An Hour Is A Long Time In Politics

Beaten Brown is holed up in the bunker. Puffed Up Clegg had the wind knocked out of his sails. Mandy's New Labour dream is disappearing down the drain. Dashing Dave is waiting in the wings. A general election on speed.

The Orange Party is still hungover with hung parliament horror. The game of political poker has begun.

Political pundits and politicians gasped in disbelief as the exit poll revealed the stark truth which had been clear before the start of the race: Cameron would win. Brown would lose. And Clegg would come nowhere.

The Orange Party has lost count the number of times a 'liberal' revival has been puffed up by the media only to fall flat on its face. Now Calamity Clegg and his clapped out crowd face winning probably less seats than they started off with. But the shameless one-trick pony did manage to puff up his personal share of the vote on the back of a single TV talent show.

Many drifted along with the well-spun media narrative but some sharp pundits had seen through the sham. The election was never about a three-horse race. The election was about the Mandy Plan for a dream ticket of an everlasting New Labour Project propped up by Wonderboy.

A plan which would see 'social democrats' who hijacked the Party finally in bed with their Clegg secret weapon, snuggling up to the 'Dems' in LibDems.

New Labour? LibDems? All "progressives" now. The stitch-up was on the cards well before the first vote was cast.

Beaten Brown seemed to be saying his goodbyes in his acceptance speech. Defeat was staring him in the face. Until the Mandy/Campbell spinners put a lid on such dangerous talk. Leaving room for one last political push.

Team Cameron has been staying schtum apart from stating the bleedin' obvious: Labour does not have a mandate to govern. But Brown, without a shred of decency, is clinging on to power until the bitter end.

The election is now a farce. Political posturing and playing by the con of 'constitutional' rules. Unelected Dark Lord Mandy still cannot stop spinning despite Clegg conceding that Cameron should be given a chance.

The struggling Supreme Leader is clinging on as 'prime minister' by his fingertips - with well-spun "constitutional continuity" - as he tries in vain to form a government. But the time to quit is approaching. All hope is lost and the odds so stacked up, a real constitutional crisis would blow up if he tries to carry on regardless.

Some kind of Con-Dem deal is the only show in town. A deal which would allow Her Maj to make that Queen's Speech on May 25 without it falling around her ears. A deal to work out an economic plan to settle the panicky money markets and make a start on rescuing bankrupt Britain from the brink of Borrowing Brown's disaster.

Cameron, winning most seats but not an overall majority, is set to state loud and clear that he can form a "strong and stable" government. For Queen and Country. In the national interest. Learnt on the playing fields of Eton. That's what Her Maj is waiting to hear. That's probably what most of her weary subjects want.

With tacit LibDem support, Tories could haggle and struggle on, using a 'confidence and supply' route pushing through an emergency budget and Queen's Speech. But soon voters could have to go through the whole election rigmarole all over again.

Some kind of Tory-Lib deal is a no-brainer. The only way to prise Bunkered Brown out of Number 10 and have a stab at Dave's 'strong and stable' government.

Calamity Clegg is left playing at being kingmaker on Fantasy Island. Mandy goes off in a sulk. An unelected prime minister and leader of a political party who cannot be trusted to be let loose anywhere near 'ordinary' people goes off to lick his tribal wounds.

"I want to be prime minister", Clegg once declared. The Orange Party is mindful of the old slogan with which mums around the land berate their children - I want never gets.

An hour is a long time in politics. Voters are on tenterhooks with an outgoing prime minister and a new prime minister-in-waiting and a total loser trying to call the shots.

Top picture: Peter Brookes, spot on again in The Times

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Best Campaign Video - Ever!

As Beaten Brown goes down the pan, time to take stock with probably the best campaign ad. 13 years of disaster and failure from the shamed New Labour Project rolled into one powerful video.

After 13 long years New Labour has certainly run out of time, the country has run out of cash and the Orange Party, like so many disillusioned voters, has run out of patience.

The grim reminder comes in a powerful Tory attack video. A disaster movie looking back on more than a decade of the New Labour sham.

13 years of lies, deceit and spin kept going by the slick snake-oil salesmanship of Blair, sinister spin of Campbell, shifty skulduggery of Mandelson and strategic strategy of Gould, all propped up with a smattering of shifty accounting by Brown.

The Orange Party has long been running its own New Labour Hall of Shame (right side bar) to show up the sham of more than a decade of failure.

Today a Sun dossier puts New Labour in the dock. A dossier that shames New Labour on health, unemployment, crime, the economy, immigration, education, the armed forces and families.

After 13 years, voters are finally waking up to the con and given a chance to boot out the party of failure.

With luck and a fair wind, a long-suffering public won't have to be duped by any more spin and hype from the Gang of Four who hijacked the Labour Party for their own ends with Borrowing Brown brought in to cook the books.

