Thoughts on a surprising election or "They're all losers!"

I think it's safe to say that no-one quite expected the outcome of this election. All the signs pointed to a particularly messy hung parliament and any reasonable reading of the polling would suggest the Conservative majority we ended up with was very unlikely indeed. In fact, it was the only outcome of the election I'd ruled out entirely.

However, one shocking exit poll appears and the results seem to vindicate it. And so it turns out the polls have failed us, having predicted the final result very accurately in the last few general elections. A seven percent Conservative lead was present in the final results but not in the polls, and constituency polling suggested a slightly stronger incumbency factor for Liberal Democrat MPs than there was on the night.

As results came in Labour wins failed to materialise; Lib Dem seats projected to be held (reasonably narrowly) were taken (reasonably narrowly), largely by the Conservatives; and the SNP bulldozed through the safest of seats in Scotland, red and yellow alike. Only this last factor had been predicted prior to the exit poll, the rest was all a surprise. As a result instead of the predicted hung parliament there was a wafer-thin Conservative majority. Coincidentally the same outcome as in 1992, last time the polls were this far off!

A map of the results of the 2015 General Election - from Wikimedia.

Naturally, this unexpected development has some serious consequences and changes a lot of things. For instance, I won't be winning any of my general election bets so Ladbrokes won't be giving me a penny today.

Talking more seriously, I can't pretend I'm neutral about this outcome. The next government will likely not be to my tastes and I'm expecting some issues I care deeply about to change in a negative way. A lot of my favourite MPs in the last parliament will not return this time, particularly from the Lib Dems, and in Northern Ireland it was disheartening to see the non-sectarian Alliance lose their only seat.

However much I dislike about the new parliament though, if I try to be dispassionate I can't help but notice that it's actually a very interesting parliament. Probably moreso than the hung parliament that had previously been projected.

In a typical parliament there are clear winners. Obviously Labour were unambiguously winners in 1997, 2001 and even 2005 for instance. But this time round, there are clear losers but I have trouble calling anyone a real, unqualified winner from this election. This may seem a ridiculous idea at first glance: the Tories far outachieved their most optimistic predictions and attained a majority that most had written off; the SNP held or gained all but three seats in Scotland and achieved record-breaking swings of almost comical sizes in doing so. And in one sense they are winners, but there are definitely flies in the ointment.

The Conservatives only have a majority of twelve. This may look good for them, as it's a big jump in seats and they now have a majority big enough that the government can even afford to lose a few by-elections. However, just as the ghost of 1992 hangs over the 2015 pollsters, I can't help but feel it over the 2015 government as well. Cameron's new government bears a striking resemblance to the famously stable and problem-free government of John Major. Whose majority was actually larger than Cameron's - twenty-one versus twelve.

I could see this as the Conservatives have lept gracefully out of the frying pan and into the fire, because of their success. They've moved to a much more slender single-party majority from a far larger coalition majority. The historical precedent is not good. Governments with small minorities in the 70s and early 90s have not had easy rides, as quarrels with small groups of backbenchers can lead to serious problems passing legislation, so tight are the margins at times. Callaghan and Major rode out the end of their respective tenures in government as lame ducks, barely able to act.

Some members of the small majority club - from Wikimedia, Creative Commons or Open Government License.

I'm not the first person to draw this analogy. It came up during this morning's election programming and was presented to a guest - Conservative Alan Duncan. He brushed way the point by saying that the Conservative party is now too disciplined to engage in the internecine warfare of that Major era and  that they have learned from their mistakes. Not five minutes later eurosceptic Conservative John Redwood is interviewed on the programme and insists that Cameron remove the EU's freedom of movement and tries to argue that the UK should not remain in the EU if it stands. The first shots over Europe were already being fired before Cameron even met the queen, so it's hard to see Conservaive infighting over Europe not being a problem for a government with such a thin majority.

Cameron's "awkward squad" is more numerous than John Major's Maastricht "bastards" were, so I'd think Conservative supporters should probably be a bit anxious about this. A small majority can be excessively difficult and despite winning his majority, he's also lost in a sense by entering into this situation that is so much less stable than the coalition was. If things go very badly the victory could even prove to be pyrrhic, but it may just prove to be a less comfortable spell in government for the Conservatives this time around.

