The Times Guide to the House of Commons

The other Labour seats to hold out against the trend were Westminster North (held by Karen Buck against the controversial Tory barrister Joanne Cash), Eltham, Bradford West, Hammersmith, Halifax, Gedling, Poplar & Limehouse (where Jim Fitzpatrick easily saw off George Galloway, the former Respect MP), Elmet & Rothwell (where Ed Balls held on after a fierce campaign), Tynemouth, Bolton West and Bolton North East.

Labour did worse in England (down 7.4 points) and slightly worse in Wales (down 6.5 points) than it did nationwide (down 6.2 points), but managed to improve its relative share in Scotland by 3.1 points compared with 2005. In England, the best Labour performances were in London, where the swing to the Tories was just 2.5 per cent, half the UK average. This explains its success in holding on, against the trend, to the seats mentioned above, as well as in seeing off Lib Dem challenges in Islington South and the new Hampstead & Kilburn seat (where Glenda Jackson beat her Tory challenger by 42 votes in a tight three-way contest).

Labour’s vote fell by 2.3 per cent in London, but 8.2 per cent elsewhere in England and, apart from Battersea, the Tory gains were concentrated in a band on the northwest of the capital, from Brentford & Isleworth, via Ealing Central & Acton, up to Harrow East and Hendon. Labour did well in seats with a large Muslim population, where the party suffered in 2005 because of the Iraq war, such as some in East London where Respect had done well in 2005 (East Ham, West Ham and Bethnal Green & Bow).

Outside London and the big industrial cities and towns of the North Labour did very badly along the motorway belts and in the East and West Midlands (together accounting for a third of their losses). Labour lost Middle England (but not Scotland and, partly, Wales) where Tony Blair’s new Labour did so well in the 1990s. The map shows vividly how Labour was wiped out in the Medway towns, where it just held on in 2005 (Chatham & Aylesford, Dartford, Gillingham & Rainham); and on the other side of the Thames in Essex (Basildon South & Thurrock East, Thurrock, and Harlow); in its 1997 gains along the South Coast (Brighton Kemptown, Dover, Hastings & Rye, Hove, and Dorset South); in the southern East Midlands (both Milton Keynes and Northampton seats, Nuneaton and Rugby); in a belt of more than a dozen seats from Worcestershire up around Birmingham and into Staffordshire, Derbyshire and the northern East Midlands (such as Burton, Cannock Chase, Corby, Derbyshire South, Erewash, High Peak, Leicestershire North West, Lincoln, Stafford, Tamworth, Warwick & Leamington, Warwickshire North, Wolverhampton South West, Worcester and Redditch); in South Yorkshire and Humberside (Brigg & Goole and Cleethorpes); and then in an unbroken group on either side of the Pennines (Colne Valley, Dewsbury, Keighley, Pendle, Pudsey, Rossendale & Darwen and South Ribble).

This analysis is reinforced by a social breakdown by Ipsos MORI, based on its campaign polls weighted to reflect the final result. This suggests that Labour lost the support of skilled manual workers, the C2s, by a huge 18 points on the 2005 election. The switch was even sharper among C2 women. This is classic aspirational Britain, highlighted by Lord Radice, the Labour peer and former MP who produced a detailed analysis for the Fabian Society after Labour lost in 1992. Entitled Southern Discomfort, this showed why the party was out of touch with the interests and hopes of this group: a problem that Mr Blair successfully addressed in 1997.

One of the perennial complaints of the Tories is that the electoral system is biased against them because of the way that boundary changes work. They point to the much larger number of votes required to elect a Tory MP compared with a Labour MP, and hence the much larger vote share required for a Tory majority.

This is only partly true. On average, seats won by the Conservatives had larger electorates than those won by Labour by a margin of 3,750: 72,350 to 68,600. But there is an uneven pattern: only four of the ten constituencies with the largest electorates are Tory held, six are Labour held. The main explanation is differential turnout where there is a much larger gap. For instance, the turnout in seats that the Tories won was 68.4 per cent, but it was only 61 per cent in those held by Labour. Hence the proposal by the Conservatives, reaffirmed by the coalition agreement, to equalise the size of constituencies will only partly address the imbalance in the system against the Tories because it will not and cannot address the issue of differential turnout.

