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‘Many of the usually reliable features of a general election campaign are yet to materialise.’ Illustration: Chris Newell/Guardian
‘Many of the usually reliable features of a general election campaign are yet to materialise.’ Illustration: Chris Newell/Guardian

General election 2015: If this deadlock holds, a battle is coming over Ed Miliband’s legitimacy

This article is more than 8 years old
Jonathan Freedland

Halfway there: As the campaign marks its midpoint, the two main parties remain deadlocked. If things stay that way, it won’t be arithmetic that decides who forms the next government – but raw politics

As horseraces go, this one should be thrilling. At the midpoint in the campaign, with three weeks gone and three weeks to go, the two favourites – though that’s an improbable way to describe politicians in the current era – are still neck and neck. Each night brings another poll projection showing Labour and the Conservatives separated by just a few seats – sometimes a single seat - in the next House of Commons. Allow for the margin of error and a photofinish on the night seems a certainty. Unless of course there’s a breakout moment, the one spectators and players alike are still waiting for.

The Tories could go into studied panic this weekend as they realise that lift-off is eluding them. They are lagging behind the 36.1% share of the vote they notched up in 2010 – and they didn’t win then either. They know they need to be three or four points ahead in the polls to feel confident, and that advance is stubbornly refusing to come.

Indeed, many of the usually reliable features of a British general election campaign have failed to materialise. It’s not just the morning press conferences that have been banished to history. There’s been no random act of violence involving a politician, no John Prescott punch. There’s not even been the requisite bruising encounter with an ordinary voter of the non-violent kind. We’re still waiting for the Sharon Storer or Gillian Duffy of 2015. We’ve not had the open mic gaffe, the candidate falling over or even the mocked-up tabloid front-page depiction of a party leader as a root vegetable. Not yet anyway.

Instead, the campaign has been relatively substantive. Sure, the Tories have tried to make it about Ed Miliband’s ex-lovers, his multiple kitchens, his brother or his loyalty to Britain. But proper issues keep intruding. Tax avoiding non-doms, the right of housing association tenants to buy their homes, the funding of the NHS and the state of our public finances – these have been the dominant notes. It’s not exactly been a high-level seminar in public policy, more like an exercise in political transvestism – the Tories posing as warm-hearted, open-walleted splashers of cash, Labour recasting itself as the hard-faced wearer of a kinkily tight fiscal corset. It may all be a pose, but the pose is on issues of substance.

Still, for all their efforts – the Tories going negative last week, then suddenly talking sunshine and the good life this week – the polls refuse to shift. Slowly the Westminster classes are beginning to contemplate what might happen if the current numbers hold up and where that would lead the governance of the country.

The focus is not on the parties so much as the likely ruling blocs. Looked at like that, Miliband is on course to become prime minister, elevated to that position courtesy of Labour, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, a grouping that looks set to have more seats in the next House of Commons than the alternative bloc: the Tories, the Lib Dems and, say, Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists.

There’s been lots of focus on how exactly these arrangements might work, perhaps a formal coalition between Labour and Nick Clegg’s party – especially if Clegg is no longer its leader – and a loose, “confidence and supply” set-up, even an unagreed one, with the Scottish Nationalists. But regardless of the details, the assumption has been consistent: so long as Labour can muster the numbers, they will form the government.

On this view, the exact tally of MPs Labour notches up is irrelevant; it doesn’t even matter whether Labour is the largest or second largest party. All that counts is that the anti-Tory camp can muster a majority in the House of Commons. It’s this logic which enables Nicola Sturgeon so confidently to urge one-time Labour voters to switch to the SNP. In terms of the government that will come about as a result, she argues, the difference is almost academic. All that matters is building up that camp committed to ousting David Cameron: whether your individual MP wears a red or yellow rosette makes no odds.

The logic is seductive. And rationally, it’s sound. Constitutionally, it is quite true that our system hands the Downing Street keys to whoever can command a majority in the House of Commons. And if the current arithmetic holds, that will be Miliband.

Ed Miliband and Nicola Sturgeon during the BBC’s live election debate. Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images

But here’s the problem. This isn’t arithmetic. It’s politics. Other things besides a simple majority in the Commons count – starting with the all-important status of being the largest single party.

If the Conservatives get 10 more seats than Labour, but Labour has the bigger bloc overall, would the Tories retreat quietly into opposition allowing Miliband to head a minority government, tacitly sustained by the SNP? To adapt the phrase of the hour: hell, no.

They would instantly denounce such a government as illegitimate. Backed by a Tory press in full cry, they would say Miliband had no mandate. They would call him a squatter in Downing Street, insisting he had usurped power. Waving aside the precedent of 1923, when the second-placed party last formed a government, cartoons would appear of Red Ed in the silver medal position on an Olympic podium trying to wrench the gold from David Cameron’s grasp. And that drumbeat would continue and would not be stilled except by a second general election.

In some ways, the drumbeat has already begun. Senior Liberal Democrats are hinting that they couldn’t possibly put Miliband in Number 10 unless Labour is the largest party. To do otherwise would be to defy the wishes of the British people, to support the loser over the winner. Of course this is nonsense, the groundless invention of a new and bogus constitutional principle. But that’s the trouble with an unwritten constitution: you can make stuff up. So long as you say it sonorously and with a sufficiently straight face, no one can tell you you’re flat out wrong.

Labour needs to be ready for this the instant the polls close at 10pm on 7 May. Because if the Tories emerge as the largest single party, they and their cheerleaders will claim at least a partial victory no matter how distant they are from a Commons majority. Their aim will be to make it hard for Miliband to form a government – not numerically hard, but politically hard. The Tory script will say things like: “These are the rules. If you win a test match by one run, it’s still a win. And Labour lost.”

The model here is the Bush v Gore dead heat of 2000. Even though nothing was clear in Florida, Republicans (and Fox News) began referring to George W as the “president-elect” and branding Gore as a sore loser for refusing to accept the fact. They framed a narrative in which for Gore to reach the White House he would have to “overturn” the result – even though the result was uncertain. Logically it made no sense. But politically it proved irreversible. And we all know what followed.

Labour has to halt that narrative before it is even born, which means preparing the ground and making the argument now. But there is also a message here for voters who want to see a Labour government, especially those in Scotland. A large anti-Tory bloc, whose Scottish contingent is made up almost entirely of nationalists, may not be enough. To head off the coming battle over legitimacy, Labour will have to be the largest single party as well. For all the complexity of our current politics, the truth is actually quite simple: the only way to be sure of getting a Labour government is to vote Labour.

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