Ed Miliband was always my preferred candidate. He’s charismatic, capable and very good in person, qualities which in my mind are really attractive in a leader. As the campaign went on, from my own experience and from the anecdotes of others, I started to get the impression that his top team isn’t as good as it should be. And this is an important factor, have no doubt that his most senior aides now will run the Labour Party if Ed wins the leadership. I felt the same during the transition from Blair to Brown – Blair’s team were slick & professional, Brown’s team was not. We all saw the effect that had…

Oh and the e-campaign efforts of the Ed Miliband team leave a lot to be desired. I would love to make a donation online but I don’t feel I can trust a website that looks like it was put together as part of a GCSE Web Design course by a 15 year old – it’s really poorly designed http://edmiliband.org/.

Today something else came up which will put a doubt in my mind. Ed is still my preferred candidate, but I really don’t like tribal, pandering politics. The BBC is carrying a story saying that Ed has ruled out the possibility of ever working with Nick Clegg in a potential coalition in the future. Apparently he told the New Statesman that it would be “pretty hard” to work with Clegg, presumably because of the actions being taken by the Coalition on deficit reduction. I don’t like Clegg either, but he is the junior partner in the Government.

The deficit is being cut rather fast but Labour has failed to present a convincing alternative plan to balance the country’s books in the right timeframe. Just because Clegg refused to resign within a couple of weeks because of the depth of the deficit cuts does not mean Labour should rule out working with him in the future. Don’t forget, there were senior Labour ministers who treacherously set out to make it impossible to form a Lab-Lib coalition in those dark days following the hung Parliament result on May 6th – they gave Nick Clegg no choice but to do a deal with the Tories.

To take this stand now is simply pandering to the party, and it’s ugly politics. It’s all academic anyway, because there’s every chance that the Liberal Democrats will be obliterated at the ballot box in 2015, and Nick Clegg might end up either out on his ear, or more likely in my opinion, serving as a Conservative MP in a majority-rule Conservative government. Ed Miliband is making a straw man out of Nick Clegg for short-term political gain.

Over dinner on Monday with a friend who happens to also be a senior Tory, and an admitted ‘huge fan’ of the Coalition Government, I found myself wondering about how the Labour Party might one day find its way back to government. I found it hard to stomach but my Tory friend’s argument was that the 2015 general election will be a battle between the Labour Party one one side and the Coalition on the other. The technicalities of this I haven’t got my head around, and I still think it could go one of many ways, but this should worry and concern the Labour Party.

My first answer to this point was that, David Cameron clearly having proven his ability to grab and hold on to power, is a ruthless political operator and wouldn’t hesitate to end the coalition deal and govern alone as a Conservative government, presumably if the Conservatives win more seats in 2015. I know it’s fashionable in Labour circles to write off the possibility that there will be a Tory Prime Minister for two terms, but single-term governments in the UK are very rare and by 2015, as painful as it might be, the deficit will be gone and it will be time to dish out the rewards and bribes to the electorate. So assuming David Cameron wins in 2015, why wouldn’t he end the Coalition in favour of an outright Tory government?

The answer is simple. Being in a coalition means Cameron can keep the Tory party as close to the centre as he likes. The Tories need to compromise so they can keep power. Of course if they had their own majority that could change but by all accounts the Coalition is now formed of three parts: 1) left-leaning Liberal Democrats who aren’t vastly comfortable with the setup, 2) right-leaning Tories who aren’t vastly comfortable with the setup either & 3) the real Coalition, the collection of Ministers & Cabinet Secretaries, and the majority of Lib/Con MPs who fully support the setup and the new way of doing politics.

It’s easy to brush the Coalition off as a right-wing government in disguise, but we just have to remember more financially rosy times and look at the approach that David Cameron wanted to take to governing. As far as Tories go, he is a centrist. He’s the ‘heir to Blair’ remember, and proud of it no doubt. Cameron is no Margaret Thatcher. So if we imagine for a moment that Cameron is a true centrist, a logical step would be to forge a permanent coalition, similar to what it looks now, into a centrist party on its own. The Liberal Democrats are in a precarious position, that is abundantly clear, with a recent poll suggesting that if an election were called today that their seat count would be reduced to just 13. Who would Nick Clegg be in that position to say no to forming a new, centrist party with a senior position for him and even a shot at being Prime Minister himself in five or ten years?

So where does this leave the Labour Party? It is hard to say but it would be naive to think that we will simply march back into Number 10 Downing Street in May 2015, simply because of ‘the cuts’ or because the population will see the ‘true colours’ of the Coalition. The Coalition is quite popular out there, as Ed Miliband and others have said, people like seeing a new way in British politics. Labour’s thus far short stint in opposition has been lacklustre and disappointing. I feel a slight shift to the left even from the more right-leaning leadership candidates. Be sure of this: for Labour to get anywhere near forming another government, it needs to genuinely renew itself, decide what it is about and make itself distinct to the electorate.

Heading to the intellectual comfort zone of the left will make Labour even more irrelevant than it currently is. Banking on the Coalition being unpopular enough in 2015 to turn around Labour’s fortunes is lazy and won’t work.

So how do we in the Labour Party re-gain the momentum to be the party of government once more? Will the Coalition become permanent and what would that mean to Labour’s fortunes over the next decade or two?

“May you live in interesting times” is a Chinese curse. These are most certainly interesting times for anybody in or interesting in politics.