Voters - real people - will decide whether to consign the fag-end government to the dustbin marked disaster, leaving a failed, shamed New Labour brand as a sad and embarrassing footnote in history.

Top picture: Peter Brookes, The Times

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Scandal Of Rigged Postal Vote Scam

The dirty little secret of a looming postal vote scam is starting to unravel even before the first vote has been officially counted. After MPs' expenses, a massive postal vote rigging scam is the next big scandal waiting to happen.

With the election outcome on an opinion poll knife-edge, voter fraud could determine the final result as evidence mounts of massive postal vote rigging.

7 million people out of 46 million have reportedly registered for postal votes for Thursday's election. Some authorities saw thousands of applications made shortly before the April 20 deadline.

Councils across the country have reported an "unprecedented" surge in the number of people registering to vote reported The Independent.

"From the south coast of England to central Scotland, local authorities are reporting increases of up to 17 percent, with a consistent trend across major cities, suburban constituencies and rural seats. The surge is apparently at its most pronounced in areas with crucial marginal seats."

Hard on the heels of the Guardian, now the Mail is reporting significant instances of postal vote rigging with police launching 50 criminal inquiries nationwide amid widespread cases of electoral rolls being packed with ‘bogus’ voters. Across 12 London boroughs alone, the Mail states that the Metropolitan Police are considering 28 claims of "major abuses".

The Sunday Times revealed how an election law loophole exposes postal votes to the danger of fraud. Election chiefs have called for political parties to be banned from handling postal vote forms as an investigation by The Times exposed major loopholes in guidelines to prevent fraud.

What galls the Orange Party and many many more is that there's nothing new about reports of voter fraud. Postal ballots are available on demand, amid widespread concerns over transparency, fraud and exploitation. The system is wide open to abuse.

There are enough dirty tricks flying around without another vote rigging scandal raising its ugly head. A scandal of a rigged election is a scandal just waiting to happen. But the electoral commission 'watchdog' still reckons everything's hunky-dory.

Back in November the Orange Party revealed how a crafty plan to push postal votes could swing the critical Glasgow NE by-election for New Labour, fuelling fears of a re-run of the alleged sham of a rigged Glenrothes 'victory'.

Glasgow NE saw a shocking number of voters registered to cast their ballot by post, more than double since the last general election.

The crucial Glenrothes by-election result surprised many political pundits who predicted an SNP win, but the Scottish Labour Party held onto the Fife seat by six thousand plus. Like many, the Orange Party smelt a rigged postal vote rat.

The move sparked concern among election watchdogs, echoing warnings of a judge after Birmingham council elections came under scrutiny way back in 2005, that postal votes are "wide open to fraud".

Suspicions over vote-rigging had been raised in the past as New Labour tends to benefit from a surge in postal votes. Now the real scandal could come in marginal seats where the postal votes could make all the difference to the election outcome.

As usual the Daily Mash calls it about right with a headline screaming: LABOUR CALLS FOR TACTICAL VOTE-RIGGING

THE Labour Party has urged its vote riggers in key marginal seats to make it look as if quite a lot of fictional people have voted Liberal Democrat.


With polling just two days away, senior Labour figures said the postal votes of people who don't exist should be used to stop the Tories, but not in the sort of really obvious way that even a British policeman would notice.

One source said: "As we enter the jiggery-pokery stage, it is vital that fictitious Lib Dem voters use their non-existent heads instead of their imaginary hearts.

"These voters that we've made up are intelligent, sophisticated and know who would have won in their constituency if we hadn't been up all night inventing names for them."

The solution is simple. Ban postal votes except for rare exceptions. Declare general election day a public holiday. Then no-one has an excuse. As EUReferedum bloggers put it - a fraud a day keeps democracy at bay.

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England Hung Out To Dry

Voters in England could be sleepwalking into democratic disaster with the spectre of a hung parliament set to spark a constitutional crisis. A nation held to ransom by MPs from outside England?

The future of the nation is at stake as a badly hung parliament looms on the horizon and Westminster parties play the post-election end-game.

The election campaign kicked off with a debate on getting the country out of the economic Brown mess. Now the race has degenerated into a squabble and muddle as riders jockey for post-election position in a post-election race.

The Orange Party is fearful of the dangers and perils a hung parliament poses for democracy, triggering a constitutional crisis in England.

The current state of opinion poll play points to a Tory minority government with deals struck in a hung parliament. Such a scenario will have profound implications for the way England is governed.

The power bases of the two main Westminster parties are split between a blue 'Tory England' with urban red Labour pockets on the one hand and a 'Celtic fringe' of a Labour Party, LibDems and nationalist parties on the other. The election will change the colour of some bums on parliamentary seats but not significantly the overall colour of the geographic map.

