The rogue elephant election

It predated the age of the Prime Ministerial Jag – if my memory serves, it was a Humber Super Snipe. The sense of excitement and anticipation was palpable.

Ted Heath was spectacularly unpopular. Harold Wilson had only been out of power for four short years. It was 1974 – my first election as a reporter. I was outside Downing Street along with crowds of onlookers.

These were the days before the erection of the Thatcher gates and anyone could mosey into Downing Street on such a day – and so we did. There were no mobile phones, I was armed with a Motorola walkie-talkie, which for some reason only worked if you stood in the archway of the Treasury – opposite Number 10.

Poor old Ted – we forget how unbelievably unpopular he was – gauche, alone, seemingly grumpy, and all but incinerated by “events” – strikes and the rest. On that morning there was hardly an ounce of sympathy as we awaited his departure for the Palace.

Whatever anyone thought of Harold – the mood was that even he was going to be a whole lot better than Ted. And then there he was – a wave on the steps – the policeman standing aside – into the Humber and away. My Motorola crackled back to LBC: “he’s gone!” Gone that was, to the palace, to inaugurate the closest election campaign in post-war history.

Doesn’t feel like that today. It’s  no surprise departure that Gordon Brown will make, we have dribbled to this day, slowly slid through an endless cascade of policy announcements, tax changes and the rest.

Then we expected no hung Parliament and got one. This time it feels as though it’s consensual to talk of a hung parliament, and the minority vierw is that we probably won’t get one. And this time there is a rogue element.

That’s the antipathy – it can feel like hatred sometimes – towards MPs, politicians, conventional politics and Westminster.  It’s much much stronger than the dislike of Ted.

The expenses scandal, the Dispatches revelations – Byers, Hoon, Butterfill, Hewitt; the whole business of “Lords for sale”; and houses you only have to visit once a month to extract tens of thousands of tax payers’ money in Lords expenses – all that leave this election to be fought in a ditch.

And no one knows what effect the stench of the scandal will do to this general election.

Will all that end up energising the electorate, or boring them? Is there a sense of a low turn out? Will minority parties – principally the Lib Dems – but the the BNP, greens, nationalists, others – take votes from the two big parties even if they don’t win many seats?

It all leaves conventional polling, seat prediction, and swings potentially undermined by that central mood shift about politics, politicians and Westminster.