Cameron’s just finished giving his announcement to the media, and his strategy is clear: A direct invitation to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, ticking all the ’4 policies’: Pupil premium, scrapping ID cards, committee to consider electoral reform and “tax fairness”. The red lines are immigration, Europe and Defence. It’s everything that Clegg said he would look for in seeking to form any kind of deal, and it’s something right wing Tories will find difficult to refuse.

The deal might not actually be any good for the Lib Dems – it’s NOT a referendum on PR. It’s NOT a commitment to raise the tax threshold, but Cameron’s done it in such a way that it’ll be extremely difficult to turn down without looking churlish and selfish.

Lib Dems will never adequately be able to explain why they’ve turned it down. If PR really is the only thing that matters to Clegg and the Lib Dems (and it’s starting to look, disgustingly, like it is) and they go instead with a ‘nothing *but* a referendum’ deal with Labour (and, with it, a referendum on Scottish Independence to get the Nats involved too) then they’re going to look like a right bunch of twats.

Not only that, the only question anyone will ever ask Nick Clegg again is this: “If PR was the precondition of Lib Dem support, why didn’t you say this before the election? What happened to the 4 priorities?” and no amount of waffle or explanation will make this go away. Cameron is holding Clegg at his word – and taking a huge risk with his own party at the same time.

Will the Lib Dem MPs let this happen? Waiting patiently for Clegg’s reaction…

So Brown’s just given a little speech to the cameras outside Number 10. The gist was this: Clegg and Cameron should take all the time they need to try and do a deal. Take weeks. Take months. Take years! But, when you’re done Clegg, come to me: I’ve got a little present for you and I think you’ll like it.

Ultimately Brown has to resign and recommend Cameron to the Queen for Cameron to become Prime Minister. Even if Cameron’s screaming blue in the face, “I can form a Government! I can form a Government! We’ve done a deal with the Lib Dems!” Brown can still turn around and make them wait… wait until he’s had HIS chat with Clegg.

Yes. The constitution really is that crazy.

Right, so, there’s no obvious result. Tories have most seats and most votes, but not really enough to form the sort of “strong, decisive” Government that Cameron says Britain needs.

The Lib Dems and Labour, together, would be just as precariously placed – however Brown has first dibs by virtue of the fact he’s still Prime Minister. Old Barnacle Brown remains Prime Minister until he resigns and tells the Queen who should take over. That’s not a conversation Brown’s going to want to make.

So, Tory minority Government is going to be weak and demand a General Election before the end of the year. A Lib/Lab Pact would be the same. The only means of getting a strong Government out of the current arrangement is a Lib/Con pact or coalition, but somehow I suspect the original Tory plan of ignoring the Lib Dems and carrying on without them, no matter what, will now hold true.

My feeling is that any partnership with Labour will mean the demise of the Liberal Democrats at the next election. The backlash for propping up Brown will be unstoppable. The narrative around the Lib Dems could be that they peaked in 2005, and they’re now on the decline (presumably as attitudes to the EU harden, attitudes to Immigration swerve Right and the electorate becomes increasingly reactionary). They need to take radical action now to stop this.

Many Lib Dem activists are saying that, if they got Proportional Representation (by doing a deal with Labour), the subsequent demise of the Lib Dems would be a sacrifice they’d be willing to make. I mean, literally that: I asked specifically if they’d be happy with the Lib Dems losing 20-30 seats as a consequence and the answer was “absolutely”.

I shudder to think. What Clegg does next is going to be absolutely crucial, and if he’s got any brains at all, if he wants the Lib Dems to survive, he WON’T do a deal with Labour and he’ll concentrate on giving Lib Dem help in sorting out the deficit and not much else. He needs to look like he’s putting the country ahead of the party, although ironically seeking PR as a condition of coalition (in effect ruling out the Tories) would, in fact, really be putting the country ahead of the party… well if you assume that PR is good for the country that is. If you don’t, the Lib Dems could be about to sacrifice themselves for absolutely nothing.

My feeling is that Nick Clegg is smarter than that, but he needs the consent of his MPs before he can do any deal. They’re going to want PR, and he may have little power to resist after such disastrous results.

49% of people would be willing to vote Lib Dem if they thought they could win. Apparently.

But let’s break this down. 49% of readers of this blog would probably be willing to donate money to keep me in food “at some point”, but exactly 0.01% of you would be willing to donate money right now.

Truth is people are willing to agree to all sorts of things if it’s at some vague point in the future. It’s when the crunch comes, when it’s time to act, do people really make that decision. Until then? The desire to be agreeable seems to win out.

So I suspect that 49% of people would be willing to “seriously consider the Lib Dems for the next general election after this one”, and I suspect that the 49% that would vote “if they thought they could win”, of those, 90% believe that the Lib Dems will NEVER be in that position.

And this, fundamentally, is the problem for any third party across the world, but especially the Lib Dems. When people go into the booths they shit themselves and vote Tory to keep out Labour and vote Labour to keep out the Tories, and shame on them for that.

But the moral of this story is that what is easily won is just as easily lost.

The worst has happened. The Evangelical campaign against Dr Evan Harris has worked. The best pro-science MP in the House of Commons has been kicked out. There’s a bit of a narrative emerging about what’s been going on in his election that explains this result but I think It’ll take some time to get my head around it and be sure it’s actually happening. I’ll need to write more about this as I go, but I suspect I need to re-read my copy of Road to Serfdom again to see if Hayek’s theory is holding up. At this point, it looks like it is.

His theory is was that when a Government fails, people won’t consider that what the politicians want to achieve is fundamentally impossible. They will, instead, blame the politicians and turn to stronger, more effective politicians. It’s not the system, it’s the people, right? And the Conservative triumph is not a result of a swing towards liberal economics because there’s nothing really liberal about the Tories economic policies. It’s about them being tougher, stronger, more moral and cleaner.

The Lib Dems did a fairly good job of keeping the party, as a whole, on the right side of this… but people don’t seem to have looked at the National Party. They’ve looked at the individual Lib Dems MPs. Those that have been squeaky clean and not too public with controversial opinions have survived the cull, but anyone even slightly dirty or slightly fruity (and it pains me to class Dr Evan Harris in that number simply for having pragmatic policies based on actual science, but that’s what’s happened nonetheless) hasn’t.

It’s because so many Lib Dems have such marginal seats that the effect is so pronounced and  devastating on their ranks (plus the fact that Lib Dems are more likely to be actual individuals and have controversial policy positions), but Labour haven’t escaped from this either. Jacqui Smith has been punished heavily for her indiscretions with another violent swing against a sleazy MP.

No doubt it’s the corruption, sleaze and weakness of the previous Government and the general sense of a breakdown in standards of behaviour in the country at large that’s caused this swing to a more puritan approach to voting in this election. Labour have understood this for a long time, since before 1997 in fact, and that’s why they’ve actually done better than expected… but this is rapidly turning into the least enjoyable and least fun way of watching Labour get booted out of office ever.

Sure, I wanted Labour out… but at what cost? What, exactly, has been unleashed here?