Tories are certain to win the majority of English seats but not so elsewhere. A working majority in England but short of an overall UK majority.

The result would be an unpredictable and potentially devastating destabilisation of democracy.

A Tory-LibDem deal is possible but short-lived. Any hint of a deal over voting reform or Europe would tear Tories apart and put the Dave Party at war with true blue Tories.

Any Tory majority government looks set to rest on a deal with Ulster's Unionists. Ulster MPs who ganged up with the Tories and were the bugbear of Wilson's tiny majority government.

Clegg's social democrat "progressive" faction of the LibDems and New Labour have a lot more in common than they let on. The price of a brokered deal could be Brown's head. But a Lib-Lab alliance too would lack a majority in England.

A Lib-Lab deal would have to use its non-English MPs to help push through its programme for - England. Tories could haggle and struggle on using the 'confidence and supply' route to push through an emergency budget and Queen's Speech. After that all political hell would break loose.

Whoever is in power, a constitutional crisis is on the cards. Other parties would use their non-English MPs to veto and block policies that only apply in England.

The stage is set for a likely scenario where whatever government takes the reins they could be held to ransom by MPs from outside of England. Non-English MPs called on to govern England.

The Westminster government doubles up as a government for England. The country will face the farce of non-English MPs deciding the fate of English policy.

As the race enters the final furlong, it comes as no surprise Cameron is in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, making a final pitch to voters outside England to paint Tories as a UK-wide party.

But Celtic nationalist parties in Wales and Scotland will put the interests of their nations first and will fight Westminster's legitimacy to govern Scotland every step of the way. Salmond's SNP may well strike a deal or vote on each issue as it comes along but that will come at a high price for England.

A hyped-up hung parliament or a European-style coalition with rag, tag and bobtail alliances is a disaster waiting to happen.

A Tory government could be formed with little support outside England. Or a Lib-Lab coalition that depends on Scottish and Welsh MPs to govern England.

The country's salvation rests with a strong, stable government capable of taking tough decisions not the wishy washy muddle with a two-bit party calling the shots. But the election campaign has degenerated into the farce of fawning media luvvies and a Westminster elite chasing the coat-tails of Wonderboy Clegg and chasing a hung parliament rabbit down the hole of chaos.

Voters deserve a better deal when the future of the nations is at stake. To set conditions with pre-election foreplay is an insult to parliamentary democracy. But a strong government to get to grips with the pain of the economic mess is playing second fiddle to post-election posturing.

Even New Labour’s strength in the 'Celtic fringe' is a sham, distorted by the first-past-the-post electoral system which also screws the Tories. But like it or not, the country is going into the election with the current 'constitutional arrangement' rigged to New Labour's advantage.

Celtic nationalists have found an invigorated voice, not so in not-so-merry-England, brow-beaten into false Britishness.

A radical shakeup of the current voting system to make it fair alongside a shake-up of currents seats with hugely disproportionate numbers of voters is one solution. But then a naturally 'Tory England' and the 'Celtic Labour fringe' would be replaced with a federation of national parties working in a United Kingdom.

That would require a party to speak up for the English. A champion along the lines of the Welsh and Scottish nationalists parties.

The wheels of democracy turn very slowly. The Orange Party can live in hope but won't live to see that day. Until that time the 'English question' may come back to haunt a hung parliament and bite with a vengeance.

Mid pictures: Predicted results - Geographic map, The Times. Cartoon - Peter Brookes, The Times.

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Weary Voters Taken For Final Spin

Weary voters are being taken out for a final ride in Spin City. The Orange Party is starting to suffer from election blues - and reds and yellows. Peering through the fog an election end-game emerges.

Getting down and dirty, the final few days are turning into one almighty slagging match. But the writing is on the wall and in the opinion polls for the party of failure, clinging on to a slither of hope to save the struggling Supreme Leader from more humiliation.

Winning over the few remaining wavering voters in the New Labour marginals is the name of the end-game. But the media spin of vast swathes of undecided voters is disappearing by the day as voter intentions harden.

Brown is a dead man walking. The fag-enders are fighting for survival in a last ditch bid to prevent election wipe-out. Now everything including Blair's frail old frame is being thrown into a final push to put the brakes on LibDems splitting New Labour's vote. The politics of fear is set to take centre stage. Scares, lies, smears and spin to scare the living daylights out of voters.

The Orange Party has lost count of the number of times Guardianistas have bleated on about a Liberal revival only to fall flat on their smug faces. The TV debates and the spin-room, egged on by a compliant BBC and the dangerous sham of a European-style 'coalition' has helped New Labour keep the bandwagon rolling.

The election outcome from polls projected from a uniform national swing are useful for lazy hacks and spinners pushing a party line. The key battleground is in the marginals where such expensive polling is a rare beast.