The three safest seats in the country are held by Labour in Merseyside: Liverpool Walton, Liverpool West Derby and Knowsley. The safest Tory seat is Richmond, North Yorkshire, held by William Hague. (All three of the main leaders at the election had above-average personal results in their constituencies.) Five seats have majorities of under 100: Hampstead & Kilburn (Lab, 42); Warwickshire North (C, 54); Camborne & Redruth (C, 66); Bolton West (Lab, 92); Thurrock (C, 92); and the narrowest of all in Northern Ireland, where Sinn Féin held Fermanagh & South Tyrone by only 4 votes.

The election saw a further slight improvement in the gender and ethnic balance among candidates, even slighter among MPs. Just over a fifth of candidates were women: at 20.8 per cent, this represented a slight improvement on the figure of 20.3 per cent in 2005. About 30 per cent of Labour’s candidates were women, against 24 per cent of Tories and 22 per cent of Lib Dems.

Just over a fifth (22 per cent) of the new MPs are women: at 142 the highest number and share ever. There are 48 Tory women MPs, 31 more than in 2005. The number of Labour women MPs is 17 less than in 2005 because of the party’s overall losses but, at 81, it is still well over half the total. The Lib Dems continue to perform poorly, with just seven women MPs.

A total of 26 MPs are from minority ethnic groups. The Tory total rose from two to eleven, while Labour numbers rose by two to fifteen. There are still no Lib Dem ethnic minority MPs.

The inconclusive result of the 2010 election leaves intriguing prospects for the next one. The Tories require a further two-point swing from Labour to gain an overall majority and Labour requires a swing from the Tories of 5 per cent to return to power with an absolute majority (exactly the same as the swing against it on May 6).

Who cares what the papers say?

Alexi Mostrous

Media Editor

In 2005, The Sun decided that the general election was so boring that it needed to employ a Page 3 girl to represent each of the three main parties. The paper followed up by announcing support for Mr Blair with a puff of red smoke from an office chimney. Five years on there were no such stunts. Political reporting was re-energised as Labour sought an historic fourth term. As doubts over David Cameron’s prospects of victory increased, editors flooded pages with election copy. In the month before polling day on May 6, national newspapers printed 11,017 stories mentioning the election, compared with 9,263 during the same period in 2005.

After two elections in which the majority of the press supported Tony Blair and new Labour – overwhelmingly in 2001, begrudgingly in 2005 – Gordon Brown entered this campaign without the unequivocal support of a single national daily newspaper. The Sun abandoned Mr Brown in September 2009, defecting on the day of his speech to the annual Labour Party conference. After more than a decade of supporting Mr Blair, the News Corporation publication offered its 7½ million readers the front-page headline: “Labour’s Lost It”. The paper spent the next seven months gleefully capitalising on Mr Brown’s unpopularity. A story in April revealed that even Peppa Pig, the children’s television character, had apparently “turned her back” on Labour.

Less than a week before polling day, The Times came out for the Tories for the first time in 18 years. In a fullpage editorial, the paper said that Mr Cameron had shown the “fortitude, judgment and character to lead this country”. After supporting Labour in the past four general elections, the Financial Times also concluded that “on balance, the Conservative Party best fits the bill”. Less surprisingly, The Daily Telegraph’s 2 million readers were encouraged, for the 18th consecutive time since 1945, to vote Tory, as were the Daily Mail’s 5 million.

In perhaps the most significant change, The Guardian decided to switch its support from Labour to the Liberal Democrats. “Invited to embrace five more years of a Labour government, and of Gordon Brown as prime minister, it is hard to feel enthusiasm,” the paper told its million readers. Even the Daily Mirror, Labour’s most loyal supporter since 1945, urged some of its 3.3 million readers to vote tactically for the Lib Dems.

At the same time, media cognoscenti were calling time on the very relevance of the press. Nick Clegg had supposedly broken the two-party mould with his barnstorming appearance in the first party leaders’ debate on ITV. Like Susan Boyle before him, a virtuoso performance seemed to catapult Mr Clegg into the nation’s consciousness. Unlike Susan Boyle, good first impressions did not translate into votes. The Lib Dem leader’s approval ratings jumped by 11 percentage points but subsequently fell back, with the party winning fewer seats although more votes than in 2005.

