What is most striking is the lively and journalistic style, and the numerous revelations and quotes from party insiders. One of the most amusing examples is a Brownite source’s hubristic prediction of the election that never was: ‘Martin Kettle will wank off for a few weeks, but that’ll be it.’ Indeed, a whole chapter is devoted to the election that never was. The authors quite rightly observe that the real counterfactual is not what if Labour had called an autumn 2007 election and won but, rather, what if Gordon Brown had not allowed the election speculation to get out of hand, and held (as he originally intended) a general election in 2008. Kavanagh and Cowley also note that the political consequences of the non-election were even worse for Brown than they were for Jim Callaghan in 1978 when his failure to call an early general election reinforced public resentment at his failure to have faced even an internal party election.
As usual, the two appendices are full of interesting statistics and analysis. The first contains lists of which seats changed hands, and the usual top tens: highest turnouts, smallest majorities, best results for the major and minor parties, and many more. The analysis in the second confirms much of what we already knew, namely, that the already-crumbling two-party system was undermined still further, and that Labour did well among ethnic minority voters and public sector workers. Otherwise, however, Labour’s performance was ‘little short of dire’. Not only did its loss of vote share almost match the drop in support following the collapse of Ramsay MacDonald’s government in 1931, but the fall in support since it first secured power in 1997 outstrips the drop in the Tory vote between 1979 and 1997.
With such thought-provoking nuggets of information, this is required reading for anyone interested in British politics.
The British General Election of 2010 is written by Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley and published by Palgrave Macmillan, 446pp, £22.99
Photo: Palgrave Macmillan