May 8, 2015
Oxfordshire
It had been a long night.
The Prime Minister was half considering whether to open the cupboard and pull out a bottle of whiskey. His wife had only just woken up to check on the results, and check up on him, but they were still coming in at five in the morning. Proportional representation had robbed anyone of knowing the election results at the strike of ten. Now it was an all-night affair, watching each constituency report one by one. It was still another two hours before he’d be needed at his own Witney count and he was still lying across the sofa, feet on the armrest, in his stone constituency house hidden away in some hamlet outside Chipping Norton. He wished he could have had company through the night, hell, he’d even have settled for Boris, but everyone was at their own count and it wasn’t like he could have invited Andy or Rebekah over. Instead he was limited to fifteen conversations at once over his Blackberry.
Speaking of Boris, the Prime Minister felt guilty that he didn’t feel as proud of his old Oxford drinking partner as he probably should have for winning his seat in London. Oh well. He glanced at the digital clock on the bottom left of the BBC coverage. Still another two hours. Time really was running slowly, slowly enough for any nerves to have steadily trickled away. Now it had just become tedious. But there was still plenty of worry to share, as the messages on his Blackberry showed. UKIP weren’t doing good – they were doing great. Thirty six seats so far, with surely more to come. The South East was being splattered with purple, and the Lib Dems seemed to be holding up nicely. They hadn’t lost a single seat yet. The knowledge that this was the most extraordinary election result in history wasn’t lost on David Cameron, but everyone had expected it after all, it’d been common knowledge that this would happen for four years. Once more, he mentally kicked himself for being stupid enough to put proportional representation to a Commons vote. It could surely have been gutted in a referendum, but all it had taken was one vote to tip it over the edge and make it law. And look what the result was; the collapse of the Liberal’s popular vote didn’t matter. It translated to winning virtually the same number of seats as they had last time. And plenty of good, bright Conservatives were losing their seats to the wretched offerings of UKIP. One had to wonder just what was wrong with voters in Kent or Essex. The Prime Minister shuddered to think of Nigel Farage who, after all the hype, had still only won in South Thanet by a whisker, taunting him in the Commons. He’d torn apart European ministers, why would British ones be any different? And this was on the assumption that David could bring Nick and his Lib Dems into government for a second round if the numbers were there, which they probably weren’t. And if they weren’t, well, there was probably only one other option. The Conservatives would never have enough seats to govern as a minority. No-one would. The other available choice made him shiver.
His party was never going to forgive him for that decision in 2011.