Last night after closing i was thinking the Brown gaffe was not an issues thing, so it probably wouldn't hurt him much. To me both Cameron and Clegg, are less appealing than Brown. I'm leaning to this Australian liberal's view of the election. Below it a link to a Murdoch paper view on preferential voting.
Gordon Brown's political revival 30 April 2010
Bob Ellis
It may change in the next few days but my current impression is Gordon Brown will win government with 309 to 314 seats and 31.3 or 31.6 per cent of the vote, and David Cameron with 211 to 217 seats and 31.3 or 31.6 per cent of the vote will take the Tories into eternal oblivion after Nick Clegg with 93 or 94 seats and 29 percent of the vote gets Brown to agree to the Single Transferable Vote (what we call preferential voting) in all elections hereafter in Britain.
I may be wrong but I've been right within three seats in 31 elections thus far, the last in South Australia (I said a net loss of one seat, and it was a net loss of two seats and I am covered in shame), and dead wrong admittedly, and shamefully and stupidly, in eight.
But if I am right this time about Britain (and I will let you know by Thursday of next week, a few hours before the polls open, if I have changed my view) it will be worthwhile asking then, I think, why the last two years of British headlines have been so massively wrong.
Brown was doomed, we were told. He was in the bunker, we were told. He would lose his leadership. He was delusional. He was having a nervous breakdown. He would be replaced by Christmas. The Tories would win by 22 per cent. Labour was cactus for a generation.
Three books were published last week, called The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labor, What Went Wrong, Gordon Brown?: How the Dream Turned Sour, and Broonland: The Last Days of Gordon Brown.
They seem now a trifle premature. And they derive from a debasement of political comment by the Murdochites and their imitators and the craven pollsters and grovelling editorialists, and a failure to understand that many Britons vote on the issues.
And the issues the Tories were running on (lowering taxes, culling public service 'waste', bringing down the deficit, giving parents the right to sack headmasters, withdrawing stimulus money, keeping the eurowogs out, prosecuting the war in Afghanistan) were never going to convince the voters that the long-loathed party of Thatcher had changed its ways.
David Cameron wasn't much help, really, in the end. He airbrushed his pink baby's-bottom face on the billboards, wore too much pink make-up in the first debate, spoke like Gussie Fink-Nottle addressing the girls of Market Snodsbury, misquoted a black serviceman who he said opposed immigration (the black serviceman wasn't a serviceman and said he'd said that immigration was a good thing), failed to respond to 30 phone calls from a soldier he said he'd help, and basically announced, 'You do it, you do it all, just volunteer and you do it all, and I'll stand here looking pink-faced and masterful and overpaid and approving' as his party manifesto which he pretty much abandoned a couple of days later.
The Big Society, he called it, reminding some of how Mrs Thatcher said once, 'There is no such thing as society. There are only families'. And how Neil Kinnock said, 'No sisterhood. No brotherhood, No neighbourhood, No number other than one. No person other then me.' And how Tories never, ever change their stripes, just their slogans.
And he just didn't get it. Britons vote on policy, they really do. They threw out Winston Churchill ten weeks after the Victory Day of a war he had won because they favoured, then, the Welfare State. They elected Harold Macmillan in part because he agreed with the Welfare State and had been a Middle Way man all his life. They elected Heath because he was the same sort of man.
They never elected Thatcher. Her 'landslide' wins in '79 and '83 came from 42 per cent of the vote, which is less than Ted Heath in '74 lost two elections with, plus a centre-left split of Labour and the Social Democrats and the Liberals and a first-past-the-post electoral fraud that sustained her cruel and punishing bunch of haddock-faced bean-counters for 18 years in office despite 58 per cent of the people never wanting them there in the first place.
So the Tories can't win again, ever, not now; and they probably never could. Yet the pundits were swearing blind for two years how the suburbs were bursting with erotic eagerness to put in the young, cool, smart, handsome, aggressive, up-to-the-minute Blair-clone Cameron because, well, because...er...And the minute another young, cool, smart, handsome, aggressive, up-to-the-minute, Russian-descended, Spanish-married, Dutch-fluent, Westminster-snob-schooled, neo-Cockney father-of-three Nick Clegg arrived, and unleashed his inner bus conductor, and he had policies people liked, the voters went like iron filings to a magnet in his direction.
Policies count. And bad policies lose elections. Cameron opposed the measures by which Gordon Brown saved the world's economy and he still does, and in a week when the world economy is tottering again he sounds increasingly like a prat when he says so.
He's wrecked the Tory party forever, I suspect, and he was always going to, and the leader-writers and the broadcast-pundits were hailing him as an inevitable victor only a fortnight ago; and announcing, amazingly, the bitter end of the Labour Party only a year ago.
What is one to make of this journalistic debacle? Only that polling is a racket, and polls that are taken a year before, or two years before, an election have no actual meaning, and using them as a basis for explosive headlines is a con, and a deliberate con, indulged by news moguls who want their headlines going a particular way.
The next thing to say is polls can be fabricated, and fabricated easily, when, in an era of mobile phones, no mobile phones are called, and the timing of a two-hour call to a private home can be managed to get a particular result.
