The Liberal Democrats maintained throughout the general election campaign that they would do better than the polls predicted, with leader Nick Clegg claiming his party would be the “surprise story”.
But as results came in showing the Lib Dem share of the vote plummeting, a party spokesperson told journalists gathered at Clegg’s constituency count in Sheffield: “I’m not going to pretend that the Liberal Democrats are going to have anything other than a bad night.”
The chief secretary to the treasury, Danny Alexander, looked set to be the highest-ranking government minister to lose their seat, with his constituency of Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey likely to fall to his Scottish National party opponent, Drew Hendry.
With it looking likely that the party would have the worst election night since it was formed in 1988, Clegg’s future was already being questioned. Speaking at the count in the English Institute of Sport, one of Clegg’s closest allies and the former Lib Dem leader of Sheffield city council, Paul Scriven, refused to speculate on Clegg’s position, saying he thought the exit poll looked “completely rogue”. “I don’t think it is going to be that result,” he said. “So we’re hypothesising.”
The party at first rejected the TV exit poll which predicted it would face huge losses and retain only 10 of its 56 seats, saying it did not correspond to information the Lib Dems had gathered from activists. But the mood was worsening as the results gathered pace.
The party’s yellow battle bus toured the country six days a week for the duration of the six-week campaign, culminating with a 40-hour journey from Land’s End to John O’Groats, both of which were in Liberal Democrat-held seats. The visits provided opportunities for Clegg to repeat the line, central to the party’s pitch to voters, that it would be a moderating force in a coalition with Labour or the Conservatives.
In the weeks running up to polling day, the Liberal Democrats were consistently critical of constituency polling from Lord Ashcroft, which did not mention the name of the local candidate in its questioning, something the Lib Dems said disadvantaged them. They said their own private polling showed an average 9-point boost when the candidate was named and boasted that many of their MPs had strong reputations at local level.
Ashcroft polled Clegg’s constituency, Sheffield Hallam, twice since March, both times placing him behind his Labour rival, Oliver Coppard. Each time Clegg dismissed the results, saying the party’s own polling had him well ahead.
“Just call me old-fashioned, but if you are going to try to work out how people are going to vote, ask them the question they are actually going to be asked on polling day,” said Clegg in response to a poll on 29 April, which had him one point behind Coppard.
A poll conducted by the Guardian and ICM on Monday, which named the candidates, showed the Lib Dem leader 7 points ahead of Coppard and suggested that a significant number of natural Conservative voters had decided to vote for the Liberal Democrats to keep Labour out.
The party openly admitted it was running a largely defensive campaign, focusing its attentions on about 30 of its seats that private polling suggested it could hold, and a “handful” of seats (including Oxford West and Abingdon, Maidstone, Montgomeryshire and Watford) they thought they could “pinch back”.
In the final days of the campaign, a senior Liberal Democrat source said the party had shifted its attentions to the 10 to 15 seats it thought it could still influence.
The Lib Dem spokesperson said the exit poll was “at the lower end” of what it had expected and the SNP had done “blindingly” in Scotland.
“Voters have gone to them from the Lib Dems and Labour and the fear factor that the Conservatives have driven in England of the SNP holding the balance of power has clearly driven voters towards them, at the expense of the Lib Dems and arguably more dramatically Labour”, the spokesperson added.
