It couldn’t, could it? Oh yes, it could (From The Northern Echo)

It couldn’t, could it? Oh yes, it could

9:52am Thursday 17th December 2009 in

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DAVID Cameron grabbed a few hours sleep on election night, as he prepared to kiss the Queen’s hand – but woke to a constitutional crisis.

When the final results at last rolled in, the Conservatives had fallen 29 seats short of an overall majority, although they were comfortably the largest party.

A disappointed Mr Cameron still expected to become Prime Minister – after all, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg had pledged to back the party with the “strongest mandate”

– but was in for a nasty shock.

To general astonishment, Gordon Brown refused to budge. Instead, he invoked the precedent of the last hung parliament in 1974, when Ted Health clung on in a doomed attempt to cobble together a coalition.

This time, talks with the Lib Dems and the Nationalists dragged on through the weekend, ending in a landmark announcement, late on Sunday, that would change British politics for ever.

Labour’s election pledge to stage a referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) system was replaced by a promised poll on Roy Jenkins’ dusted-off proposals for “AV+” – the Lib Dems’ Holy Grail of proportional representation.

In return, Mr Clegg agreed to keep Labour in power for five months – until that referendum could be held – also helping to pass key legislation on financial services, crime and energy.

Of course, there was an almighty outcry, not least from right-wing newspapers. One incandescent, if overexcited, Daily Mail commentator compared it with Lenin seizing power in 1917.

But the crucial vote was allowed by Speaker John Bercow, the one-time Conservative MP who – having disowned his old party – had faced Tory threats to topple him.

So it was that the first Lab-Lib alliance for more than 30 years was born, with Lib Dems Vince Cable (Chancellor) and Simon Hughes (education) sat around the Cabinet table.

In hindsight, Mr Cameron’s slide in the polls had begun late in 2009 when worried voters ran shy of his plans for savage public spending cuts and grew angry over Tory candidates who were revealed to be tax-dodging “non-doms”.

However, when the new Cabinet met for the first time, it was with a new face in the top seat after the Lib Dems insisted that the exhausted Mr Brown simply had to go.

With just days to pick a new leader – and no time to consult party members, or the trade unions – Labour had invoked emergency rules that allowed the old Cabinet to pick his successor.

It was no contest. The only plausible candidate was the man whose witty election press conferences and forensic savaging of the Tory manifesto had carried his party through a treacherous campaign.

Incredibly, he had only been an MP for one week, after exploiting a law change, rushed through in March, that had allowed him to resign his life peerage and ditch his ermine.

Free to stand for the Commons, this bighitter was quickly parachuted into an ultrasafe North-East seat, where the veteran Labour MP quit because of a sad, sudden and mysterious illness.

Blinking in the bright May sunlight, the former Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham addressed reporters outside the famous No 10 door.

“Just call me Peter,” he told them, with a smile.