an early election, making it impossible to begin the difficult work that the next administration needs to undertake. So the negotiators found themselves in an ironic position. The Lib Dems wanted policy concessions but were politically nervous of a full-scale coalition. The Tories, whom everyone assumed would play it tough, wanted to make policy concessions so that a proper long-term partnership could be formed.

One issue remained difficult: electoral reform. The Tories were offering a free vote in the Commons on a referendum on the Alternative Vote and that was not enough. That, plus the emotional pull of Lib Dems towards the Left, sent Mr Clegg’s team talking to Labour. For a brief period a new Lib-Lab arrangement appeared a real possibility. But it was brief. Labour did not have the heart for it. Labour’s negotiations – informally over the weekend and formally on the Monday after Gordon Brown announced his intention to resign – were half-hearted. They were not prepared to concede much, underestimated the progress the Lib Dems had made with the Tories, and thought that the numbers did not really stack up anyway.

It was also brief because the Tories made a big offer – a whipped vote to have a referendum on AV – and this offer, skilfully guided through the party in the hours after Mr Brown’s departure had scared the Tories into imagining a Lib-Lab deal, brought Cameron not merely the premiership, but more besides: a great opportunity.

Finding it hard to gain even 40 per cent of the vote, the Conservative Party has, for years now, been threatened by the possible emergence of a unified progressive Left. Blair advisers such as Lord Mandelson and Lord Adonis have long seen this. They regard the split in the Left between Labour and the Liberals that took place at the beginning of the 20th century as having ushered in a Conservative century. They are probably correct. That split has been a very important reason for the election of Tory governments, particularly in the past 40 years.

If the Conservatives had won a small majority, it is not hard to imagine them being swept out in five years by an alliance, either explicit or implied, of Labour and Liberal Democrats. Something like that happened in 1997 and produced the Blair landslide. Now a combination of the new maths of the Commons and Cameron’s boldness disrupted this and in doing so, changed politics for years. The Liberal Democrats have been picked up and put down in a different place, partly by Mr Clegg of course, but largely by a Cameron offer of partnership. The anti-Conservative majority is, in an extraordinary political coup, no longer an anti-Conservative majority. Things are more complicated now.

The second part of the opportunity relates to Mr Cameron’s own party. Five years of work to rebrand the party did not change perceptions as much as his team had hoped. But now this. Mr Cameron has the potential to lift himself and the party above normal partisan politics.

And so, after some of the most dramatic days in modern politics, David Cameron found himself waving to the photographers outside No 10, flanked by Nick Clegg. But he has made a huge gamble. Could this move split his party? Might the Liberal Democrats prove not merely prickly partners, but impossible ones?

Unknown, unknowable. But this can be said with certainty. Politics has changed for ever.

Meet the Class of 2010, the new politics in person

Rachel Sylvester

Times columnist

There is a black-belt karate expert, a female football coach, a Mormon, a former television presenter and a bestselling author who has had the film rights to his life bought by Brad Pitt. A total of 232 new MPs were elected for the first time on May 6, 2010, including 147 Conservatives, 67 Labour members, 9 Liberal Democrats and the first representative of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, who won in the Brighton Pavilion constituency.

They are the novices in the Virgin Parliament, the new boys and girls who were swept into Westminster on the wave of public revulsion that followed the expenses scandal in what was widely perceived to be a House of Whores. Some were elected purely as a result of the swing away from Labour to the Tories that came after 13 years of one party having been in power, but many replaced MPs who had either resigned or been voted out by an electorate angry about the duck houses, moats and mortgages. The turnover at the last election was unusually high. The result is that more than a third of those now sitting on the green benches in the House of Commons are innocent about the wiles of the whips, ignorant of parliamentary tricks and unequipped by the now-abolished John Lewis List. Half the Tory MPs have just been elected for the first time. The Class of 2010 is the physical embodiment of “a new politics”. They are younger on average than in 1997, the last time power changed hands: 34 per cent of the new MPs are aged in their thirties. There are more black and Asian faces on the green benches than ever before: 26 MPs from ethnic minorities and marginally more women. Three Muslim women were elected, including the bright and beautiful Rushanara Ali, who regained Bethnal Green for Labour from the Respect party’s George Galloway.

Matthew Hancock, a former economist at the Bank of England who was an adviser to George Osborne before being elected Tory MP for West Suffolk at the election, says: “I’m 31 and I don’t feel particularly young. There’s a feeling of a huge generational shift.”

Michael Dugher, a former aide to Gordon Brown who is now Labour MP for Barnsley East, agrees. “People are very keen to learn the lessons of the past,” he says. “We are going to do things differently now. It is noticeable that the new MPs are hanging around with each other rather than the old hands. There is a togetherness about the new generation.”

As the new arrivals gathered for training sessions on parliamentary procedure, security and the expenses regime at the start of the new session, it became clear that whatever their party allegiances they were united by a determination to represent a clean break with the dirty past. Nicholas Boles, the new Conservative MP for Grantham and Stamford, who until recently worked for Boris Johnson and is seen as one of the party’s smartest policy brains, says: “Everybody is obsessed about not getting caught up in another expenses scandal. It is not that we are a bunch of selfrighteous men and women in white suits but there is an overwhelming feeling that that was terrible, that we are at the beginning of our careers and the last thing we want to do is to have even the slightest hint of anything improper.”

