And now, with four days left, reality sets in. There isn’t going to be a majority government on Friday morning. That’s becoming abundantly clear. No matter how hard the party leaders strain and push – no matter how many giant limestone tablets they sacrifice in the name of awful garden design – the best they can hope for is an invitation to the clandestine post-election government-forming meetings that will ultimately wreck their reputations and break the hearts of their supporters.
That’s the best they can hope for. Someone gets to be Nick Clegg, and that’s the best they can hope for. It hardly bears thinking about. The worst-case scenario – and one that’s increasingly likely to happen – is that everything will grind to a halt and there’ll be another election before Christmas.
Another election. All of this all over again. All the campaigning. All the dead-eyed visits to animal rescue centres. All the pledges and debates and drudgery all over again, but this time underlined by an inescapable sense of resignation. They’ll all know that we don’t like them. We’ll all know that our votes will once again only help to shore up a coalition that nobody can fully align with. It won’t end well. God, there’ll probably be another Question Time special too. This whole thing is going to be the worst.
Does anyone have the heart to go through all this again? The leaders don’t. Cameron has looked medically exhausted since about February, Clegg has become so utterly submerged in self-loathing that he now spends his days reading horrible tweets about himself out loud and Miliband has already lost the strength of mind to realise that carving vaguely worded platitudes into a limestone slab is the very stupidest thing that any human being has ever suggested.
The voters don’t. As Kenneth Clarke pointed out, a second election would almost definitely conclude with a direct repeat of the first result. In 1974, the second election gave Labour such a slender majority that they ended their time in charge as a minority government. That probably won’t even happen this time; the best we can hope is that our party of choice gets a slightly increased coalition-forming mandate. In terms of chest-pounding campaign slogans, Come and Vote Again and Maybe We’ll Rethink Our Attitudes About the SNP isn’t exactly Hope and Change.
And, most importantly of all, I don’t. This election has done me in. I’m a shell of my former self, sallow and haggard and coasting entirely on a wave of artificial food additives. And all I’ve really done is sit at home and type out a series of badly observed almost-gags like a puerile 10-year-old with a poo fixation. What am I going to do if there’s another election? Make more jokes about Ed Miliband’s willy? I’ve already made one of them, and that’s at least three more jokes about Ed Miliband’s willy than humanity deserves.
But, anyway, this is what’s likely to happen: there’ll be a hung parliament, then a fortnight of limbo, then a shaky coalition that’ll be shot down by two successive no-confidence votes, then there’ll be another election characterised by two entrenched margins screaming knackered rhetoric at a disillusioned majority. This campaign was hard enough to endure, but the next one is going to be horrible. Let’s just all cross our fingers and pray that nobody thinks to do another Question Time special. Nobody deserves that.
