Prime minister Clegg faces wipeout at 2019 election

By Sam Macrory - 28th April 2010

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Labour's latest election broadcast, A Nightmare on your Street, offers a vision of how the country might turn out should the Conservative Party emerge victorious after next week's general election.

But what if the Liberal Democrats secure enough seats to broker a deal on electoral reform?

Is proportional representation the dream scenario they picture?

Sam Macrory looks into his crystal ball.

It's the week before the general election of 2019.

The Rotten Parliament of 2005 is slipping fast from the collective memory, with the last of the BR – Before Reform – Parliaments to lay claim to the Palace of Westminster now a black and white image in a new world of Technicolor politics.

Since that May weekend in 2010, when the then Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg arrived through the rear entrance of Downing Street – Clegg had earlier slipped out of his Putney home wearing tennis whites in an attempt to throw eager hacks off the scent – to hold coalition talks with the defeated Labour leader Gordon Brown, the electoral system of first-past-the-post has been left looking as prehistoric as the democratically unaccountable age of rotten boroughs.

Westminster is now the product of proportional representation, and the political landscape has changed beyond recognition.
Soon after the 2010 result, which left the Conservative Party left tearing itself apart in opposition despite winning the popular vote, the crushed Tory leader David Cameron came under increasing pressure to shape his party's image in the traditionalist visions of the Cornerstone Group of Tory MPs.

But with the Tory leader still in thrall to the modernising liberalism championed by his wife Samantha and the party's deeply unpopular policy guru Steve Hilton, the Cornerstone rump of 57 MPs chose to split from the party just nine months before the 2015 poll and form the predictably christened Cornerstone Party.

Led by Liam Fox, who had found himself increasingly at odds with Cameron's modernising agenda, the Cornerstone rump moved quickly after the 2015 election to court the 11 newly elected UKIP MPs. An official merger was agreed following talks between one-time Cornerstone Group chairman Edward Leigh, one of the Upper House's first batch of elected peers, and the veteran UKIP leader Malcolm Pearson, formerly Lord Pearson of Rannoch, another of the newly-elected generation.

Now known as the Freedom Party, this 117-strong number pulsates with a deep-set Eurosceptiscm, a promise to represent provincial Tory voters, and, after the 2010 defeat, a deep distrust of the mainstream Conservative Party's metropolitan hue.

It treads carefully. Just last week the BNP leader Nick Griffin, one of his party's two MPs, has offered support in key votes in return for influence of the Freedom Party's policies; Fox rejected the offer out of hand.

The split in Tory ranks saw the immediate retirement from politics of Cameron – now touring the world as a slightly more affordable public speaker than Tony Blair - and the hasty election of Greg Clark to lead the remaining modernising Conservatives into another disappointing election result.

Clark stood down following damning criticism from 74-year-old party grandee Ken Clarke – himself smarting from losing out in a fourth leadership contest – and triggered a race to helm the embattled survivors of the Cameron Project.

Standing on a slogan of Modernising Compassionate Change, Nick Boles became the first openly gay leader of a political party when he was chosen to lead what would soon be recast as the New Progressive Party.

Since 2010 we have also seen the death of the Labour Party in its former guise. The formation of the Lib/Lab coalition in 2010 saw the Lib Dems demand the removal of Gordon Brown as leader and the installation of the PR-hungry Alan Johnson in his place, with the alliance eventually splitting Labour in two by the autumn of 2017.

Increasing discomfort at the prospect of a permanent realignment of the New Labour wing of the party and the socially democratic arm of the Liberal Democrats saw the veteran bruiser John Prescott, stripped of his appointed peerage after the upper house became a wholly elected body in 2015, make an urgent call for the creation of a new party to stand up for the trade unions and make the case for the positive influence of the state.

With Prescott as Life President, and Ed Balls - the one-time advisor to Gordon Brown, now a full time academic at Edinburgh University - and Harriet Harman as joint leaders, Real Labour soon began a relentlessly negative campaign designed to paint the remaining coalitionists as free-market Conservatives in disguise.

Their approach, which saw Alastair Campbell coaxed out of retirement to advise Real Labour in an unofficial capacity, was typically ferocious. Prime minister Nick Clegg, relying heavily on his remaining New Labour allies and already governing with a reduced majority following the 2015 PR debut, is looking vulnerable.

His position is weakened by the emergence of the New Progressives and a restored New Labour Party, now basking in the shared leadership of the Miliband brothers and free at last from its leftwing influence. An embattled Clegg is struggling to justify his party’s existence.

So, after a difficult Parliament for the coalition, it is Simon Hughes who has emerged as a key player in the build-up to polling day. Repeatedly denied a cabinet post, Hughes, the darling of the old Liberal Party left, is said to be in early co-operation talks with the six Green MPs in an effort to force a significant number of Liberal Democrats to walk out of the coalition and leave Clegg – said to be being courted by the modernising Boles – unable to hold onto the leadership.

So it is Clegg, on the eve of the poll, who stands most to lose.

The author of electoral reform is standing on the edge of becoming the first prime minister to be forced from office by the wildly unpredictable landscape which proportional representation has created.

The genie was well and truly let out of the bottle; if he had his three wishes again, would he do the same?

Sam Macrory is features editor of The House Magazine.

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