And so it was we got NSW-Labor-is-doomed headlines, and Mike-Rann-is-doomed headlines, and Anna-Bligh-is-doomed headlines, and David-Bartlett-is-doomed headlines based on polls, and extrapolations from polls, that had no predictive validity.
Gordon Brown can get 26 per cent of the vote and 248 seats and still be Prime Minister, and we're not told that. Mike Rann won back office in South Australia though swings against him in some seats topped 16 per cent, and we weren't told that could happen.
It's where the swings are, and who are the candidates, and what are the policies that matter, and we're told it's much more mystical than that. The mood of the electorate. The it's-time factor. The fresh new face in the playground. The size of the leader's eyebrows. The pregnancy of his wife.
Very little of that sort of thing matters in an intelligent country like Britain. It matters in stupid countries like America where people queue around the block in falling snow on a working day to push buttons on machines that may be rigged; and think Sarah Palin has a future.
Policies count, and spin matters less than it used to, in England and Scotland where people catch up with what's happening pretty fast these days, and vote accordingly.
And Gordon Brown - or, at a long shot Nick Clegg, or Alan Johnson, or David Miliband, or Harriet Harman, or Ed Balls - will be Prime Minister by the end of May, in a shared-power deal that will transform British politics by bringing in some game-changing brand of proportional representation.
And thus put the Thatcher rump in the dustbin of history. And about time too.
Or perhaps you disagree.
Postscript: Friday, April 30th, 7.50 a.m
My strong impression that a fiery, substantial Brown won the last Debate easily has been rapidly contradicted by an early YouGov Poll claiming toffy, condescending Cameron won it easily and Brown came third. I will foolishly nonetheless hold to my first figures, a Lib-Lab coalition and the Tory Party's extinction in the next few years.
$Stock Rev, i think you were more sure than I. 13 years, is a long time, and Cameron's 'transformation' job. It will be interesting ..
Clegg, Cameron kick off coalition era 12 May 2010 .. AFP
New British Prime Minister David Cameron has begun unveiling details of his historic centre-right coalition government, ending 13 years of Labour rule.
Cameron, who has radically transformed his Conservative party from the Margaret Thatcher years to prepare it for power, shook hands with Lib Dem head Nick Clegg on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street before getting down to work.
New Foreign Secretary William Hague insisted the coalition agreement, forged in five days of political deadlock after an inconclusive election, would stand the test of time.
"I dont think it will be a weak coalition. It will be a strong government," said Hague. New Chancellor George Osborne added: "Now's the time to roll up the sleeves, and get Britain working."
London's stock market and the pound recovered after a jittery few days ended with Tuesday's coalition deal.
"Markets had feared a negative start, but as the dawn of a new political era takes place, there appears to be a collective sigh of relief that we have a clearer way forward," ODL Securities trader Owen Ireland said.
Cameron's appointment by Queen Elizabeth II late Tuesday came after Labour leader Gordon Brown finally admitted defeat.
Cameron acknowleged the huge challenges facing him, not least Britain's fragile recovery from the global economic crisis.
"This is going to be hard and difficult work. A coalition will throw up all sorts of challenges," he said in a speech in Downing Street, flanked by his pregnant wife Samantha.
President Barack Obama called Cameron within minutes of his appointment, inviting him to visit the United States in July, Downing Street said.
Other world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd also quickly called Cameron to congratulate him.
European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said Cameron's government would face "difficult choices in difficult times", while Russia said it hoped for a "new impulse" in chilly relations.
Clegg was joined by four other Lib Dem ministers in Cameron's coalition government, after backing the deal to form Britain's first coalition government since World War II.
"We are going to form a new kind of government," Clegg told his lawmakers, adding he hoped it marked "the start of the new politics I have always believed in."
Key Conservative appointments included 38-year-old Osborne as finance minister -- facing daunting economic challenges including a eurozone crisis -- and Hague as foreign minister.
Britain lived through five days of uncertainty after Thursday's general election produced no clear winner for the first time since 1974.
The Conservatives won 306 seats in the 650-member House of Commons -- 20 short of a clear majority of 326 -- followed by Labour on 258 and the Lib Dems on 57. The Lib Dems held talks with Cameron and Brown's party.
Clegg is leading a Liberal party into British government for the first time since David Lloyd George left power in 1922.
Critics say the deal between the centre-right Conservatives and centrist Lib Dems is an unlikely alliance, since they have strongly differing views on a number of issues.
But between them, they have enough to secure a majority in the House of Commons which Labour and the Lib Dems, seen as more natural bedfellows, did not.
There were already doubts about the political union Wednesday, however, with the Conservative-supporting Daily Telegraph newspaper warning it would be "unsatisfactory and short-lived."
"Even as they applauded the statesmanship of their leaders, there were voices in both parties predicting the marriage would not last," added the Financial Times.
Brown wished Cameron well as he left office Tuesday, while acknowledging the personal weaknesses -- such as poor presentational skills and impatience -- which hampered his three-year premiership.
His Labour party's deputy leader Harriet Harman will act as caretaker leader while a leadership campaign takes place, which is expected to conclude by September.
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