British election - what next?

By Graham Cooke

At the time of writing, just about the only certainty in the British General Election is that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is doomed.

With just over 100 seats still to be declared his Labour Party is trailing the Opposition Conservatives by around 60. Overtures to the Liberal Democrats will not help him, as the third party has, at this point, polled just 40 seats, a surprisingly poor performance after so much was expected of them.

And anyway, the price of Liberal Democrat support for Labour in the House of Commons would have been the immediate departure of Brown.

That seems to be increasingly irrelevant as the Tories power on, probably to a position where they will be just short of an absolute majority.

So the question is what happens next? Convention has it that the sitting Prime Minister always has the first shot at trying to form a Government if the result is not clear-cut.

This means Brown will probably spend the next day or two going through the motions of talking to the Lib-Dems and possibly the Welsh and Scottish Nationalists to see if some unlikely deal can be forged.

Assuming that is impossible, he will advise Queen Elizabeth to call on Opposition Leader David Cameron to form a Government. This Cameron will do, possibly trying to shore up an absolute majority by seeking the support of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland.

However, the price of DUP is demanding - outlined in the weeks leading up to the election - of cordoning off Northern Ireland from any Tory spending cuts, is simply too high.

In which case Cameron will try to go it alone with a minority Government.

The last time that happened under Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1974, the Government lasted six months. However, at the subsequent election, Wilson managed a tiny majority.

Labour strategists will be mindful of this and may conclude it would be to their advantage to let Cameron's inexperienced team stagger on for a year or two in the hope the public quickly become disenchanted and switches back to them. Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats may take a similar view.

All of which suggests that Britain may have a continuing political crisis to add to the economic one it is already facing.

Interesting times lie ahead.