Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Ed Davey were seated next to each other in Westminster Abbey for the coronation. For these knights of the opposition realm, it was an opportunity to exchange mutual congratulations on their successes in the local elections. For everyone else, the pairing provided a glimpse of one possible future for this country in which prime minister Starmer and deputy PM Davey have agreed to form a Lab-Lib coalition. I don’t say this will happen. No one can predict exactly how the chips will fall. I do say both men should be thinking about and preparing for hung parliament scenarios because there’s a significant level of probability that the next election will produce one.
Sir Keir has credible grounds for saying he will become prime minister, but his MPs struggle to sound genuinely confident that Labour will secure a parliamentary majority. The explanation is the national mood and the electoral maths. As one of the Labour leader’s inner circle puts it, “the maths is very difficult”. Sir Keir has sought to efface the Jeremy Corbyn years, but he can’t rewrite the party’s cataclysmically atrocious performance at the last election, which crushed the number of Labour MPs in the Commons to its lowest tally since 1935. Climbing a towering mountain from such a very low base presents a vertiginous challenge. To get to a parliamentary majority of just one, Labour must win 123 more seats than it did in 2019. Sir Keir would need a majority substantially better than one to sustain a reforming government through a full parliamentary term. Seat gains on that scale rarely happen. History suggests it is not mission impossible, but it is mission extremely bloody difficult.
That’s the hard maths of the next election. Then there’s the bitter mood of the electorate. Campaigners from all the parties agree that the animating theme of the locals was seething anger in all kinds of areas among all kinds of folk towards the Tories. Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens were beneficiaries of this fierce fury with the incumbents. There was less evidence of effervescent enthusiasm for the main party of opposition. The results were encouraging for Labour, but not so stupendous that you would be sensible to bet the farm on Sir Keir winning the general election outright.
That’s prompted the Tories and their megaphones in the rightwing media to try to curdle the blood with the alleged horrors of hung parliaments, “dirty deals” and coalitions. The Conservatives will try to terrorise the electorate because they are so terrified themselves. There’s a nightmare that stalks the Conservative party. It is that Sir Keir and Sir Ed strike a deal in which the Lib Dems cooperate with Labour in return for a referendum on proportional representation. There’s a lot more support for electoral reform among Labour people than there once was and last year’s party conference overwhelmingly backed change to a proportional system. The referendum is held, first-past-the-post is consigned to the dustbin and the rules of the game are changed. Never again will the Tories be able to rely on an antiquated electoral system to turn a minority share of the vote into majoritarian power for them. PR would not exclude the Conservatives from government for ever. It would make it impossible to impose a rightwing agenda when most of the country didn’t want one.
That’s the primal fear of the Conservative party. This is combined with shameless hypocrisy about deals between parties. Two of our most recent four elections have produced hung parliaments. In 2010, David Cameron found himself short of a majority and brokered a coalition with the Lib Dems. In 2017, Theresa May threw away her majority and struck a desperate bargain with the DUP to stay afloat. In neither case had this been advertised to the electorate in advance. In neither case had the voters been warned that the Tories would cut a deal with another party in order to secure power. So it is rich for Conservative politicians and commentators to demand that Sir Keir spells out in every detail what he would do in the event that the next election leaves him short of a majority.
The Labour leader has been unambiguous on one crucial question. He has categorically ruled out any kind of deal with the SNP under any circumstances. He’s learned the lesson from 2015 when his predecessor Ed Miliband was too slow to realise that equivocation would be costly. This allowed the Tories to monger scares that a hung parliament would result in a “coalition of chaos”. They produced a deadly attack ad in which a tiny Mr Miliband was imprisoned in the pocket of a giant Alex Salmond. This proved potent in scaring swing voters in England away from Labour and the Lib Dems and into the arms of the Conservatives.
They will probably try to reprise some version of this gambit at the next election, but there is a lot of doubt even among Tories that it will be effective. Not least because the party that brought you the disasters of Brexit, the bedlam of Boris Johnson and the madness of Liz Truss have been the true cavaliers of chaos.
Neither Sir Keir nor Sir Ed are keen to get entangled in talk about a hung parliament, but both have kept the door open to a post-election deal. There are respects in which the stars are aligned. The two men have an amiable relationship and a compatible outlook. They are united in believing that the national interest demands the eviction of the Tories. Sir Ed says it is his “most important job”. His deputy, Daisy Cooper, describes it as a “moral responsibility”. Sir Ed is rarely critical of Labour and Sir Keir doesn’t make nasty remarks about the Lib Dems. Nothing is likely to be said before the election that would preclude an agreement between them after it.
A formal electoral pact will not happen because neither leader thinks it is a smart idea and both worry about the several ways in which it could backfire. Both assume that anti-Tory voters will be able to work out for themselves how to maximise the punishment of the Conservatives. For the Tories, one of the frightening dimensions of the local elections was the amount of tactical voting to unseat them.
Labour and the Lib Dems will continue to concentrate resources where each is best placed to beat the Tories and avoid pointless competition between them. The electoral map helps. There is only one Labour-Lib Dem marginal parliamentary constituency. That is Sheffield Hallam, which was Nick Clegg’s seat before it was taken by Labour. There are some policy differences between the two parties, but none so gaping that it would make a coalition undoable. There is also policy overlap. Lib Dems like to point out that they pushed for a windfall tax on the hydrocarbon majors before it was adopted by Labour.
For Sir Ed’s party, another chance to participate in government would be a big opportunity, but it would come attached to a big worry. They were eviscerated at the end of their five years of cohabitation with the Tories and there are a lot of Lib Dems who are extremely nervous that they would meet the same fate if they went into coalition with Labour.
Would Sir Keir issue an invitation to dance anyway? If he finds himself short of a majority or with a small one, there are several ways he could go. One option would be to try to emulate the Wilson model. Harold Wilson won the 1964 election, but with an unworkable majority of just four, which he judged too precarious to sustain a Labour government over a full term. So he established his authority at Number 10, burnished his personal popularity and then went back to the country in 1966 with the slogan “You know Labour government works”. His reward was a much heftier majority of 98 seats. He repeated this two-bites approach, though with less success, in 1974 by forming a minority government after the February election of that year and then going back to the country in October to seek a majority.
Absent the use of a time machine, we can’t know exactly what the numbers will look like or how the atmosphere will feel after the next election. So no one can be certain, including Sir Keir himself, what he will do if he comes up short. This we do know. Whenever he’s asked to name the past Labour leader that he most admires, his answer is always Wilson.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