The other great victors, the SNP, made history by the sheer scale of their victory. Yet, this won't actually get them much in the way of real power. There's no minority (or minority coalition) Labour government dependent on their votes, and they have no leverage against any majority.

This is, of course, just their bad luck. It's not even a case of their being a victim of their own success, as I would argue the Conservatives are. As Nicola Sturgeon said, they don't have the balance of power simply because Labour didn't do well enough in England and Wales to form a minority government which the SNP could support. The SNP has hit the jackpot, only to find it has nowhere to spend it.

The Conservatives and SNP are not quite as successful as they seem, in a rather subtle way. However, there is no such subtlety in the the Lib Dems' performance. They slightly underperformed in key seats relative to the polls and as a result lost most of their seats rather than about half. They also lost some of their best MPs and emerged as the biggest loser of the election. In their previous life as the Liberal Party they have suffered through worse catastrophes than this, but catastrophe is nevertheless the right word tp describe the 2015 election, they've fewer seats now than they've had in any parliament since 1992. Their next leader, likely Tim Farron, will have his work cut out for him if they want to recover their brand in time for the next election. But unless they can do this they don't get a silver lining, they would have just thrown away decades of careful electioneering just for a shot in government.

Labour's outcome was not quite so grim as that of the Lib Dems, as they did not collapse but merely failed to advance, slipping back a bit in fact. They had many embarassing losses to the SNP and Ed Balls' defeat must have been humiliating but they didn't suffer too many lost seats at the hands of the Conservatives, and took some back. Nevertheless, a day ago they were strong contenders to form the next government and if they aimed to do this, as surely they did, they failed miserably.

The unreliability of the polls undoubtedly led to some complacency in the campaign and likely some bad decisions but given how far short of expectations they've fallen it's hard to not call them the penultimate losers of the night.

The silver lining for Labour is quite clear though. Fresh talent has arisen in Labour during Ed Miliband's time as party leader: Chuka Umunna, Liz Kendall and Dan Jarvis have been bandied around as likely contenders in the next leadership contest - the former two were elected in 2010 and the latter in a by-election in 2011. It was too early for them in the last leadership election but there's a chance for some fresh talent to arise.

Newer people like this. Labour's silver lining? - from Wikimedia.

The final obvious loser of the night is UKIP, and they are perhaps a bit of a wildcard. Douglas Carswell retained Clacton with ease, but Mark Reckless lost his seat of Rochester & Strood and in the long list of possible breakthrough seats such as Heywood & Middleton, Boston & Skegness, Castle Point, Thurrock and so on not a single UKIP MP was elected. In most of the seats they weren't particularly close and even Nigel Farage failed to win in South Thanet.

It's hard to see where they go from here. It could be that this is it for them, that the crest of their wave was last year and they'll just start to fade as the BNP faded after their lacklustre performance in Barking in the 2010 election. If that is the outcome of the election for UKIP then it makes the Lib Dems a success story in comparison.

This is not a given though, perhaps they'll still be around in five years - reinvigorated by an EU referendum. Perhaps Carswell, as the only MP, will take over and UKIP will slowly transform into a party that's more coherent and professional.

The only Great British parties who are not losers in any sense I can think of are the Greens and Plaid Cymru. However, they're certainly not major winners either: the Greens turned Brighton Pavillion into a much safer seat and they attained a solid second place in Bristol West, but little progress was made in Norwich South or Holborn & St. Pancras. Meanwhile, Plaid Cymru held all of their seats, including the potentially difficult Arfon (which had heavy boundary changes), but failed to gain additional seats like Ynys Mon or significantly dent the Lib Dem majority in Ceredigion. Both these parties achieved modest goals but little more.

Ultimately I don't think we've any real winners, we've just got five losers sitting in three camps. The subtle losers of the Conservatives, with the possibility of second term Cameron being an unfavourable parallel to John Major, and of the SNP, who have great clout on paper but no way to exercise it in practice. The obvious losers of the Liberal Democrats and Labour. And finally UKIP, who've clearly failed to have a breakthrough, but how serious a failure this actually is is unclear.

Almost every party has a reason to be concerned by these results, in the short term or in the long term, and even the wild victories of the Conservatives and the SNP have a catch to them. I think this result is, in its way, more interesting than just a hung parliament!