And another thing…

YOU know that something’s up when Jonathan Isaby of conservativehome calls you late on a Sunday evening. News of a developing political scandal, perhaps? An invitation to one of his frequent and excellent parties?

No, but a subject of import, nevertheless – specifically, how to save general election night. As The Sunday Times reported yesterday, an increasing number of killjoys council chiefs are planning to postpone their local counts until the day after polling, thereby killing any sense of excitement that traditionally surrounds the most important night in the political calendar.

Jonathan gives his own excellent reasons for opposing this move in the Facebook group he has set up (and I would urge you to join). But my own reasons for wanting the counts to happen as soon as the polls close are:

• personal – no candidate wants to be forced to wait an extra excruciating number of hours before finding out his fate. It’s just not fair; and
• spectacle – how many people have been turned on to politics by the drama and tension of a Thursday nigh election count? That would be utterly lost if we couldn’t find out the results until the following afternoon while everyone’s at work.

In fact that last reason is why I’m also opposed to electronic counting in the National Lottery style: can you imagine how dull it would be if, when the polls closed at ten, David Dimbleby, instead of giving us an exit poll result, told us what the precise actual result of the general election was?

General election only happen every four or five years. Is it really too much to ask that counts actually take place in the same way they’ve been carried out for generations?

IT’S THE Holy Grail of UK election coverage: whispered of, speculated about, but never actually achieved.

But today, the prospect of the first ever live leaders’ debate during a general election has moved a step closer, with none other than Peter Mandelson telling The Evening Standard:

I don’t think Gordon would have a problem with that. While Cameron is good with words, he doesn’t have the ideas or policies to back them. I think people would see through the smile. The more the public sees of them, the more they’d realise that Gordon is the man with the substance.

Generally, the Leader of the Opposition’s challenge to the Prime Minister to a US-style televised debate is a much-loved and quaint tradition of British electoral politics. And traditionally, the PM turns down the request, as John Major did in 1992. But five years later, it was Major who turned the tables on Tony Blair, by challenging the Leader of the Opposition to such a debate, which Blair declined.

It would certainly make good television this time round, but there’s one possible fly in the ointment: Nick Clegg. A two-way debate could indeed be a thrilling spectacle as the two party leaders battle across the rostrums, each pressing the case for his party in a career-defining confrontation. What a pity, then, to have to interrupt the flow of debate by turning with a resigned sigh every few minutes to Nick as he wrings his hands in pious anguish and prepares to lambast the leaders of the main parties with accusations of playing “Punch and Judy politics” and suchlike.

No, by all means let Nick have a separate debate with Harriet and Hague or whoever — televise it, even. But let’s not ruin a perfectly good fight between the two biggest boys in the playground by allowing the president of the sixth form debating society to get in the way. He’d only get his dinner money stolen anyway.

THE GENERAL political consensus is that the Tories are heading, not just for an overall majority at the next general election, but a landslide majority.

At the risk of appearing unfashionable, therefore, let me suggest an alternative scenario: a re-elected Labour government with a working majority.

I have a number of reasons for suggesting this. First of all, as Michael Portillo pointed out at the weekend, the Tories go into the next election with fewer MPs than Michael Foot won in 1983 – 199 to Foot’s 210. So in order to win a majority of just one, Cameron has to secure a net gain of 125 seats. Assuming a mere handful of Scottish seats, that is a very big mountain to climb.

Secondly, the Conservatives’ lead in the polls seems far more to do with Labour’s unpopularity than with David Cameron’s (or his party’s) popularity. Cameron has still not sealed the deal. Now, why is that, do you think? He’s been leader for three and a half years; you would have thought that people would have made their minds up about him by now. If they have, they’ve decided they can take him or leave him.

True, the received wisdom about such things is that governments lose elections, oppositions don’t win them. But Tony Blair was genuinely popular as leader of the opposition. Cameron is not. This offers Labour some genuine hope.

Labour is lower in the polls than I can remember. We are an unpopular government. But the fact that the Tories have so far been rarely able to rise above 40 per cent in the polls suggests that all is not lost.

The Tories, the ones I speak to down here at Westminster, know this. They know the election’s not in the bag, unlike most of the people who comment on this site, whose hatred for the government is so intense, they will simply not allow themselves even to consider the possibility that Labour might yet pull back from the brink.

And perhaps they’re right. No government or party has the God-given right to govern. We may well lose. Cameron may well become prime Minister.

But I’m guessing that right at this moment you could get some very generous odds on a Labour victory. if I were you, I’d throw down a few quid. What have you got to lose?

