6 May 2011

The SNP is smiling while coalition relations cool

Disunited Kingdom. Disunited coalition. Ed Miliband? Must do better. What a fascinating set of results. Labour in Scotland has been walloped. Ignore the Labour spin telling you the SNP hoovered up Lib Dem support in Scotland.

They did. But then they went to work on Labour voters and got a late surge – one of the latest, largest surges recorded in recent polling (see Peter Kellner’s commentary).

With Labour and the SNP so close together on policy, Scots faced with the choice of “who stands up to London best” decided to go for nationalists with a capital “N” not a small “n”. One colleague here in the office wondered whether that was a verdict in some way on Ed Miliband’s inability to stand up to the coalition forcefully.

I don’t think the Scots had Ed Miliband on their minds. They did have Iain Gray on their minds though, and that has a read across for Ed Miliband.

More than one senior Labour figure in Westminster has pointed out that you might draw the conclusion from the Scottish elections that you can’t win an election in the modern age of presidential/TV-dominated politics with an uncharismatic, low-profile leader.

Ed M’s team intend to address this profile deficit in the coming weeks with more focus on the man himself and his beliefs… but the fact that senior Labour figures are talking about it should be a worry to Ed Miliband.

Read more: Alex Salmond’s SNP make big gains in Scotland

By the way, Labour in Scotland came within a whisker of getting an even bigger thwack from the SNP. Look at the combined majorities of Labour MSPs who narrowly held on (Iain Gray, Malcolm Chisolm, Johann Lamont, Duncan McNeill, John Pentland, Michael McMahon – all three-figure majorities now). Their combined majorities are 3,180. That means around 1,500 votes going the other way across six seats and the SNP would’ve snatched them too.

Read more: A ‘very, very bad night’ for Lib Dems

As for the coalition. Peter Kellner has some pretty gloomy news for Nick Clegg on AV too. YouGov’s shared its first stab at an online exit poll and it suggests that the No camp will end up leading 62 per cent to the Yes camp’s 38 per cent.

Electoral reform was the prize Lib Dems held out for in the coalition talks, the last piece to slip into place, and now it looks as though it has been dashed – and a burning flame of the Lib Dems’ central beliefs, what gets them up in the morning, is no more for a generation.

Professor Iain Maclean of Oxford University said in a speech last month Nick Clegg “played his best card in May 2010, and now holds a bunch of twos and threes”.

Relations in the coalition will now be “frostier,” one Lib Dem Cabinet minister said to me, “more formal, crossing t’s and dotting i’s”. The informal agreement between Nick Clegg and David Cameron that the Tory leader would not weigh in on the referendum was a classic piece of what in the old days we used to call “sofa government”. Lib Dems are now counting the spoons.

David Cameron, on the basis of what we know about last night’s results, is counting his many blessings. The Tories could be barely down 1 per cent on share of the vote from the 2010 general election.

Their supporters don’t have much quarrel with what they’re doing, and they even seem to be hoovering up some Lib Dem support here and there in the south to add insult to coalition injury. At this rate, and with the Westminster seat reductions and boundary changes he’s got through Parliament, David Cameron will be thinking things could be a looking a lot worse.

If Alex Salmond’s smile is as wide as the arc of prosperity he used to talk about, David Cameron’s is a close contender on width.

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