The Almost Landslide

So the results are in. First off I will say that last night's election coverage from the BBC was both good and bad. Too many fluffs, too many mistakes and too many cuts to result announcements too late. But the number crunchers were intelligent and sensible, providing a good insight to what was going on. A partial well done. I stayed up till 6:30am this morning, decided to snatch four hours sleep and am now feeling pretty good. Surprising the limits you can push yourself to when you really need to.

But in terms of the result, I hope to conduct a very thorough analysis of the result by the end of the day. I had high expecations for the Lib Dems, probably too high, but under normal circumstances I would have been content with 62 MPs. Yet, given I now know what has happened, I am very disappointed.

The thrust of my analysis will be to look at what happened underneath the radar. As everyone has already concluded, this was a very weird election with some apparently random swings all over the place. It wasn't helped by the BBC's obsession with "Lab-Con" swing, which was irrelevant in many seats. We know the real story of this election is the disaffection of 1 million Labour voters who have turned their back on the party and voted Lib Dem. The Tories have gained seats, but in terms of actual vote numbers they have barely moved.

I will look at why this election result shows the Tories to perhaps be in more trouble than people think, and yet at the same time they are perhaps on the cusp of victory for 2009/2010 - a victory that would be very hollow indeed.

Then what of the future for all three parties? There will be an interesting few months ahead. Change is imminent within all three parties. What will the visions for the future be now?

And the final majority of 66? I can live with that, even if some particularly nasty Tories have managed to emerge out of the rotten party woodwork.

As for Bob Marshall-Andrews? He is, and always will remain, Left Out Liberal's Official Hero!

Check back later when I hope to start work on this detailed and hopefully interesting post-mortem.