Mr Clegg ran away with the verdict of viewers. In the course of 90 minutes he had wrested from Mr Cameron the mantle of change, in which the Tory leader had cloaked himself for the past four years. Within days, the Lib Dems shot up ten points in the polls. One found Mr Clegg to be the most popular political leader since Churchill. And so the game changed. Although campaigning continued, the oxygen sucked up by the first debate in effect suspended the state of the race while all sides waited for the second debate. Hosted by Sky in Bristol, it saw Mr Cameron recover some of his poise. Mr Clegg, despite his first success, refused to play safe, showed that his first offering was no fluke and cemented his place as a contender.
Shortly before the third debate, Mr Clegg, in an interview with The Times, said that the Lib Dems had replaced Labour as the progressive force in politics and that the election now boiled down to a two-horse race between him and Mr Cameron. Two weeks previously such an assertion would have been laughed out of court. With many polls showing the Lib Dems nudging ahead of Labour, it now carried weight.
Mr Clegg’s success, or Cleggmania to give it its official media term, forced Labour and the Tories into tactical switches. They both turned their guns on Lib Dem policies, such as an amnesty on some illegal immigrants, softer sentencing and a refusal to guarantee the future of Britian’s nuclear deterrent. The Tories did so with menaced warnings whereas Labour, with an eye on the possibilities of a Lib-Lab deal if voters returned a hung Parliament, were less harsh.
Mr Brown also re-wrote his personal campaign. Labour strategists, faced with selling a leader who was unpopular with voters, had kept the Prime Minister to a routine of small meetings largely behind closed doors. It had left Mr Brown frustrated. He would spend the final ten days meeting more “real people” and making more speeches. The new style made a calamitous start. In Rochdale, Mr Brown was accosted by a Labour-supporting grandmother, Gillian Duffy, who took him to task on issues ranging from student fees to immigration. She walked away happy to have had her say and quietly thrilled to have met the Prime Minister. He got into his official car and branded the mild confrontation a disaster, called her a bigoted woman and blamed an aide. The remarks were picked up by a radio microphone he had worn for his walkabout and had not yet taken off.
For the rest of the day Mrs Duffy became the centre of an extraordinary maelstrom. She was devastated to learn of Mr Brown’s remarks, which were played repeatedly on news channels. They were doubly damaging: Mr Brown had appeared deaf to the concerns of millions of voters on immigration; and his apparent instinct to blame aides underlined a wider perception of character flaws. Over the next six hours, Mr Brown apologised six times. He tore up his schedule, abandoned preparation for the following day’s final debate and returned to Rochdale where he spent 40 minutes in Mrs Duffy’s living room trying to explain himself.
The third and final debate, hosted by the BBC in Birmingham, was Mr Brown’s last chance to turn the campaign around. Labour aides had negotiated successfully for its theme to be the economy, Mr Brown’s perceived strongest suit. Although he put in his best performace, he again trailed in third place, according to snap polls. In the final days, he was at his best, delivering his most passionate speech on social justice to an audience in London. Some wondered where this fiery campaigner had been for the previous three weeks, and why he had not been let loose. Others concluded that he was able to let himself go because he suspected he had lost.
On the eve of polling day Mr Cameron campaigned through the night, a self-consciously arduous bus trip from Scotland to Bristol via Grimsby where he met night workers in depots and sorting offices along the way. Such a gruelling final lap was hardly the best preparation for what was to follow.
Polling day itself was marred by near tragedy when Nigel Farage, an MEP and the former leader of the UK Independence Party, escaped with his life from a light plane crash after a campaign stunt went disastrously wrong. The aircraft carrying Mr Farage, who was standing against the Speaker, John Bercow, in Buckingham, was trailing a 15ft banner that read: “Vote for your country – Vote UKIP”. The banner became entangled with the plane’s tail about 10ft above the ground, causing it to nosedive. Mr Farage said that he and his pilot, Justin Adams, had had a miraculous escape.
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