The rocky road to parliament

With polling day on Thursday, the United Kingdom is heading for its most exciting general election result in decades, and the identity of the next occupant of No 10 Downing Street is still not certain

LEAVING THE University of Birmingham in the early hours of yesterday, the Bangladeshi taxi driver, who had just taken Lord Peter Mandelson to his hotel, was angry with life, angry with Gordon Brown and Labour, angry with the banks, angry with everything. Now working 70 hours a week to make ends meet, he vowed to vote for the far-right British National Party.

“Mandelson asked me to turn down the heat. He said it was too hot. I told him it was only artificial heat, but on May 6th I told him that he would feel the heat of the British public,” said the driver, who by the end of the conversation had switched his voting allegiance to Respect, the tiny party run by former Labour MP, Galloway, which draws its support mostly from the Muslim community.

Conversations with taxi drivers are always a dangerous guide to the electoral politics of any country, but the Bangladeshi illustrated one truth: Election 2010 is the most volatile campaign the United Kingdom has ever known, and the voting intentions of many are still uncertain with just six days to go to polling. However, the Labour campaign has about it the smell of death.

From the start, the Labour Party was hamstrung. Struggling as an unpopular leader, Gordon Brown made sure to bring all of his cabinet with him on to the footpath of 10 Downing Street on the morning he called the election. The message was clear – “I’m part of a team” – but it jarred with the public’s understanding of him as a difficult, often cantankerous man.

In the weeks since, Brown has been almost an add-on to the campaign, endlessly touring high-tech factories to meet apprentices. Everywhere, he has voiced the mantra that the UK economy is still a budding flower that would be destroyed by the Conservatives’ plans to start cutting spending this year rather than in 10 months or so, as favoured by Labour.

Brown’s initial campaign, if such it could be called, was desultory, controlled and fearful. In his home district of Kirkcaldy in Scotland, Labour supporters were bussed in to throng the streets before the prime minister did a Bertie Ahern 1997-style canvass. Even the seats in the local cafe were safely occupied by loyalists, lest the television cameras witnessed him caught unawares by a floating voter. His team was worried about Gillian Duffy (the woman Brown was overheard calling a “bigot” this week) even before they knew her name.

Surrounded by the half-built wings of military aircraft in the Airbus factory in Bristol, his travelling media entourage despaired. In election campaigns, journalists want their subject to be the person making the news. Brown, however, made none, and even his press officers no longer tried to claim that he had. Television reporters turned to each other, complaining: “What are we going to do with this? He didn’t say anything.” One photographer built up his collection of images of other photographers yawning.

By last week, plans had changed. Brown was now going to go out and about and meet the people, but even here not all was as it appeared, with evidence that supporters had been press-ganged to turn up. Unlike some politicians, Brown hates canvassing. More comfortable with global issues, he is the archetypal pol who professes to adore the human race as a species but struggles to deal with individuals.

The need for control during this campaign was not just confined to Labour. In the first election since YouTube, Twitter and Facebook became daily staples for many, along with 24-hour news, politicians of all hues have been terrified that their campaigns could be derailed at a moment’s notice by an off-guard comment or an irascible voter. Consequently, events were micro-managed to the enth degree.

Conservative leader David Cameron opted not to have the traditional press bus in tow, confining the numbers to just three or four, most from tame Tory-supporting papers. He also held meetings that often gave the illusion of engagement, rather than its reality.

In Bolton, early on, he visited Warburtons bakery to meet workers on the factory floor. The meeting provided one of the images of the campaign so far, with Cameron photographed against a wall of packaged loaves, though when it later emerged that the company had subsequently given £25,000 (€29,000) to the Tory campaign he was accused of effectively selling commercial endorsements, an allegation the Conservatives made little effort to deny.

Cameron’s “Big Society” message – wherein the state cannot solve every problem and the citizen must play a more active role – is not just something crafted for the campaign. Rather, it reflects Cameron’s own beliefs in conservatism, tradition and community. However, the fact that he believes it has not made it any easier to explain.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, meanwhile, could not believe his luck. Entering the campaign, he knew he needed a bounce in his party’s poll ratings – which his party usually gets because of the unusual levels of attention it receives during a campaign – just to hold on to his outgoing 62 MPs in the House of Commons. There seemed little prospect of getting any more and fracturing the tectonic plates of British politics.

However, the first TV leaders’ debate in Manchester changed everything, and Labour’s Peter Mandelson, as it has turned out, made the situation worse when he appeared in the Hilton Hotel nearby to brief journalists. Brown had done badly, and not even Mandelson could spin that, but Clegg’s superior performance offered him the opportunity to damn Cameron by praising Clegg.

Mandelson’s appearance in the press room got cameras flashing and visibly discomfited the Conservative shadow chancellor, George Osborne, who was briefing on behalf of his leader, insisting, in the face of raised eyebrows, that he had done well. With the cameras rolling, Mandelson, a peacock before he is anything else, could not restrain himself from mocking the younger man. Osborne cringed.

