Warning: these Tories won’t jump. They must be pushed

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/28/tories-david-cameron-voters-election

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In St George’s community centre in Wakefield, Ann was on her first visit for a free lunch. Tiny and frail on her mobility scooter, she was a senior care worker until struck down by diabetes: she has an open abdominal ulcer and recently fell and broke her shoulder and ribs. But that’s no bar to Iain Duncan Smith – she’s on the work programme’s “work-related activity group” despite being almost immobile. Bailiffs came knocking this week, threatening her for the £700 back rent she owes, due to a bedroom tax debt after one daughter moved out. She had £2 left for the week.

Yes, she says emphatically, she’s always voted Labour. But her daughter, mother of three, who brought Ann here, says she’s never voted. Does she know the difference between parties? “No, not really,” though she thinks her mother is cruelly treated. Yet her life, her children’s and her mother’s will be severely affected by George Osborne’s next £12bn of cuts. Only a few days left to persuade people like her that voting matters.

With an unbearable nine days still to run, this excruciatingly static tug-of-war election is fraying nerves beyond endurance. The momentous nature of the choice ahead is still passing too many voters by: canvassers need the patience of saints hearing those whose lives will be radically affected by the result say “They’re all the same” or “We don’t vote”. The temptation to grab people by the lapels and give them a good shaking must be almost overwhelming.

Ann and those like her are why Labour supporters hover over the polls in agony, hope vying with panic. Ed Miliband has laid out Labour’s most radical programme for years – pitched against the toughest Tory state-shrinking austerity yet. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has never seen so wide a gap in tax and spending policies – Tory cuts 30 times deeper than Labour’s. Today the Institute for Fiscal Studies will again fruitlessly ask the Tories to say how they can cut £12bn from working-age benefits, without grinding hardship to low-paid families and the disabled. Timid TV interviewers keep letting Tories get away with not listing where the axe would fall.

Membership Event: Guardian Live: Election results special

The other great dread: a David Cameron win fires the starting pistol of the EU referendum, throwing the country into turmoil over Europe, with a grave risk of exit. Scotland will be gone and little England risks floating off alone without influence anywhere. No election in living memory has had such a profound and irrevocable effect on who we are, how we live and what is to become of us.

The outcome is so uncertain, veering from extreme to extreme, commentators would be wise to prepare a plausible column for every eventuality. Joy! Labour crosses the line as the biggest party! There is no “legitimacy” nonsense. The Tories fall upon one another in an Eton wall game of internecine ferocity, unable to believe the school geek, the loser whose head they stuck down the toilet, ended up as head boy. Why did they lose?

Sagacious after-the-event explanations include Osborne’s smugness about economic “success” when too few were better off. His “jobs miracle” was all zero-hours and temp work paying less than you can live on. Tax cuts for the rich caused billionaires’ wealth to double but austerity for the rest: even some Tories blush at “all in this together”. Why did recovery need more belt-tightening, with the NHS teetering on the edge? Tories stayed toxic and Cameron should never have ditched “compassionate conservatism”. Labour fought a good campaign on decent values, honest in comparison. That’s why the Tories lost, we’ll write.

But outright Tory failure looks unlikely. Yesterday’s Guardian poll gave them another blip up: is this the last-minute trend they always hoped might echo 1992? Be braced for Cameron to win more seats and more votes than Labour, greeted with a victory parade on every Tory front page. They may not command a majority in the Commons, but don’t underestimate their attempt at extra-parliamentary politics.

Theresa May’s declaration that this will be the “worst constitutional crisis since the abdication” is a threat. YouGov pollster Joe Twyman writes that if the Tories have more votes and more seats they could “claim the plurality of public opinion on their side and therefore refuse to just relinquish power to another minority party that similarly lacks the stability of a coalition. Along with public opinion, a Conservative minority government might even claim to be acting ‘in the national interest’ by maintaining the unity and defence of the realm through neutralising both the separatist desires of the SNP and their wish to abandon Trident.”

Imagine the Tories, spurred on by their raucous press, trying to mobilise popular opinion against the legal constitutional result: that’s insurrection. They wrote the Fixed-term Parliaments Act and they must abide by it. If Cameron can’t command a Commons majority he hands over power, if Miliband has a left-of-centre Commons majority with SNP support. To proclaim Scotland’s representatives illegitimate is preposterous and dangerous. To claim public opinion is an appeal to the mob. Parties that lost the popular vote have ruled before, thanks to our unjust non-proportional system that the Tories cleave to. Attlee won the popular vote in 1951, but failed to win a Commons majority. In 1974 Labour had fewer votes but four more seats than the Tories. Politically and psychologically even a badly diminished Lib Dem cohort could matter, but if Nick Clegg sticks with his threat to support the Tories, pretending it’s a constitutional necessity, he deals a final blow to the party he has already led to ruination.

Labour would need nerves of steel to hold power against that storm of Tory outrage – but Miliband looks confidently unflinching. The SNP, pledged to “lock out the Tories”, would be locked into supporting Labour on any government-shaking issue, not puppet-masters. Fearing some last-minute Tory bounce, Labour holds its breath, well-used to shocks: the first election I covered as a junior reporter was 1970, when few saw Wilson’s defeat coming. In 1979, few really thought Margaret Thatcher could beat popular Jim Callaghan. Neil Kinnock’s loss in 1992 was a shock, as John Major cut such a minor figure – and indeed was effortlessly outdone by Tony Blair in 1997. Nothing was more certain than Gordon Brown’s fall in 2010.

But no past defeats would be more painful than another term of Cameron and Osborne, bringing a social and foreign policy rightwing radicalism more extreme than any in my lifetime.

• Polly Toynbee is a panellist at Guardian Live: Election results special on Friday 8 May at 6pm in Kings Place. For full details and to book tickets, see here