The Nuffield guides to general elections, published since 1945, has become to psephologists and political historians what Wisden is to cricket enthusiasts and Baedeker is to travel enthusiasts.
This latest volume does not disappoint, not least in its lively and journalistic style, and the numerous revelations and quotes from party insiders. The most amusing is the account of one candidate in an unwinnable seat complaining that party membership was no longer ‘a social plus’ and bemoaning that the activists on whom he relied are the last people ‘you want anywhere near the general public’. The insider accounts really come into their own, however, in the account of election night, with the drily understated title ‘Different Scripts Required’. Not surprisingly, there is a stark juxtaposition between the ‘sheer horror’ among viewers of the exit poll seats projection at Labour’s Brewer’s Green headquarters, and the ‘stunned euphoria’ at Conservative headquarters.
Unlike Labour’s other recent unexpected defeat, 1992, there is no consolation to be had among Labour supporters from the electoral mountain being less steep to climb next time. Just how much steeper the climb will be in 2020 is outlined in the analysis of the results in Appendix 1. The extent to which Labour’s loss of all but one of its seats in Scotland has tipped the electoral system to working in favour of the Conservatives, is underlined by John Curtice, Stephen Fisher and Robert Ford’s calculation that ‘the Conservatives would win 46 more seats than Labour if the two parties were to win the same share of the vote and that Labour would need to be 3.7 points ahead of the Conservatives before they achieved parity in terms of seats’.
Then again, the range of results, ranging from a Conservative lead of 5.8 points to a Labour lead of 12.5 points, which would result in a hung parliament in 2020 ‘has never been so wide as it has proven to be after the 2015 election’. So the 2015 general election may not, after all, mark a return to the normal service of single-party government after the hung parliament which followed the 2010 general election.
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The British General Election of 2015
Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh
Palgrave Macmillan | pp528pp | £29.99 (paperback)
No analysis of why the polls were so wrong then? Are you leaving that analysis to the polling organisations? I have yet to hear one explanation as to why everyone failed to pick up the shift to the right in the latter weeks of the election. Lots of guesses but no analysis.
This rules out the possibility the polls were over-estimating Labour support and under-estimating Tory support all along, and that maybe there was no ‘shift to the right’ but instead that the Tories had a lead of some sort throughout the campaign and maybe for a long while before.
I have since seen Mark Darcy’s interview with the authors of the book. Depressing news for Labour and some strong lessons to be learned about rough politics if we are to compete in 2020. Certainly I miss the the inputs of Alistair Campbell’s and Peter Mandelson’s of Labour’s 1990’s Response Unit and feel we should always have such a unit at the leader’s disposal, whatever the cost.