I’VE SPENT quite a lot of time in the past couple of days mocking those who think that calling for electoral reform is an appropriate response to the expenses scandal.

But what about the other well-worn reaction — calling for a general election?

It’s no surprise the media want an election, they always do. And oppositions tend to be in favour if they’re confident of winning or if they want to appear so (I seem to recall William Hague using “bring it on”-type language in 2001. Bless).

But is the middle of a scandal the right time to go to the country? There are plenty of other issues that will have to be debated during the campaign and at the moment, they wouldn’t get a look in.

On the other hand, the 1997 campaign was almost entirely dominated by “Tory sleaze”. But does anyone really believe that if Major’s mandate had had another year to run, he would have still gone to the country?

With Labour miles behind in even the most optimistic polls, no-one can blame Gordon Brown for holding on for the time being. Apart from Attlee’s baffling and disastrous decision to call an election in 1951 when there was no need, there’s no precedent for Brown to do likewise.

We’re still looking at next May, folks. Have patience.

STILL on the subject of politicians hacking off voters, I was reminded this morning of an unfortunate incident during my first election campaign in 2001. What reminded me was a Royal Mail card put through our door at the weekend asking Carolyn to collect a letter for which the sender had paid insufficient postage; “£1.30 to pay” reads the scribbled legend on the card.

My election agent (we’re back in 2001 now — do keep up) had decided it might be a good idea for me to write personally to all the first-time voters in the constituency. And to save the time and effort that would be involved in hand delivering them, he decided that, since there was enough cash left in the kitty, and we were still well below our legal spending limit, we could afford to splash out on a few hundred second class stamps. A local volunteer agreed to affix the said stamps to the envelopes and to post them. 

So far so good.

And then the phone calls began. Rather unwisely, I had included my home number on the letter and invited any young voter to call me to discuss any issue of concern in the run-up to polling day. Bad move. Actually, very few of the letter’s intended recipients bothered to call, but only because they had left it to their parents to take the Royal Mail card reading “postage to pay” to the sorting office to collect my words of wisdom.

A large proportion of the letters had been posted sans stamp. Can you imagine how well disposed you would feel towards a politician if you arrived at a sorting office to collect what you might reasonably suspect was an important letter, only to be told you had to fork out over a quid to receive it… and then to discover it’s from a candidate in the general election!?

My profuse (and, frankly, panic-laden) apologies seemed to assuage most of my callers and a dread fear of having to pay out hundreds of pounds of compensation to the recipients (and therefore of being disqualified for going over the spending limit) eventually receded.

I have advised Carolyn, therefore, not to bother collecting the under-stamped letter. It’ll probably only be from some bloody politician anyway…

I REALLY hope The Whip is wrong in predicting that Labour strategists are planning to resort to the failed “Tory toff” tactics during the general election.

It didn’t work in Crewe and it won’t work in a nationwide contest. And I’m not against it just because it’s ineffective: even if I thought people would respond positively, I would still be against it.

But for most of my 25 years in the Labour Party I’ve argued for the notion that class warfare is irrelevant. And I’ve argued that Labour can only win by being the party of aspiration. Slagging people off for being wealthy and for having privileged backgrounds would be utterly self-defeating — literally and figuratively. 

Cameron and Osborne would be bad for Britain, not because they used to be members of the Bullingdon Club or are former public schoolboys or whatever, but because their political philosophy and policies will damage and divide our nation.

And by focussing on class, we would effectively be conceding that we don’t have anything to say about Tory policies.

EVERYONE loves to speculate about the timing of elections, don’t they?

It’s one of the most peculiar and fascinating aspects of our (uncodified) constitution that incumbent prime ministers are allowed to choose a date for a general election; citizens of nations where fixed term parliaments are the norm must gaze in wonder and bewilderment at our set-up.

Not that I’m making a case for fixed term parliaments here. It is the current rules that have allowed us to escape the tyranny of proportional representation for so long –  after all, when there’s a guaranteed four-year wait for the next election to come along, you’re pretty much obliged to cobble together a coalition deal with the nearest Liberal. As it stands, leaders of minority governments usually have the option of calling a second election in an effort to win an outright majority, as Wilson did in October 1974, following eight months of a hung parliament.

In today’s Times, Daniel Finkelstein tries to ratchet up the pressure on the PM to consider holding an early election. His logic, as usual, is persuasive, but I think he may have got it wrong on this occasion.

Because whenever a journalist asks me the question, “When will the election be?”, I give the same answer: whenever Gordon reckons he can win.