It is the marginal trends which party polling strategists follow most closely, leading Brown to famously bottle it in 2007 and leading to more adjectival reporting from tabloid hacks. And in the marginals with Ashcroft's cash, Tories are inching ahead.

The cunning Mandy/Campbell plan to big up Clegg in the first leader's debate backfired spectacularly. A dangerous strategy as the debates dragged on and the worm started to turn, as the Orange Party warned at the time.

Brown's nasty 'bigoted woman' jibe was a game-changer but the rot had set in earlier. Bigotgate was the final nail in the coffin of a party which had spun itself into a hole of its own making. The Party had been duped by a bunch of New Labour social democrat wolves in Labour Party sheep's clothing. The 'liberals' as Brown hisses were always the enemy.

New Labour beefed up the Windbag Clegg bandwagon to spin a hung parliament. Now the Dark Lord's plan has fallen flat on its face. It became clear from that final debate that Brown was a dead duck. The beast of Cleverclogs was coming back to bite them. The Orange Party has said so often the Party had become a victim of its own obsession with post-election squabbling and wheeling and dealing.

The Party is now on the horns of a dilemma. Rules prevent seat by seat tactical voting to stop the Dave Party. Dozens of New Labour candidates would be staring certain defeat in the face.

But that doesn't prevent some sneakily suggesting a tactical vote for the LibDems may still produce that dream of a hung parliament, with the dream of a "progressive" New Labour/LibDem coalition and Mandy's dream of ultimate power pulling the strings of anointed successor, Miliband the Elder.

The price of a LibDem-New Labour stitch-up will be Brown's head. The price of a LibDem-Tory deal could be Dave's body. Tories will try to ignore the 'liberals' for as long as they can.

Anyone who thinks a government based on the number of votes cast or the biggest share of the vote, can rise out of the election ashes, is living in cloud cuckoo land. Voters elect MPs to parliament. The commons decides the government based on a numbers game.

The rank and file decent Labour party would rather eat their own flesh than seal a deal with the hated Liberals. Clegg too has a fight on his hands in a party riddled with divisions between left-wingers and wet social democrat add ons.

Tories are now set for the most votes, the most number of seats and the biggest share of the vote. But the rigged election system means without that magic majority of seats, Dave would still be on his downers in a badly hung parliament. And unelected Mandy would still be calling the shots. In Westminster it is only the number and colour of the bums on seats that matter. The current 'constitutional arrangement' is at the heart of the 'democratic' parliamentary process.

Tories hope of beating the odds with a solid working majority may rest in a likely alliance with Ulster's Unionist MPs.

The campaign has finally exposed Brown as a two-faced hypocrite and pathological liar. Clegg as a shallow charlatan. Duplicitous Dave as the best of a bad bunch.

Throughout the campaign Brown lied over the dire economic mess and immigration figures, a charge backed up by hard evidence. Clegg's potty policies are a shallow sham. Cameron talks tough but the proof is in the post-election pudding.

The country is bankrupt but has been given a respite from the money markets until post-election pain kicks in. The stakes are high with jobs on the line and spending cuts in the pipeline, as all parties suddenly discover newfound post-election honesty. Tory policies to 'cut faster deeper' are simply the best of a bad job.

Whatever the outcome, the mounting powers of an EU superstate, the hopeless Afghan war, the iron grip of Big Oil, a supermarket stranglehold, the ridiculous merry-go-round kowtowing to China is set to continue.

So too a PC world of zealots sneering at anyone who doesn't fit into their warped world, a boom turned to bust benefit culture, gross government squandering of taxpayers cash, a decimated UK manufacturing industry, a Common Purpose clan and crony culture wallowing in a sea of greenwash.

The Orange Party is a realist, cynical and sceptical. Despite a looming postal vote scandal, there's a chance to stem the tide of the decline after 13 years of failure and disaster and halt the New Labour Project in its tracks.

Freshly scrubbed Dave is set to give more polished performances until he magically morphs into Blair. Smooth-talking Clegg with his half-baked hollow policies is a walking calamity waiting to happen.

A decent Labour Party, free of the shackles of the Gang of Four's New Labour sham, is limbering up on the sidelines after licking its wounds, ready to come back refreshed. Ready for a fight with true blue Tories eager to ditch Duplicitous Dave.

The country is in with a fighting chance to salvage something from the New Labour wreckage but could end up with more of the same.

The only outcome that matters is the party with a majority of seats. Without a clear majority and that constitutional mandate to govern, the days of the Dave Party will be numbered. Voters will have to go through the whole rigmarole sooner rather than later.

The final outcome will become clear at the stroke of 10pm on Thursday. A joint exit poll from the broadcast media will declare the winner before the next episode in the drama of Spin City starts to unfold.

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