The result of the 7 May election remains anyone’s guess, but that has not stopped fearless pundit General Boles from staring intently into his crystal ball and coming up with a selection of alternative futures. Which scenario will come closest to reality? Let history be the judge. Illustrations by Gary Barker
1 Chaos Theory
In what was the bitterest and most destructive election in living memory, the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems went down, UKIP, the Greens and the SNP went up and a peculiarly British form of chaos emerged from the rubble. Coalitions could not be conceived, deals could not be done, the public blamed the politicians for their inertia and the politicians blamed the public for their situation. The only thing everyone agreed about was that there was nothing they could agree about. Cameron, Clegg and Miliband were all ousted by their parties and the rancour of the subsequent leadership contests made the general election look like a model of bonhomie. Amidst the chaos, failed actor Russell Brand took to Twitter to encourage his followers to ‘Rally For Revolution’. Despite a charge of £70 + booking fee, tens of thousands turned up and in the subsequent riot, the former Mr Katy Perry was accidentally tasered 17 times by the police. This unfortunate event seemed to cheer the country up (if only for a short while) and a new election was called, which delivered pretty much exactly the same result, leaving Britain as the new Belgium, albeit with a worse football team.
2 Minor Tory Report
A case of so near and yet so far as the Conservative Party came within just three seats of being able to form a majority government. Opinion pollsters were unanimous in crediting Nigel Farage’s last-minute pledge to annex northern Spain and give every pensioner a free holiday home for the swing from blue to purple that secured 32 seats for UKIP in the new parliament. Unlike in 2010, post-election negotiations were slow to begin due to UKIP’s Westminster Arms victory party lock-in lasting eight days. Eventually, an impatient David Cameron forced his way through the scrum of journalists surrounding the pub and sat down with Farage to begin negotiations on forming a Tory-UKIP coalition. Unfortunately, we are not privy to the contents of this conversation as Cameron refused to discuss it and Farage can’t remember it. However, Buzzfeed’s lip-reading expert has claimed that the main stumbling point was UKIP’s insistence on launching Trident nuclear missiles at Buenos Aires. Given that no agreement could be reached with UKIP, the Conservatives decided to form a minority government and seek support on an issue-by-issue basis with the four remaining Liberal Democrat MPs.
3 Carry On Coalition
To the amazement of many, 2015’s general election delivered a broadly similar result to 2010. The Lib Dems lost fewer seats than had been predicted and with the Tories gaining 12, Coalition 2.0 – to the delight of virtually nobody – became a workable proposition. In voting booths across the land, millions of people contemplated ticking the Labour box, but when it came to it, the thought of prime minister Miliband led them to decide that it was better the devil you know than the devil who struggles to eat a bacon sandwich. UKIP didn’t break through either as too many of its candidates sounded like 1970s pub comedians and the campaign by BOOB (British Organisation for Ostentatious Breastfeeding) put paid to Nigel Farage’s chances of being elected in South Thanet. The result also meant that reports of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s (political) death had been greatly exaggerated and he returned to Westminster with the look of a man who had won the EuroMillions jackpot on the same day as being given the all-clear from cancer. But his good mood was not to last, as relations between the coalition partners quickly deteriorated to the point where they were only able to communicate via passive-aggressive subtweets.
4 Try Again Kids
As expected, May’s election produced another hung parliament but, unlike 2010, childish squabbling between the party leaders meant no coalition could be agreed upon. Nigel refused to play with David because David had been mean about Nigel’s friends. Ed and Alex fell out because Alex didn’t want Ed’s submarines in his pond, and as for Nick, well nobody wanted to play with Nick. So the kids/MPs decided to have another election but found themselves a bit short of cash, having spent millions on billboard adverts and sherbet dips. It wasn’t too much of a problem for David – he had his rich friends empty their piggy banks and between them came up with €10m (£7.2m). Ed wasn’t quite so lucky. His friends in the unions told him that unless he nationalised Starbucks and gave them all free macchiatos, they weren’t giving him another penny. Because of this, David outspent Ed 20 to 1 on posters saying that David was great and Ed was rubbish and that people had to choose to be friends with either David or Ed. Sick of the immaturity of it all, the electorate reluctantly made David head boy for another five years.
5 How Did That Happen?
As Ed Miliband stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street to make his first speech as prime minister, his awkward, forced smile could not hide the utter shock he felt at having won the general election. Tory warnings about going to bed with Farage and waking up with Miliband had been ignored and UKIP had taken enough votes from the Conservatives to give Labour a 27-seat majority on just 33% of the vote. The reds had also been helped by the Green Party’s vote collapse after their leader, Natalie Bennett, was caught on camera saying the country would be better off without cars and electricity. What little hope there was for Miliband’s government quickly turned to despair and anger as Ed Balls stuck to coalition spending plans for 2015/16. The new leader of the
Lib Dems, Tim Farron, somewhat opportunistically led hundreds of thousands of teachers and nurses through the streets of London to protest against the public sector pay freeze and in Knightsbridge, one of the residents of One Hyde Park draped a banner from his penthouse balcony proclaiming ‘Balls to your mansion tax’.