And this is not a unique or unprecedented choice he faces: every single one of his predecessors in modern times has weighed exactly the same considerations. Douglas Home held on for as long as possible and almost snatched victory from the jaws of defeat; Wilson misjudged and should probably have held off until 1971; Heath gambled and lost; Callaghan was forced into an election he probably should have held eight months earlier; Thatcher, Major and Blair all chose dates that they judged would best suit their parties’ electoral prospects.

This isn’t cynicism. Let me clarify that: this isn’t unjustified cynicism. The reason prime minsters are given this latitude is specifically to allow them room for manoeuvre for party political ends.

Setting aside the rights and wrongs of such a system (it’s the only one we have at the moment), GB is faced with the same choice, and the same restrictions and flexibilities, as his predecessors. He will take advantage of that maneouvrability, and so he should. 

But instead of columnists and commentators trying to read the PM’s mind, or attempting to read the entrails of small mammals, they should save themselves time by simply remembering that prime ministers want to win elections.

This is not rocket science – it’s simple arithmetic. If, by spring 2009, the polls are showing a consistent likliehood of a Labour victory, then GB will hop in the Jag and head for the palace. If they don’t, he’ll stay put. If the polls don’t show the required lead between now and June 2010, then the election will be postponed until… that’s right – June 2010.

As I say, it’s not rocket science. But it’s damn fine entertainment.

I’ve no idea how many of the Conservative gains at the last general election were as a direct result of the so-called “Ashcroft money”. But I do know that no party should be allowed to buy themselves a majority by funnelling vast quantities of cash into marginal seats.

Predictably, of course, the Tories disagree, as can be seen from their hysterical reaction to Jack Straw’s announcement last week of a curb on local spending by parties between elections.

The key to enforcing this lies with local party activists. I’ve often been privy to discussions among Labour activists who were convinced that our opponents had broken some electoral law or other, and each time the conversation would end with everyone expecting someone else to take the complaint forward to an official level. Nothing ever happened. This time, especially if we’re to reintroduce the so-called “trigger” (at which point a candidate’s general election spending is deemed to have begun – theoretically months or even years before the national campaign proper is launched), local parties will have to be vigilant to make sure the new rules aren’t flouted.

BBC Parliament’s repeat today of the 1983 General Election results brings into sharp focus some of the arguments being put forward by some party members in response to our party’s current difficulties. If you want to know what happens when a party ignores the wider electorate, tune in to Sky channel 504.

I was a floating voter in 1983. I had used my vote for the first time a year earlier at the regional council elections to support the sitting Labour councillor, Jimmy Jennings. But by the time the general election came round, and despite pleadings from my parents to stick with Labour, I was utterly fed up with the party, its ludicrous defence policy, its renationalisation policy, its policy of withdrawal from Europe. And although I had some respect for Michael Foot, let’s just say I was unimpressed with his potential as prime minister.

In subsequent years, having joined the Labour Party, I was reluctant, for obvious reasons, to confess to comrades that I had voted SDP. But when Tony Blair and New Labour arrived, I realised there was nothing wrong in admitting, not only that Labour didn’t win my vote, but that Labour didn’t deserve my vote. And although there’s no prospect of our going down that self-destructive, arrogant, self-absorbed road ever again, 1983 should nevertheless stand as a reminder – or a warning – of what happens when parties start excluding part of the nation from their conversation.

I had forgotten just how bad 1983 was for us until I started watching BBC Parliament’s repeat of election night a few minutes ago. Unlike every other election night, where there’s speculation about which seats held by the government party might fall to the opposition, the programme has started with guesstimates about how many Labour seats will fall to the Conservatives.

I wasn’t a member of the Labour Party at the time and watched the live results in the home of a Tory friend. He was satisfied rather than jubilant; considering I hadn’t supported Labour, I was strangely and vaguely depressed as I made my way home in the early hours of the morning.

(Now Neil Kinnock is on, his voice hoarse from the campaign, dodging questions about whether or not he’s the next leader of the Labour Party. And now Torbay has become the first seat to declare – Sir Frederick Bennet (Con) has been re-elected with a reduced majority. Labour loses deposit. Oh dear…)

A mistake that TV dramas invariably make when depicting election night is having the candidates on the stage unaware of the result until the returning officer reads out the figures. In fact all the candidates are told in advance so that they can demand a recount if necessary. So when you’re already standing up there, there’s no surprises left in store.

But what on earth is Michael Foot wearing on his lapel? The Labour leader wearing a rosette with yellow and green? I disapprove.