Part of that disparity may be explained by the barrage of anti-Clegg stories unleashed by right-leaning newspapers after the first debate on April 15. On the morning of the second debate, the Telegraph used a massive front-page headline to reveal that some Liberal Democrat donors had been paying money directly into Mr Clegg’s bank account. He produced bank statements showing that these were to fund part of a researcher’s salary. The Daily Mail upped the ante with a front page accusing Mr Clegg of a “Nazi Slur”. The story was based on remarks he made in 2002, when he wrote that Britain had a “more insidious…cross to bear” than Germany over Nazism. The scoop drew ire from Mr Clegg’s supporters, who pointed out that the Mail’s website at one point carried no fewer than eight anti-Clegg stories.

Private Eye provided some light relief. “Is Clegg A Poof?” ran a fake Sun headline in the satirical magazine. “Voting For Clegg Will Give You Cancer,” a fake Mail page warned. “And Cause Collapse In House Prices.”

Many journalists expressed excitement at Mr Clegg’s elevation, however, not least because it added to the tantalisingly vague prospect of a hung Parliament. Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, told the Radio 4 Today programme that Cleggmania was “the reason people in our business are getting so excited”. The Sunday Times ran a front-page story on a YouGov poll showing Mr Clegg to be more popular than Winston Churchill.

Whether the attacks on Mr Clegg had a significant effect is arguable. They may have slowed some of his momentum and left voters in doubt as to his party’s ability to govern. Perhaps more likely is that voters showed themselves more influenced by sustained media exposure in the years before an election, which the Lib Dems have never enjoyed, than by a one-off television performance, however impressive. With Mr Clegg as Deputy Prime Minister, that disparity is likely to be corrected.

Mr Cameron and Mr Brown were convinced that newspapers move votes. Yet as Roy Greenslade, Professor of Journalism at City University, points out, the press has been mostly pro-Tory since 1945, but Labour has won more elections. According to an Ipsos MORI poll cited by Professor Greenslade, between 20 and 30 per cent of Daily Mail readers consistently voted Labour between 1997 and 2005, despite the paper’s protestations. In 2010, however, the result may have been more similar to 1992, when only 14 per cent voted for Neil Kinnock.

Times readers appear to be even more independent: 64 per cent agreed with the paper when it advised them to vote Tory in 1992, according to Ipsos MORI, but in 2001, when the paper came out for Labour, 40 per cent of readers still said that they would support the Tories.

About 45 per cent of Sun readers pledged to vote Tory in 1992, when the paper put Neil Kinnock’s head in a light bulb on polling day and ran the headline: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain turn out the lights.” In contrast, only 29 per cent said that they would vote Conservative when the paper supported Mr Blair in 2001. A similar swing back to the Tories this year may have carried influence, especially in marginal seats.

Readers themselves do not consider newspapers to be influential at all. A survey by Press Gazette in March suggested that nine out of ten voters believed that their vote would be unaffected by any media organisation. Editors have to hope that Anthony Wells, a political commentator for YouGov, is right when he says: “The real impact is more subconscious, the long-term drip-drip of positive or negative coverage.”

The great irony about reporting this election is found in the numerous editorials warning voters against a hung Parliament. In the event, the actual outcome of 2010 was one that no newspaper, save The Independent, endorsed.

And the winner is…television

Andrew Billen

Television Critic

The sky was dusty with volcanic ash and the airwaves thick with politics. Yet for a while the electorate refused to inhale. In a multichannel world, it is easy to avoid the news, easier still the election specials. ITVI’s studio debates, Campaign 2010 with Jonathan Dimbleby, lost rather than gained audience as the election wore on. The regular political gabfests, BBC One’s Question Time and The Andrew Marr Show, suffered dwindling not growing viewing figures. It was like soccer fans turning off Match of the Day during the World Cup.

If, like the grounded aeroplanes, the campaign was going to take off, it would take something new, and something different. It was supplied by three live, 90-minute election debates agreed between the politicians and networks after tortuous discussion. Their order having been decided by lottery, the first, ITV’s on April 15, centred on domestic policy. Its MC, Alastair Stewart, proclaimed it historic. Its 9.5 million viewers – a figure that would not disgrace a Saturday night Britain’s Got Talent – apparently agreed. But even Stewart could not have predicted that the commentariate and the focus-grouped would independently declare a clear winner in the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg or that his party’s trend in the polls would go vertical. The debate was declared a “game changer”.

