An insane electoral system leaves Clegg
praying for a Labour revival

As all three leaders voted this morning, a shock exit poll among the trio showed that – if this result was projected Nationwide – they would get 20.3 million votes each, but the Liberal Democrats would still have only 90 seats. The PoliticsHome site scored a major scoop by asserting ‘An Ipsos-Mori poll for the Evening Standard today puts Mr Cameron 44 seats short of an outright majority, the full results being Con 36, Lab 29, LD 27’.

That’s going to be some streamlined House of Commons, but the missing % signs do keep up the site’s growing credentials to take over from the Grauniad as the most misspelt, malapropism-riddled site on the web. Last week they had Nick Clegg ‘honing in on Labour marginals’, and David Cameron trying to ‘diffuse the row between senior Party strategists’.

The last real polls showed the Tories 50 seats short, and The Slog’s prediction 70 seats adrift. Here in the Roost, we remain confident – but even though the votes have still to be counted, the horse-trading has already begun. Gordon Brown has apparently offered the Unionists a maintenance of Ulster’s block maintenance grant (very generous of him) and David Cameron has won the backing of unionists to support a Conservative government in exchange for sparing the region from the worst of the planned spending cuts. One can’t help feeling that there might be someone called Bialystock in the Unionist Party.

Part of me sort of hopes that Clegg does wind up in Number Ten, because it would be seriously cool to have a PM’s wife called Miriam Gonzales Durantes. One feels that at some time in the future, she’ll be glorified in a musical using a diminutive of her name. All South Americans have names like Eduardo Arantes di Nacimento, which then get shortened to Pele or Didi or Belgrano. In Argentina, the famous First Lady became Evita, but I’m not sure ‘Miriam’ has the same romantic appeal. She could be called Nickita of course, but that’s been done before….and Cleggita would make her sound like a cumbersome dancer from Yorkshire. Gonzo’s not such a good idea either. Duce? No, that’s been tried too…with disastrous consequences. Anyway, that’d be Nick’s job.

The question is probably academic, because it’s beginning to look like Nick Clegg really isn’t going anywhere within reach of Downing Street. Over the final three days of the campaign, it must have dawned on the LibDem leader that – short of a major New Labour revival – his sum total of gains from this election will be in the region of twenty or so seats. Cameron wisely sent him off with a flea in his ear, and Gordon Brown is now far too toxic to go near.

We are thus presented with the delicious possibility that Nick might be spending all of today secretly advising LibDem second-place voters in Labour marginals to switch their allegiance to the Party he referred to three weeks ago as ‘a rotting carcass’. For surreal as it sounds, at this point he’d benefit far more from Labour wins than he would from having a bigger Liberal Democrat Party in the Commons: better to have 80 MPs coming third on the losing side, than 110 MPs sitting, impotent and frustrated, in second place behind the Tories.

Such is the nature of our potty electoral system. All in all, these election sketches have been more fun than I expected – but Brown’s defence of insolvency, Cameron’s defence of naked electoral power, and Clegg’s defence of a corrupt superstate have not made for the sort of stuff any of us will want to remember much in the future. All three have wound up looking like they should be staring out from Church guttering.