If Cleggmania didn’t turn into actual votes for the Liberal Democrats, it did serve another function during this General Election: It froze out UKIP, the Greens and the BNP from the coverage. Caroline Lucas did win a seat for the Greens, thanks to ferocious local campaigning, but Brighton Pavilion was the only tiny piece of good news for any of the 2nd tier parties.

Even now, in the varied and diverse postmortem of this General Election, the disaster that’s befallen these parties isn’t getting mentioned at all. So, lacking anything else to write about I thought I’d mention it now.

Revealing for me was a fairly local result. In the BNP stronghold of Mixenden Illingworth in West Yorkshire, the Nazis came third. Third! It’s mostly housing association territory, so of course Labour won, but the Conservatives came second, much to my astonishment. There was a time when they polled only hundreds of votes there. In fact, this was the first council seat the BNP claimed in West Yorkshire, after enjoying visits from the full weight of the BNP campaigning machine.

A friend of mine had a run in with Nick Griffin at the time during what was a very dirty and aggressive bi-election. “You’re a Lib Dem?” Griffin is supposed to have said. “Your logo is yellow, the colour of piss.” My friend claims he replied, “No, it’s the colour of the sun.”

This personal presence from Griffin did win the area over, much to my dismay (because, it has to be said, I lived there at the time). Eventually the party machine moved on, leaving it to the local supporters and activists to continue the work, and, inevitably, the BNP support drifted away as the glamour and naughtiness of voting BNP faded, the reality of the same small number of names appearing on ballot sheets over and over again and the track record of the goons who do actually make it has sunk in.

This experience of wild, enthusiastic support for the BNP evaporating over time appears to be repeating itself across the country. In Barking, where Nick Griffin got the best result of any BNP politician with 6k votes, they lost all their councillors.

How much of this was due to the freeze out in the media? And how much did the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats benefit from a very welcome absence of hysterical, “YOU MUST VOTE LABOUR TO KEEP OUT THE BNP!” messages?

UKIP, too, seemed to have had a very disappointing election judging from the stream of very glum looking faces on Election Night coverage.

Perhaps Alix Mortimer is right to suggest that Cleggmania was the reason the Lib Dems still have at least 57 seats, instead of being crushed into oblivion by the biggest squeeze on non-Tory, non-Labour votes for years?

There’s no doubt that without the debates, if this had been a normal election, the media would have focused on the threat to Tories from UKIP, the threat to Labour from the BNP and, in doing so, have given both parties the publicity they crave. The story could so easily have been “voters to punish the big three for expenses scandal” but as it happened it was those individual MPs that chose to stand for re-election with a blemished record that got a very specific, targeted booting.

If the predictions about the future of the Lib Dems in a post-coalition world hold true, we could be returning to an era of real two party politics. What next for these minor parties, struggling not just to make some sort of breakthrough but now, it seems, find themselves in a fight for their survival?

UPDATE: What’s the price of failure? For UKIP, it was £237k in lost deposits. The Greens threw away £151k and the BNP pissed £133k of hard earned fascist pounds up the wall. H/T, Matt Wardman via Twitter

I woke up this morning with this image in my head and had it on Twitter before I was even out of bed. I really need to stop taking my laptop into the bedroom.

The Twitterati are all a-grumble this morning. Sterling has rallied a little against the Dollar. The UK hasn’t had its credit rating downgraded. In fact, from the Market’s point of view, things look… well, they look good.

“The Tories” they cry, “were BLUFFING! We haven’t got a deal and the markets haven’t crashed! Ooo the liars! ”

Ah. No. Sorry. Isn’t it just as plausible that the markets are rising on the back of confidence that a deal will be done (and considering the deadline set by Nick Clegg) at some point today, and that this deal will be putting the economy and sorting out the deficit as their top priority either way?

Markets like that sort of thing. Hell, this non-aligned political blogger loves this sort of thing. We haven’t got a Government but a majority Government looks more likely today than it did on Friday, doesn’t it?

Update: The BBC has another theory:

But once trading began, the FTSE 100 index of London’s leading shares leapt more than 4% – suggesting traders saw the EU deal over a fund to stop the Greek debt crisis spreading as much more significant.

You know, we’ve all got cringeworthy photographs from our past. It seems David Cameron is no exception. The Daily Mail have the scoop: David Cameron once met the Queen looking extremely cute in a rabbit costume. Oh yes. Normally it’d be worth little more than a quick giggle, but my brain practically exploded when I read the text that went with it.

“… already looking statesman-like at ten years old”

Judge for yourself, but I’m suspecting something of a motherly bias in the mind of the Mail today. Adorable? Yes. Statesman-like? Really?

Two almost identical announcements today from the Conservatives and Liberals suggesting that they’ve had good talks, stressing that their highest priority is ‘economic stability’ and, presumably the deficit.

They didn’t say anything else, but you’d be wrong to think there’s nothing to glean from the tantalising clues we’ve already had.

First, and really really importantly, they’ve already both started spinning positively about what this future coalition might be like – one that puts the national interest and the economic situation first. We’re being buttered up, and the ‘line’ is being taken well in advance of the official announcement of the deal. It’s not just the public, either: It’s the members of the two parties who must, it has to be said, be fretting and worrying about those devious new in-laws.

The other message to take from that is that both sides are clearly determined to do the deal. Everything that needs to be done to keep this deal viable – secrecy and positivity – is being done. There are NO leaks coming from either side, at all: One can assume that there’s a strict ‘no leaks’ clause on continued negotiations to prevent either side being put in an impossible position through a well placed leak or announcement forcing hands.

That’s politics for you – machinations, leaks, intrigue and deceit. Yet these negotiations are surprisingly clean. They’re all being… nice… to each other. Are you unsettled? Are you unnerved? This is, it must be said, weirder than Nick Clegg being compared with Churchill, isn’t it?

If I’d known coalitions were going to be this calming and civilising, I’d have been in favour a lot sooner.