As talent contests, the following debates on April 22 and April 29 were less decisive, mainly because, what by now could be seen as Clegg’s challengers, Gordon Brown and, especially, David Cameron got better at them. Mr Cameron particularly mastered the “trick” of addressing the camera lens directly, a technique pioneered more than 50 years ago when hosts of Sunday Night at the London Palladium realised that faced with the choice of addressing the stalls or the nation’s sitting rooms it was wise to talk to the many not the few.

The second debate, focusing on foreign policy and held by Sky News, was a success for a channel whose political editor, Adam Boulton, had campaigned hard for them to happen. Its 4.4 million viewers was a record audience for a Sky News production. Ofcom, the regulator, received many hundreds of complaints, however, mainly because Boulton, as chairman, broke protocol by asking a question of his own. Most confidently staged was the BBC’s final “economic crisis debate”, although it attracted fewer viewers than the first. Its experienced host, David Dimbleby, intervened more than either Stewart or Boulton, but only to repeat his audience’s questions. In future such debates may have less constricted or more varied formats. It is, surely, impossible to imagine an election happening without them.

With even Jeremy Paxman’s traditional roastings of the leaders producing few headlines, only once outside the set-pieces did television change the agenda, and then it was by accident. A Sky News radio mike was left on and attached to Mr Brown as he sped from an unsatisfactory encounter with a pensioner supporter. She was, he told an aide, a “bigoted woman”. Within hours, his remarks were played back to him on Jeremy Vine’s Radio Two show. The camera showed him head in hands. After a self-immolating visit to Mrs Duffy’s home in Rochdale, Mr Brown emerged before more cameras bashfully declaring himself a sinner but a penitent one. The mini-soap looked a disaster for Mr Brown, but, as it turned out, his ratings had nowhere further to fall.

The election night programmes for the first time featured an exit poll jointly paid for by the BBC, ITV and Sky. Its prediction of a hung Parliament, with Mr Cameron short of an overall majority by 19, was initially treated with scepticism by the studio pundits, mainly because it insisted that the Lib Dems’ representation in Westminster would decline. It proved almost uncannily accurate. The result was so close that BBC One’s election programme, which began at 9.55pm on the Thursday did not end until 8.45am on the Friday. David Dimbleby, showing stamina uncommon in a septuagenarian, resumed his anchorman’s seat at 11am and carried on until 4pm. His efforts, showcased in a huge glass set built in Television Centre, earned the BBC more than 4 million viewers overnight. ITVI’s show, hosted by Alastair Stewart, attracted only an average of 1.26 million and was beaten by a satirical commentary on the results from Channel 4. Sky News did worse than it had five years before, its 111,000 viewers probably depleted by its new-fangled HD transmission causing its sound to ride out of synch.

And so, like the old politics, the senior mass medium endured. Just as there was no decisive breakthrough for the third party, there was none for multichannel or the blogosphere. Had television turned the election into a beauty contest? By the end it appeared more likely that its debates had found a new way to scrutinise not only character but policy and that those of each contestant had been found wanting. The Friday after polling day, Sandy Toksvig, chairwoman of Radio Four’s The News Quiz, made the Nick Clegg/Britain’s Got Talent comparison explicit. We saw someone new, liked what we heard but, in the end, decided to vote for someone else. At least, however, by then we knew whom we were voting for. After a foggy start, it was a good election for television.

It will never be the same again

Daniel Finkelstein

Executive Editor

On Friday, May 7, 2010 David Cameron, the Leader of the Opposition, woke from a very short night’s sleep and made an historic decision. It was one that would propel him into 10 Downing Street within five days and would change British politics for ever. He was, he determined, going to attempt to form the first coalition government since the Second World War.

Mr Cameron had long thought a hung Parliament rather likely. The number of seats that the Tories would have to win to have an overall majority was daunting. But his team had not, as Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats had, spent a great deal of time agonising over what to do if it actually happened. Mr Cameron did not unveil a carefully developed plan. He acted on instinct.