Among the new Tory and Liberal Democrat MPs there is a sense of excitement about the possibilities opened up by the coalition Government. One session of the induction course took place in the chamber and the two parties’ members drifted to the Government side and sat among each other, intermingled. “We chatted very easily and got on in a way that would have been much more difficult for the old guard on either side,” one Conservative member says.

The Class of 2010 is more professional than previous generations. About 20 per cent of the new MPs are defined as having come into the Commons from politics, having worked either as advisers or councillors, 15 per cent from business, 12 per cent consultancy, 12 per cent law and 10 per cent financial services. Only 6 per cent have come in from charities, 5 per cent from the education sector and 5 per cent from the media.

According to an analysis by the Sutton Trust, an educational charity, 35 per cent of MPs in the new Parliament went to independent schools. More than half of Conservative MPs were educated privately and 20 out of the 306 on the Tory benches went to one school – David Cameron’s alma mater, Eton. On the Labour side, it is rather different. “There are a lot of regional accents, most of us are working class-made-good,” says one new MP. Several union officials won seats, after a successful operation by Unite.

There does, though, also seem to be a hereditary principle at work in the House of Commons across the board. At least nine children of politicians were elected in 2010. They include Zac Goldsmith, the new Conservative MP for Richmond Park, who is the son of the late Referendum Party leader, Sir James Goldsmith; Ben Gummer, elected in Ipswich, the son of John Gummer, the former Tory Cabinet minister; and Anas Sarwar, who took over as Labour MP for Glasgow Central from his father, Mohammed Sarwar. Harriet Harman’s husband, Jack Dromey, joins her in Parliament as MP for Birmingham Erdington and Valerie Vaz, Labour MP for Walsall South, is the sister of Keith Vaz, the longstanding Labour MP for Leicester East. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the son of the former Times Editor Lord Rees-Mogg, was elected in Somerset North East.

The new Conservative members are generally socially liberal and supportive of David Cameron’s modernisation of their party. A few days after the election, the Tory leader held a meeting of all his new MPs and was rather astonished by the attitude he found. “The general mood of the group was that, if anything, we had not gone far enough on modernisation,” one of those present says. “David said afterwards how remarkable it was, he was quite taken aback.”

Like Mr Cameron, most of the new Conservative MPs, are also pretty Eurosceptic. According to George Eustace, the former campaign director of the anti-euro “no” campaign, who is now MP for Camborne and Redruth: “Most think we should be taking powers back from the EU, but the new intake is also very committed to the idea of social enterprises, charities and voluntary groups being involved in public services. The Iain Duncan Smith agenda is where traditional right-wing Conservatism can come together with the more liberal modernising wing of the party.”

Other high-profile Tories include Rory Stewart, in Penrith and the Border, a former deputy governor of Iraq and bestselling author. He once walked across Afghanistan and also spent a summer as a tutor to Princes William and Harry. It is his life story that has been snapped up by Brad Pitt. Dan Byles, the new Tory MP for Warwickshire North, is almost as adventurous – he has rowed across the Atlantic and skied to the north pole with his mother.

Mr Goldsmith, the brother of Jemima Khan, will add a touch of glamour to the green benches, but could also clash with the leadership over green issues. Tracy Crouch, Tory MP for Chatham and Aylesford, is the qualified football coach. David Rutley, a former banker who represents Macclesfield, is the House of Commons’s first Mormon. Helen Grant, in Maidstone and the Weald, is the first black woman Conservative MP. Dominic Raab, Tory MP for Esher and Walton, a lawyer by training, has represented Britain at karate.

On the Labour side there is a fighting spirit as well. Those to watch include Tristram Hunt, the television historian who has just been elected in Stoke-on-Trent Central, and Chuka Umunna, the new MP for Streatham, a former lawyer who has been described as a potential British Barack Obama. Rachel Reeves, in Leeds West, is a former Bank of England economist with a reforming zeal, and Gloria De Piero, who was until she became MP for Ashfield a GMTV presenter, is certain to attract plenty of attention. Two former ministers under Tony Blair who lost their seats in 2005 also returned to Parliament: Stephen Twigg in Liverpool West Derby and Chris Leslie in Nottingham East.

One new MP says: “It is nothing like 1997, when lots of people got in who never expected to. Everyone here now has got black under their fingernails from having scraped their way up. They are quite a brutal, hard-headed bunch. They don’t look at the world through the prism of Blair-Brown or Left versus Right. They look at the world through the prism of Labour’s defeat.”

Whatever their party affiliation, those elected this year also look at the world through the prism of the MPs’ expenses scandal. There is the possibility of a really quite dramatic change of culture, brought about by a younger, more independent-minded intake who are all too aware of voters’ anger with politicians. Some of the Conservatives have been chosen in open primaries, which may make them less willing to toe the party line. Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs have used the election campaign to make clear their determination to alter the way in which politics is done. Across the board, the new intake is generally more receptive to constitutional reform, including changes to the voting system, than their parties’ older grandees.

Just as the Blair Babes transformed how the House of Commons looked in 1997, bringing flashes of feminine colour to the rows of grey suits, so the Class of 2010 could alter for ever the way in which politics is conducted. One new Tory MP says: “We get the scale of the public’s anger over the expenses scandal in a way that those who were in Parliament when it broke do not really get. We understand just how much change is needed.”

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