The playbill had to be ripped up overnight. We had been promised a month-long improvised variations of Three Weddings and a Funeral. Instead, we got a straight 90-minute version of Three Funerals and an Astonishment. Or possibly two and a half funerals. At his South Thanet count, Nigel Farage had said he was standing down as Ukip’s party leader, only to almost immediately suggest he would take the summer off and then could be open to offers.
Nick Clegg’s funeral was, confusingly, more of a woodland burial held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, one of London’s more hip and cutting edge venues. In the foyer, were two sculptures of half-eaten scarecrows called Don’t Touch Me; the third was upstairs in the Nash Room. The Lib Dem leader’s extraordinary zen-like calm of the past six weeks had at last deserted him as he announced his resignation. He was back to looking pale, vulnerable and red-eyed.
“History will judge us kindly,” he declared hopefully. It could hardly judge him more harshly than the voters had. The long road to recovery would now be travelled in a minibus. He did have some fight left, though. “Fear and grievance has won,” he said. By the time he finished, he was struggling to hold back the tears. Many of his supporters had less reserve.
Ed Miliband’s resignation was an altogether more polished and formal affair. He arrived at the wood-panelled Institute of Chartered Surveyors with a professional politician’s wave and his wife, Justine, by his side. He even managed to fit in an early gag about finding himself at the epicentre of the most unlikely cult of the 21st century – Milifandom – as he took total responsibility for his party’s failure. Much of the time he sounded as if he was on autopilot, though that was still more impassioned than much of his campaigning had been.
Nor was there any mention of the Ed Stone: a fitting end for it might be to carve the names of those MPs who lost their seats as a result of such an idiotic stunt on the back and stick it outside Labour HQ. Ed wound up by hoping that the battle for his succession would be conducted with decency. Not like the last leadership contest, then. First his brother, then the leadership – Ed had lost two of the things he had loved most dearly. The pathos was impossible to miss.
At Downing Street, David Cameron didn’t even try to conceal his amazement. He had been taken as much by surprise as everyone else. His speech was gracious, decidedly unpumped and hostage to fortune. It’s one he may come to regret in the months ahead. Having campaigned for the past few weeks on the perils of the evil Scots taking over England, he was now promoting himself as the One Britain prime minister. There will be a lot of people both north and south of the border who might find that hard to believe.
But Dave is Dave, and Dave can’t help making things up as he goes along. He just gets a bit carried away. “Having won an overall majority, I will now implement everything in our election manifesto,” he declared. He did get one thing right, by calling the British a good-humoured bunch. We must be. We had just elected the party whose manifesto had been dismissed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies as the most innumerate and un-costed of them all. It was a manifesto predicated on negotiating a coalition rather than enactment. Even as he was speaking, George Osborne was rummaging down the back of the sofa for money he didn’t have, and the poorest and most vulnerable were considering feeding themselves to the dogs before the Tories got there first.
It was a day on which self-sacrifice was not to be dismissed. To compound the surreality of a day that had already turned out to be even more hallucinatory than the hi-vis psychedelic dress that Sam Cam had worn to accompany Dave to the the palace, the last post rang out over Whitehall at 3pm to mark the 70th anniversary of VE Day. There they all were, lined up for a final encore. Nick and Ed had little trouble keeping their heads bowed in solemnity. Dave looked to his right and clocked the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon.
But his biggest threat was standing just behind him. Boris Johnson is the one Tory who is not quite so thrilled by Dave’s success as the others. Boris hasn’t come back to Westminster just to run some two-bit government department. Dave looked pensive. Strange as it may seem, it was slowly dawning on him that winning an overall majority might just turn out to have been the easy bit.
