My sustaining fantasy during the election campaign was that by harnessing the power of Cleggmania, a Labour defeat could be converted into a triumph for a pluralist centre left: partisan bickering would be set aside, the long dreamt-of alliance with the Lib Dems realised, and the foundations of the no-Tory future laid. Sadly, the outcome of the election provides no mandate for a Labour-Lib Dem alliance.

If the combined seats of Labour and the Lib Dems were enough to form an overall majority, I would say crack on with a coalition, but they don’t. A coalition in these circumstances would be a perilously rickety construct requiring support from a host of smaller parties. It is doubtful that it would be strong enough to pass the legislation required to tackle the structural deficit. It would either collapse, discrediting everyone involved, or its legislative agenda would be so deformed by veto-wielding nationalists, that everyone implicated would be discredited.

This arrangement might also tarnish the very cause that it was set up to advance: political reform. Electoral change would still have to be put to a referendum. If the government proposing it were seen as weak and dysfunctional, or if the issue was perceived to have been cynically hyped up to scupper Cameron’s coalition hopes, the public could take against it. Electoral reform is a worthy cause and during the campaign I thought there were signs it was coming to a head. However, the election results do not provide clear evidence of this, which makes me doubt that people, during a time of economic crisis, will understand why it should be the sine qua non for forming the next government.

The only honest reading of the results is that the public cautiously favours a Tory administration whose excesses would be tempered by having to accommodate another party. Labour has already had to pay a heavyish price for appearing to ignore the public both in the election that never was and by persisting with a prime minister perceived as “unelected”, but it could have been worse. If people think that the party is continuing in that vein there is a danger that the backlash will swell further, rendering inevitable the anti-Labour mega-tsunami that it was mercifully spared on Thursday.

Some suggest that a coalition can still be achieved if Brown is replaced with someone more acceptable to Clegg. Those making those calls should ask themselves: what it is about the Labour’s problems in recent years that indicates that another unelected leader is the answer? Furthermore, even if you think and have always thought that other candidates would make a more electable party leader than Gordon Brown, it is for Labour members to appoint their leader, not another party. We lost an election not a war. We should not have to stand powerlessly by while our leadership is toppled and a new regime installed over our heads.

Clegg, after all, was not a winner but a poor third. As much as I sympathise with his plight, he is not in a position to impose a Pax Lib Demica on either the Conservatives or the Labour party. His role is limited to making up the numbers in a Tory administration, as that is the only show in town. He can, however, take comfort from the knowledge that the progressive causes that he will have to jettison in the process will find a loving home in a newly reinvigorated Labour party.

Had the numbers allowed it, a Labour-Lib Dem coalition would have been an excellent idea. But with both centre-left parties having lost seats, a pact with the Lib Dems would be seen as illegitimate. If there is one thing sadder and more demented for a government than the bunker phase, it’s the Salo/Sigmaringen phase. A Labour-Lib Dem deal in these circumstances would not be a “progressive coalition” but a suicide pact.