6 Can We Be Friends?
Where once upon a time the British electoral system was famed for producing decisive results, the election of 2015 managed to deliver something rather messier as Labour won more seats than the Tories despite getting fewer votes, with the Liberal Democrats enjoying a similar advantage over UKIP. Despite this, Ed Miliband was 10 seats short of a majority and had to convince his party that the people they had been denouncing as traitors, quislings and Tory stooges for the past five years were in fact a reasonable bunch with whom they could govern in the national interest. As part of the deal, the Lib Dems agreed to sacrifice Nick Clegg (not literally, as Dennis Skinner had suggested) by sending him to Brussels, where his linguistic skills could be usefully employed in his role as an EU commissioner. The new coalition’s honeymoon period was brutally short as the parties that came second and fourth in the election were dubbed a ‘coalition of losers’ by the media, with the Daily Mail summing up the situation in its own unique way with a large ‘Squatters’ headline captioning the first picture of Ed Miliband greeting the new Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, in Downing Street.
7 I Can Sing A Rainbow Coalition
If the coalition of the past five years had seen the UK flirting with a more European style of government, then the one that emerged after the 2015 election was a veritable orgy of continental-style politics as Labour, SNP, Lib Dem and Green MPs unexpectedly found themselves in bed together. Whatever doubts the parties had about the arrangement were negated by the sheer pleasure they took at the thought of keeping the Conservatives and UKIP out of office. As leader of what became known as the ‘Rainbow Coalition’, it didn’t take long for Ed Miliband to be dubbed ‘Prime Minister Bungle’, but media mockery was the least of his problems as the government turned out to have all the stability of an Emirates cable car in a high wind. The first coalition press conference was delayed for 80 minutes as the party leaders bickered over who would stand next to who and Alex Salmond’s habit of answering every question at length – whether it was addressed to him or not – visibly annoyed his coalition partners. Bookies stopped taking bets on when the government would collapse after the Green Party insisted that all ministerial cars should be replaced with rickshaws for journeys within the M25.
8 Tory Tory Tory
During an election campaign in which the slogan ‘long-term economic plan’ was repeated more than 9,000 times, David Cameron eventually ground the public into submission and secured a nine-seat Conservative majority after he gave a cast-iron guarantee never to mention the phrase again. However, the euphoria of victory was short-lived as, freed from the shackles of coalition, a vocal minority of Conservative MPs dusted off their ‘Now that’s what I call Toryism’ LPs and threatened to defect to UKIP unless the PM immediately reintroduced grammar schools, fox-hunting and bowler hats for civil servants. Negotiations with the EU foundered on the Tory Party’s insistence that all migrants be able to recite The Canterbury Tales from memory before being allowed to work in the UK. On the home front, David Cameron was left pining for his Nick Clegg-shaped human shield when public anger over spending cuts led to strikes and riots. The election of Boris Johnson was another fly in the PM’s ointment as the irrepressible Member for Uxbridge subtly undermined his leader at every given opportunity (that is when he wasn’t busy with his part-time jobs as Daily Telegraph writer and mayor of London).
9 A Right Royal Resolution
Following an inconclusive election result, HM Queen Elizabeth ran out of patience with the feeble, failed attempts of politicians to agree a coalition and rang the Cabinet secretary to say: “Sod this for a game of soldiers, I’ll run the bloody country myself.” As protocol dictated, Her Majesty asked herself to form a government and kissed her hand to accept the invitation. Mindful of the need to appear in touch with the electorate, the new prime minister forsook her chauffeur-driven Bentley in favour of an Uber taxi to Downing Street. With a corgi tucked under each arm, she walked though the door of Number 10 and into the history books as the first British head of state to also be prime minister. There was some scepticism about abolishing Parliament, but the sale of the Palace of Westminster to the Qatar Investment Authority raised a few billion pounds and seemed to go down well with the public. Of more concern were accusations of nepotism in government appointments. The new foreign secretary, HRH Prince Philip, seemed ill-suited to a position requiring diplomatic skills and, at the time of writing, the jury is still out on whether Prince Charles is an improvement on Eric Pickles at the department for communities and local government.
10 A Time For Heroes
In the early hours of Friday 8 May 2015, as the attention of the nation – nay the world – was fixed on my declaration in Grantham & Stamford (I won, by the way), president Putin sneakily took advantage of the distraction and ordered his troops into Estonia with instructions to push on as far into Western Europe as possible. Clearly, if Vlad and the Red Army ever reached Blighty, our democratic way of life would be in peril and, as such, then and there, with no thought whatsoever, I took it upon myself to suspend our democratic way of life and appoint myself lord protector of the United Kingdom. Within a few hours, I had called the Queen to explain the situation, commandeered a Gulfstream G650 to take me to Germany, and Skyped president Obama to see if I could borrow a tank division or two. Within a short few weeks, victory was mine and I returned to London to be greeted by a parade through the city and public demand to continue as dictator-in-chief. Who was I to argue? First thing on the agenda: abolishment of all the planning rules and the construction of a million new homes fit for heroes (subject to credit status).
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