It’s been a tough campaign. Now give us a break
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Version 0 of 1. When did the 2015 election campaign begin? A year ago when the government effectively ran out of things to do? One hundred days ago when all the parties celebrated the start of their 100 days to go until the election campaigns? Or six weeks ago when parliament was dissolved? Your guess is as good as mine. However long it has been, it’s felt longer. It has been a campaign in which very little appears to have happened over a long period of time. All the main parties ran out of new ideas early on and have been reduced to trying to find new ways of saying exactly the same things while acting as if they were positive and excited about it. Though not to real people, obviously. For all their rhetoric of wanting to go out and “talk to the real people of Britain”, Dave and Ed have largely gone out of their way to avoid them. Rallies took place in front of invited activists, who were given instructions to be enthusiastic, and filmed in such a way to make it look on TV as if they were well attended by hundreds of campaigners rather than a few dozen. It has been the most stage-managed election campaign in history. Membership Event: Guardian Live: Election results special Even the wives of the three main parties’ leaders have been brought on as political fashion accessories. SamCam, the ever more Dave-adoring and silent Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, looked even more adoring this week than last, so she must have been ticked off for looking bored in Leeds last Friday. Justine has come across a little better, merely scowling from time to time as if she knows the whole process is demeaning but necessary. Miriam has been the only true star: looking and acting as if the whole thing was a bit of a joke from the start. Seldom without a genuine smile, she even had real conversations with real people; mainly because the Lib Dem spin doctors aren’t as effective at keeping her away from them as the Conservatives and the Labour. Yet for all of this effort, the polls have barely moved in months, a hung parliament looks inevitable and the manifestos have been written as coalition bargaining positions rather than binding promises. Which is perhaps just as well, as the independent thinktank, the Institute of Fiscal Studies, has been through all of them with a calculator and declared every party in need of remedial GCSE economics classes. Imaginary numbers it can cope with; imaginary, imaginary numbers it can’t. Who could have guessed that George Osborne could find £8bn down the back of the sofa for the NHS after years of telling the country it was broke? The biggest winner has been the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, whose manifesto launch was more of a coronation than a political rally. No matter how hard parts of the media have tried to brand her “the greatest threat to the constitution since the abdication crisis” – bigger even than the second world war, apparently – many people still see her on TV and think she looks like a half-decent person and politician. It helped that the SNP kept the more divisive Alex Salmond under wraps throughout the campaign; but, even so, that’s no mean feat. Ed Miliband out-performed expectations. Possibly even his own. The Tories expected to pull away in the polls during the last few weeks of the election when everyone saw how rubbish Ed was. This was a classic example of the Tories shooting themselves in the foot; they managed to lower the bar for the Labour leader. So, many people with little interest in politics were surprised to find Ed could actually string coherent sentences together. His Edymandias EdStone moment may have been one of the most ill-conceived political stunts of all time: fortunately the monarchy came to the rescue with the timely arrival of the royal baby to fill the news pages instead. That must be a first. For David Cameron, it’s been much the reverse. A man already known for his chillaxing tendencies, Dave has spent much of the campaign going through the motions, as if he believed that by constantly repeating “competence or chaos” he would automatically be given back the keys to No 10. After it became clear that this tactic wasn’t working, his advisers tried to get him to appear as if he cares a bit more, one way or the other. Few things are less suggestive of genuine passion than a man who feels the need to tell everyone how “bloody pumped” he is every few minutes: other than his rolled-up sleeves that have been neatly ironed. It has also been a tough campaign for Nigel Farage, who has struggled to look excited. He can’t bear not having an audience and with so much of the media attention focused on Scotland, there’s been a noticeable downturn in last year’s Ukipmania. Farage is also locked in a neck-and-neck battle with the Tories to win his constituency of South Thanet. By Friday, both his – and possibly Ukip’s – prominence in the political debate could be as good as over. Ukip has always been very much a one-man show. Much like the Greens, who have always been a one-woman show; their decline in popularity has been because the wrong woman has been in charge. Natalie Bennett has got better, but she isn’t a star like Caroline Lucas. Lucas’s decision to stand down as leader to focus on retaining her Brighton Pavilion seat might have been the right tactical move, but it hasn’t helped her party nationally. The biggest surprise has been Nick Clegg. By rights, the Lib Dem leader should have been the most depressed man in Britain. His party has taken a pasting over the past five years for its participation in the coalition and looks set to lose at least half of its seats. And yet Clegg has been criss-crossing the country in a state of zen-like calm. Either he’s been successfully practising Mindfulness and is resigned to his fate. Or he genuinely believes that no matter how small his party becomes, he will still be in a position to play kingmaker after the election. He could even be right about that. There is one thing on which everyone – politicians and voters alike – has been in agreement about throughout the campaign. They all can’t wait for it to be over. Most people going into the ballot box with their “stubby little pencils” (TM David Cameron in almost every speech), will be voting for the party they mistrust and dislike the least. That’s why the parties have so often campaigned on negativity rather than hope. Some may see this as a sign of the public becoming more cynical about politicians: I prefer to see it as a better-informed scepticism. Trust is something that has to be earned. So we end up in the same place as when we started. Unless the polls have been consistently wrong or there is a late unexpected swing, there will be another hung parliament. That may be inconvenient for the main parties, but it’s not a constitutional crisis of any description. It’s a legitimate democratic decision. Like it or not, some horse-trading will need to be done and a government will have to be formed. Because if there’s one thing that will make people even more sceptical about politics, it’s the thought of having to go through the whole process of another general election within even a year. Come to think of it, that might also be enough to put some politicians off politics. • While polls remain open please refrain from disclosing your voting choices. 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