But it was not just Mr Cameron’s instinct that changed history. It was also the maths and Mr Clegg had always believed that the maths would be crucial. On May 7, the cold fact was that the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives could together form a government with a majority of more than 80, but the Lib Dems and Labour would not have a majority even if they voted as a single block on everything.

So just before lunch on Friday, Mr Clegg arrived back at Lib Dem HQ and announced that he was sticking to the plan he had formulated before the election, one designed precisely for the sort of numerical position he was now in. He regarded the party with the largest support as having earned the right to seek to show that they were able to govern in the national interest. And that meant opening talks with the Conservatives.

What Mr Clegg had almost certainly not expected was Mr Cameron’s response. The latter had quickly won support for coalition from his team, starting with his closest ally, George Osborne. Working with his adviser, Steve Hilton, he prepared a statement in which he said that while a mere pact with the Lib Dems was possible, he wanted to make a “big, open and comprehensive offer” to the third party. His aim: full coalition.

The negotiations began quickly, with the teams meeting that afternoon at the Cabinet Office for an initial session. Mr Osborne selected the venue. He wanted the Lib Dems to be able to see power out of the window. And so, looking over the Downing Street garden and in a sweltering room where the central heating had broken, the teams began to talk. Danny Alexander, David Laws, Chris Huhne and Andrew Stunnell for the Lib Dems quickly came to see that Mr Cameron was serious. They realised that his negotiating team – Mr Osborne, William Hague, Edward Llewellyn and Oliver Letwin – had come ready to make big concessions. Perhaps they did not quite realise why. From the word go, Mr Cameron realised that he needed a deal, but he also saw the whole thing as an opportunity.

First, the necessity. The Cameron team thought that a minority government was a very grim prospect indeed. Having introduced unpopular measures to deal with the deficit, the Government could be turfed out at the worst possible political moment.

There was raw political calculation in this, of course, but also consideration of the national interest. A minority government would not survive for long. It would need, or be forced, to fight an early election, making it impossible to begin the difficult work that the next administration needs to undertake. So the negotiators found themselves in an ironic position. The Lib Dems wanted policy concessions but were politically nervous of a full-scale coalition. The Tories, whom everyone assumed would play it tough, wanted to make policy concessions so that a proper long-term partnership could be formed.

One issue remained difficult: electoral reform. The Tories were offering a free vote in the Commons on a referendum on the Alternative Vote and that was not enough. That, plus the emotional pull of Lib Dems towards the Left, sent Mr Clegg’s team talking to Labour. For a brief period a new Lib-Lab arrangement appeared a real possibility. But it was brief. Labour did not have the heart for it. Labour’s negotiations – informally over the weekend and formally on the Monday after Gordon Brown announced his intention to resign – were half-hearted. They were not prepared to concede much, underestimated the progress the Lib Dems had made with the Tories, and thought that the numbers did not really stack up anyway.

It was also brief because the Tories made a big offer – a whipped vote to have a referendum on AV – and this offer, skilfully guided through the party in the hours after Mr Brown’s departure had scared the Tories into imagining a Lib-Lab deal, brought Cameron not merely the premiership, but more besides: a great opportunity.

Finding it hard to gain even 40 per cent of the vote, the Conservative Party has, for years now, been threatened by the possible emergence of a unified progressive Left. Blair advisers such as Lord Mandelson and Lord Adonis have long seen this. They regard the split in the Left between Labour and the Liberals that took place at the beginning of the 20th century as having ushered in a Conservative century. They are probably correct. That split has been a very important reason for the election of Tory governments, particularly in the past 40 years.

If the Conservatives had won a small majority, it is not hard to imagine them being swept out in five years by an alliance, either explicit or implied, of Labour and Liberal Democrats. Something like that happened in 1997 and produced the Blair landslide. Now a combination of the new maths of the Commons and Cameron’s boldness disrupted this and in doing so, changed politics for years. The Liberal Democrats have been picked up and put down in a different place, partly by Mr Clegg of course, but largely by a Cameron offer of partnership. The anti-Conservative majority is, in an extraordinary political coup, no longer an anti-Conservative majority. Things are more complicated now.