Within hours, the election’s dynamic had changed irrevocably. The Liberal Democrat leader became the man the public wanted to love, partly because he had done well in the debate but, most importantly, because a population angry with politicians wanted somewhere to go. Clegg’s political image is as much an invention of the British public as of himself.

By the second television debate, attention had already turned to the post-election landscape. Would the Liberal Democrats go into a coalition? If so, with whom and under what conditions? And could Gordon Brown survive if Labour won the second-largest number of seats but only came third – because of the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system – in the popular vote?

Sitting that day in the sunlit patio of the Clifton Hotel, near Bristol, with a view across to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s famous suspension bridge and below to the Avon Gorge, foreign secretary David Miliband ate a curious mixture of pasta and ham sandwiches, while fielding questions about Brown’s future. “Nobody but the Labour Party decides who is the leader of the Labour Party,” he declared.

However, Miliband, along with home secretary Alan Johnson, is already being spoken about as a successor to Brown. Miliband could have become the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, but stayed in London. He wants to be Labour leader, but has usually, most recently during January’s shambolic attempted coup against Brown, shown a lack of the ruthlessness necessary to succeed at the highest reaches of politics.

Many in the party have long favoured Johnson, a former postman who was raised on a council estate by a single mother, as Labour leader, but he has often disappointed with his apparent lack of fire. In the election planning process, Ed Miliband, author of Labour's manifesto and David's brother, went to the home secretary looking for ideas on justice. Johnson, looking at what Miliband had already prepared, just said: "Fine, fine, fine, that's grand."

Lassitude is often the mark of the man. In 2007, during an appearance on BBC's Desert Island Discs, Johnson was asked by presenter Kirstie Young why he had not run for the Labour leadership. Disarmingly, he replied: "I don't think I would have been good enough, frankly. I don't think I've got the capabilities. You get to a level and look around and think, 'perhaps I could go to the next level'. I don't think I could go to that level, which is the only level up from being a cabinet minister."

However, the decision of Johnson, who has long favoured proportional representation, to back its introduction so forcefully in the last week shows that ambition may often be cloaked in an affable disguise.

Labour is heading for its worst share of the popular vote since the 1983 election under Michael Foot, but its final tally of seats is unknowable, given the challenge posed by the Liberal Democrats in places where it has never previously challenged, and given the possibility – exacerbated by the Duffy incident in Rochdale – that Labour voters will simply stay at home in disgust rather than vote for anyone else.

Brown's blunder in Rochdale with Gillian Duffy has given sanction for a more open, if often hysterical, debate about immigration, perhaps to the benefit of the British National Party in Barking and Stoke-on-Trent, where it is battling Labour. Meanwhile, Clegg's decision to place so much emphasis on the issue, in his manifesto and subsequently, may deter soft support that he might otherwise have attracted.

One of the issues, now, is what kind of Labour Party will emerge after the election. Its traditional left-wing MPs in Labour heartlands are more likely to survive than those who came in with the Blair tide in 1997, and although a Labour leader is elected by the party membership, such an outcome threatens a return to the left rather than a continued focus on the centre ground where modern elections are fought and won.

In such a circumstance, and assuming that the Labour leadership becomes vacant, Brown's closest ally, Ed Balls, will push hard to replace him, backed by the largest trade unions who are now the party's key source of funds (following the disappearance of the "luvvies" who were wooed so successfully by Blair in Downing Street and on weekends away at Chequers).

Balls's rise, or indeed his defeat in a bitter battle, would cause fractures within Labour. Miliband and Johnson, perhaps by forming a "dream team", could stop him, but a man schooled in the internecine battles of the Blair/Brown era and supported by the likes of Brown's former press chief, Charlie Whelan, would remain a thorn.

All of this, of course, assumes that Balls holds his seat near Leeds – and he may not.

WITH LESS than a week to go, all three leaders face major issues.

Clegg, whose party is divided about its preferred coalition partner, would prefer a Conservative/Liberal alliance if he can get voting reform, but the British public, though it says it wants change, does not know what change it wants. Two-thirds say PR would be "a good thing", but just a quarter believe it right that the Liberal Democrat leader should make it his price for entering coalition.

Brown's desperation for office means that he will be more willing to concede more of Clegg's demands, if the numbers require it, than Cameron, and more quickly.

The Conservative leader, though, is caught between the need to win power to maintain his hold on the leadership and the reality that the majority of his new MPs – younger but just as conservative as the old, if not more so – do not want to make concessions on the electoral system.

British politics is set to enter new territory: and it is a landscape marked with dangers. Though each party insists it has been upfront about the state of British finances, none of them has done enough.

The legitimacy of the actions taken after the election in the eyes of the voters will be in question from the moment the next PM passes the threshold of No. 10.