With theatrical timing, Saturday required the three leaders to attend the Cenotaph for the 65th anniversary of VE-Day. Normal service would have seen the Prime Minister approach to lay his wreath first, followed by the two other party leaders in turn. The occasion was choreographed, though, to reflect the election result: the three approached the Cenotaph together. The body language ranged from uncertain to icy.
The first public sign of the talks came on Sunday when the negotiating teams – William Hague, George Osborne, Oliver Letwin and Ed Llewellyn for the Tories; Danny Alexander, Chris Huhne, David Laws and Andrew Stunell for the Lib Dems – arrived at the Cabinet Office. The arrangement for the use of government property with civil servants on hand to answer questions about policies and costings was a first, codified in advance by Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, in preparation for just such an electoral outcome.
To the background clatter of news helicopters overhead, a crowd of political tourists joined reporters outside the teal door of 70, Whitehall, to await news of who would govern and how. The parties left after nearly six hours without a deal. Meanwhile, ominously for the Tories, Mr Brown returned from Scotland and went almost immediately into a meeting with Mr Clegg at the Foreign Office. Cabinet ministers, including Lord Mandeslon, Lord Adonis, Alan Johnson, Ben Bradshaw and Peter Hain were offering increasingly vocal support for the idea of a “rainbow coalition” of Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the nationalist parties and independents. It was clear that Mr Clegg was making Mr Cameron sweat.
Tory perspiration turned to desperation on Monday when Mr Brown played his final card. After two further conversations with Mr Clegg, he stood in Downing Street to announce that the Liberal Democrats wanted to open formal talks with Labour and that he intended to step down. His announcement reversed the chronology of his discussions with Mr Clegg. The Liberal Democrat leader had made clear during the campaign that he could not prop up a defeated Mr Brown in Downing Street. The Prime Minister’s departure, even if at a later date, was a pre-requisite for the start of Lib-Lab talks.
Nonetheless, Mr Brown’s bombshell took the Tories by surprise. Labour, it turned out, had sent its own team of negotiators – Lord Mandelson, Lord Adonis, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband – to talk to the Liberal Democrats on Saturday. Throughout the weekend senior Liberal Democrats, including Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, Charles Kennedy, Sir Menzies Campbell and Vince Cable, had been urging Mr Brown to budge and thus usher in the “progressive alliance” or realignment of the Left that they, in varying degrees, had devoted their political lives to achieving. The message received in Downing Street from the senior Lib Dems was clear: we do not want to go into coalition with the Tories.
Mr Cameron and those around him had woken on Monday believing that they were heading to Downing Street. Despite offering Mr Clegg a referendum on the alternative vote system and Cabinet seats, they went to bed fearing that they were out of the game. The proposed Lib-Lab deal hit immediate problems, however, on the Tuesday morning. First, senior Labour figures including David Blunkett and John Reid hit the airwaves to warn that the country would not wear what was being dubbed a “coalition of the losers”. The maths were also against it: adding the three Welsh nationalists, four non-Unionist Ulster MPs, one independent Unionist and Britain’s first Green MP to the Labour and Lib Dem ranks gave such a coalition only 324 MPs, hardly the basis for stable government.
Secondly, the two parties’ negotiating teams fared badly. Labour subsequently accused the Liberal Democrats of making unrealistic spending demands; the Liberal Democrats accused Labour of posturing and failing to take them seriously. The upshot was that shortly after lunch, the Tory and Liberal Democrat negotiating teams were back in the Cabinet Office. There, they hammered out terms of a seven-page document that expressed where they agreed and where the Lib Dems would be allowed to opt out of government policy, such as on the future of Trident.
With every passing minute it became clearer that whatever emerged, Labour had lost the negotiations as well as the election. Mr Brown gathered his entourage in Downing Street for his farewell. With the sun beginning to set, and stung by accusations that in fulfilling his constitutional role to remain Prime Minister until an alternative emerged he had tried to cling to office, Mr Brown’s dignity could wait no longer.
In a telephone conversation with Mr Clegg, witnessed by the photographer Martin Argles who was in No 10 to record Mr Brown’s final hours for posterity, the Prime Minister said: “Nick, Nick, I can’t hold on any longer. Nick, I’ve got to go to the Palace. The country expects me to do that. I have to go. The Queen expects me to go. I can’t hold on any longer.”
In Downing Street he ended 13 years of Labour rule that had begun with Tony Blair being cheered from Whitehall to the front door of No 10. In a moment of poignant self-awareness, he said that the job had taught him about the best in human nature and about its frailties “including my own”.
He and his wife, Sarah, walked to the waiting car holding hands with their two sons, John and Fraser, a very rare sight of the family together after years in which the Browns had protected their sons’ privacy.
Within the hour Mr Cameron travelled from a Buckingham Palace bathed in late evening sunshine to the gloom of Downing Street at dusk. He arrived as the youngest Prime Minister since 1812, the twelfth to serve under Elizabeth II and the first Tory for 31 years to depose a Labour prime minister.
How the polls really got it right
Andrew Cooper
Founder of Populus
The 2010 general election saw more opinion polls published than ever before – more than 90 polls during the course of the campaign: a rate of about three per day. Nearly half of these were from one organisation, YouGov, who produced a daily poll for The Sun, but during the campaign 11 different research companies produced voting polls.
The polling organisations between them used every conceivable mode of interviewing voters and deployed a wide range of ways to weight and adjust their data. These differing approaches, however, produced a fairly consistent picture as the election campaign kicked off, with the Conservatives 7 to 10 per cent ahead of Labour and the Liberal Democrats about a further 10 per cent behind. The polling story of the campaign was the subsequent abrupt surge in Liberal Democrat support, and its failure to materialise on election day.
Several polls picked up a growing frustration among many voters during the first week of the campaign. Even before the first TV debate the Populus poll for The Times published on April 14 found that more voters were hoping that the election would result in a hung Parliament than in a Conservative or Labour majority. The same poll found 75 per cent thinking that it was “time for a change from Labour”, but only 34 per cent that it was also “time for a change to the Conservatives”; two fifths of the electorate wanting change, but unsure which party, if any, they trusted to deliver the kind of change they wanted. Furthermore, only 6 per cent of voters felt that the main parties were being completely honest about their plans for dealing with the deficit and only 4 per cent that they were being honest about their tax plans. These findings to a great extent defined the mood of the voters.
The first debate resulted in one of the most dramatic swings in party support ever seen, with the Liberal Democrats jumping by about 10 per cent more or less literally overnight, with the gain coming slightly more from the Conservatives than from Labour. There were nearly 40 polls published between the end of the first debate and the end of the third debate and the Lib Dems were in the lead in five of them and in second place, ahead of Labour, in all but four. When, on the stroke of 10pm on election night, the exit poll predicted that the Liberal Democrats would end up with fewer MPs than at the previous election it was met with widespread incredulity because it seemed irreconcilable with the consensus of pre-election polls. The exit poll turned out, of course, to be right.
Close analysis suggests that Lib Dem poll support was always frothy: it relied heavily on strong support from younger voters and people who had not voted