Hung parliament on the cards with an Ashcroft appearance

The BBC just put up current share of the vote in the seats now in – Con 37 per cent, Labour 27 per cent, Lib Dem 22 per cent. That misses out a lot of seats that might have regional or local twists. But if the numbers are anything like that it is nigh on impossible for Labour to claim a right to govern.

Ed Balls’ jaw was jutting out as he heard he’d held on with a big slump in his majority. No major scalps from the Cabinet now seem likely. Ed Balls acknowledged it was “quite close” and has given gracious compliments to his Tory rival.

In an interview just now Ed Balls said there will be conversations over the next few hours that will decide who governs the country but he sounds like a man who knows the game is up.

Charles Clarke’s extraordinary political odyssey is over. Under Neil Kinnock, many people thought he more or less ran the party. In some minds he never quite adapted to having the people he used to boss around running the party.

Gordon Brown, he said, would lead the party to a ghastly defeat. But Labour lacked the nerve or inclination to follow his coup attempts (3 or 4 of them in total, depending on how you count them). 

I’m struck looking at the Tory MPs elected so far that there are a lot of the less glamorous, local councillor types that one of those closely involved in the A Lists told me were dull. No doubt some more of David Cameron’s most favoured candidates will turn up in later counts.

Lord Ashcroft, being interviewed on the BBC, is sounding disappointed by the “mixed bag” results.

He “very much doubted” whether his tax status had affected the results and said he’d done a poll that proved that.

Peter Kellner’s latest calculation is that the Ashcroft money had a big effect on Labour marginals giving the Tories a 7.5 per cent swing on average in these seats compared with a 5.5 per cent swing across the country as a whole.

Labour seems to have regularly bled support away to the BNP in a lot of seats.

In Lab/Con marginals the Labour drop doesn’t go solely to the Tories but in a lot of seats there’s slippage to “others” too and in most cases that seems to be BNP from what I can tell.