General election: Voters flummox pollsters, pundits and punters

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 8 Μαΐου 2015 - 03:52

British eyes traditionally focus on Trafalgar Square at times of national importance, be they moments of anger or joy: demos against unemployment or the bomb on the one hand; VE day on the other.

Election night used to a speciality, right into recent times, with a big TV screen and members of the happy party leaping into the fountains. Just after midnight in this election, the population of Trafalgar Square totalled four - a pair of lovers whispering to each other under a streetlamp, and two "heritage wardens" chatting less intently but confident of a quiet shift. Even the pigeons have now gone elsewhere.

An hour later Leicester Square was also quiet. But by Covent Garden a small crowd had gathered. A woman rushed up to me: "Can you not walk here, please? We're filming." "What are you filming?" "A Bollywood movie," she replied.

The British had retreated indoors, the everyday reaction of a secretive people. They had just committed their slyest, most secretive trick in memory: flummoxing pollsters, pundits and punters alike. And the greatest losers of the night, other than the politicians consigned to oblivion, appeared to be the market research industry who use elections as a loss leader to promote their commercial work. They have been knocked sideways by the academics who mastermind the exit poll.

Normally the facts of election night unfold with painful slowness. This time there was a single coup de theatre: it came with the announcement of the exit poll on the stroke of 10. Instead of wandering the empty streets, I was at a leftish-leaning party in leftish-leaning Islington. There was a mass gulp when the poll came through, and another when it was announced that Michael Gove, the divisive and banished education secretary, was about to comment. Someone switched channels fast.

It was more than four hours before a single seat (Kilmarnock) changed hands. But by then the facts were clear. And most of the country - or at least the Labour half (which is a good deal less than half the country, it turns out) - had given up and gone to bed.

Early on, John Curtice, king of the exit poll, was looking dishevelled and edgy as his findings were widely rubbished and the former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown threatened to eat his hat. Just after 1am came the first real sign of vindication.

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>The face of the 1992 election, when Sir John Major flummoxed the polls, was the night's first big winner, the Essex Tory David Amess. His equivalent here was Justin Tomlinson, holding a potentially vulnerable seat in Swindon North with an increased Conservative majority. But he did not whoop and grin like Mr Amess; he just gave a little self-satisfied smile, as though he had just made a tricky contract to win a hand of bridge.

And so the night went on. The rituals were observed: the windy announcements from the returning officers; the convention that the winner must not smile, never mind whoop or grin, until the announcement has been made; the gracious speeches from both winners and losers - Jim Murphy, the vanquished leader of Scottish Labour, giving a particularly charming example.

Yet all around these old certainties was mayhem. Scotland going in one startling direction, just as predicted; England going another, much less decisive but far less expected. The Liberal Democrat vote, built up from almost nothing through 60 years of painstaking effort, being magicked away in an instant. Punishment for joining David Cameron's coalition? So how come a large chunk of their vote appeared to heading Tory?

<>Long before dawn, the tumbrils were calling for Nick Clegg and the first indictments were starting to be drawn up on Ed Miliband.

Somewhere in rural Oxfordshire, pending his first post-election public appearance, Mr Cameron was probably doing the odd whoop among the self-satisfied smiles. But he might have been feeling a touch pensive too about continuing to lead a country more disunited than at any time in memory - with no majority or a tiny one, without any worthwhile potential allies, with his backbenchers full of anti-Europeans, many of them obsessive. As with Sir John, the roses of success might turn to the ashes of disaster very fast.

That's not much consolation to the losers. In Islington, anyone still awake was pouring another gin and hemlock.

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