I spent most of yesterday trying to come to terms with the fact that my political party, for the time being, had been kicked well into the long grass, and at the same time that David Cameron would become Prime Minister in the next few days. Mild relief was the fact that the Conservatives didn’t get an outright majority, which would have meant a Tory government starting yesterday would have had a much lower threshold of ‘democratic resistance’ to its policies over the coming term of parliament. The lower threshold of opposition would have made it easier for David Cameron to make deep spending cuts in a more ruthless way. So at the very least, one comfort to take out of this election is that there’s no majority Conservative government this morning.

Nick Clegg made it clear yesterday that he would give the Conservatives the first shot at forming a governing coalition with him. Neither Labour or the Tories won the required majority of seats, or 326 to be exact, on Thursday to form a government on their own (Conservatives have 306, Labour are on 258) so the 57 Liberal Democrat seats when added to the seats of the Tories create an overall majority which allows David Cameron to be Prime Minister. A Liberal/Labour coalition would only have 315 seats, so other small parties would have to be drafted in to make that work. In return for Clegg’s overtures yesterday, Cameron practically love-bombed the Liberal Democrats and made a “big, comprehensive offer” to help Clegg implement some of the policies in his election manifesto.

So for the coming hours at least, it seems that Clegg & Cameron will come up with a deal allowing the Tories to run the country for the first time since 1997. Let’s not jump the gun though. There are at least two major sticking points which really do have the potential to pour cold water over this Con-Lib romance.

1) The Liberal Democrats really are a democratic party, internally speaking. There’s a so-called “triple lock” that Nick Clegg would need to release in order to sign a deal with the Tories. Firstly, he needs approval from the Liberal Democrat members of parliament. Secondly, he would need the approval of the Lib Dem federal executive, the body of representatives that forms the administrative core of the party. Third and finally, and perhaps most crucially, the whole membership body of the Liberal Democrats would need to be balloted in a postal vote.

- Whilst I could see a situation where Nick Clegg and his front bench could persuade the executive committee and the Lib Dem MPs of the merits of making a deal which would a) blunt the Tories’ power in government to make brutal cuts and b) see some of the Lib Dems’ agenda actually be implemented, I suspect most of the Liberal Democrat members would not want to be seen dead in a coalition with the party that’s furthest away in terms of ideology.

2) The single most important policy for the Liberal Democrats to seek implementation of is electoral reform. If Britain changes its electoral system from the current first-past-the-post to proportional representation (PR), the Liberal Democrats would have more seats and more of a shot of forming a government. Let me demonstrate. The current system awarded the Liberal Democrats 57 seats for getting 23% of the vote share. Labour got 258 seats from 29% of the vote share. Under PR the Lib Dems would have got somewhere around 150 seats from this election. So you can see why they want electoral reform! I agree though, I think our current system is archaic and undemocratic, and actually turns people off politics.

- The reason this is important is because it is highly unlikely the Tories would agree to implement or try to implement an electoral system which would result in their parliamentary suicide. Proportional representation would make it difficult in the short-medium term for the Tories to be the party of government. The Conservatives are ideologically opposed to proportional representation and they believe that first-past-the-post, with some tinkering, is best for British democracy. Cameron himself said yesterday that the only ground they would concede on electoral reform would be to set up a commission to look into the matter – a ‘talking shop’ in effect.

These two sticking points are critical to keep in mind over the next few days. Whilst the media might have already made Prime Minister Cameron under a Tory/Liberal coalition a foregone conclusion, I wouldn’t hold my breath on this outcome. Gordon Brown has already offered a referendum on electoral reform should the Lib Dems go into a coalition with Labour. Unfortunately, for Labour to stay in power even with the Lib Dems’ seats, it would require support from the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Northern Irish Social Democratic & Labour Party (SDLP). A four-party coalition would in my opinion be more likely to lead to instability in government and the markets. Despite this fact, I now don’t see this as an impossibility.

When Nick Clegg realises that he won’t get the electoral reform his party prizes, and perhaps when the members of his party show him that they despise the idea of a pact with the Tories, he will consider forming some kind of deal with incumbent Labour. Without doubt, that would have its difficulties also – Clegg won’t want to be seen to prop up a government that lost an election, and a leader who is unpopular. But it’s the most natural political fit for the Lib Dems. And it would be the deal most likely to lead to electoral reform. Labour too would have to pay a higher price than just a referendum on electoral reform; it is highly likely Clegg would want Brown’s head to roll before he forms a coalition with Labour, and this would most likely mean that David Miliband, as Labour’s new leader, would be Britain’s unelected Prime Minister.

This leads to one final possible outcome. A second election within months. Gordon Brown has the right to stay on as PM until the outcome is clear. He also has the right to call another election if there isn’t such a clear outcome. Quite frankly, I doubt a second election would give the decisive result that Brown would look for. Labour is almost 50 seats behind the Tories, and they would be unlikely to win any seats back that it lost on Thursday night. The Tories need at least 20 more seats to form an outright majority government, and whilst that’s more of a possibility, if the country really wanted a Tory government they would have given the party those seats on Thursday.

This is indeed, as Winston Churchill said, “a riddle wrapped up in an enigma”. The days and weeks ahead will cause political uncertainty and this will be bad for the country. It looks very unlikely from where I’m sitting, that there will be a Tory/Liberal deal, and the alternative four-party pact to keep Labour in power is loaded with tension also. A second election is unlikely to create a clear outcome. British politics entered a new reality on Thursday, and it’s going to be very hard work to convert the democratic wishes of the British electorate into a stable government.