A Crippling Election That Nobody Won

It may well enter British history as the election nobody won, a paradigm of a poor and poorly timed good news-bad news joke. The British voters provided something for everyone--but not enough for anyone to govern effectively.In the process, as they did in the last election, the voters also upset the best estimates of pollsters and pundits.

Thus Britain's Labor Party won the most seats in the House of Commons --but did not win a majority. The Tories took the popular vote-- 11.9 million v. 11.7 million for Labor--but they also lost 26 seats and their comfortable 16-seat majority in the last Parliament. The upstart Liberals got their biggest vote in history, but it converted into disproportionately few seats. Confronted with those agonizingly close results, Prime Minister Edward Heath advised Queen Elizabeth that, contrary to British custom, he would not resign in favor of Labor's Harold Wilson but would try to keep his embattled party in power by forming a new government.

By a Thread. As close as any in British history, the election was a cliff-hanger until the very end. Shortly after the polls closed, the BBC projected that Labor would squeeze out a victory, and as the evening wore on, Labor, which is strong in city ridings, surged far ahead. But next day, when results came in from rural areas, the Tories dramatically narrowed the lead. All through Friday, the outcome hung by a thread, with four recounts in some constituencies.

In the end, with 635 seats at stake, Labor had won 301. a gain of 14 but well short of the 318 needed for a majority. The Tories took 296, while Scottish and Welsh nationalists and other minuscule parties picked up 24 seats. The Liberals attracted 6 million votes, nearly one-fifth of the electorate, but got only 14 seats in the winner-take-all balloting. That meant that the Liberals, together with the independents, would hold the balance of power in either a Tory or Labor minority government.

As the last few figures came trickling in, it became clear that the Liberals were the key to what was rapidly developing into a constitutional crisis to match Britain's economic crisis. Not since 1924, when the first Labor government took office under Ramsay MacDonald as a minority government with support from the Liberals, had the political situation been so uncertain. It was possible that Queen Elizabeth could find herself in an extraordinarily awkward position for a modern constitutional monarch: deciding which party or parties would be best able to command support in the House of Commons and thus run the government. The Crown could even be dragged into an unseemly political row if the Tories tried to cling to power in a way that appeared unfair.

Under the unwritten rules of the British constitution, Heath did not necessarily have to resign if the other party failed to get a majority. But Harold Wilson had historical precedent on his side in contending that it was his right to form the next government--indeed, never before in similar circumstances had a British Prime Minister refused to step down. As Heath sat silent in No.10 Downing Street, Wilson issued a terse statement from Labor headquarters a few blocks away. Underscoring the urgent need for a government that could deal promptly and decisively with the coal miners' strike and the three-day work week, he declared that "the Conservatives now lack any authority to lead the country. The Labor Party is prepared to form a government."

Rumored Ploy. Heath remained closeted all day with his chief advisers, struggling desperately to work out a successful strategy. One rumored ploy: Heath would resign and pass the party leadership--and prime ministership --to William Whitelaw, his Employment Secretary and former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The theory was that the popular Whitelaw might be a more acceptable choice to hold the Tories in power than Heath. Finally, just before 8 p.m., Heath made the short journey to Buckingham Palace, where he informed the Queen that he intended to explore ways of carrying on his administration.

It would seem an almost impossible task. Heath had sought a larger mandate to deal with the miners and inflation; he was stunningly rebuffed. To many Britons, Conservatives as well as Laborites, his refusal to resign not only smacked of opportunism but risked intensifying divisions in the country. Wrote Peter Jenkins in the Guardian: "Nothing in his term of office so ill becomes him like his leaving of it."

Heath's first move was to try to gain the support of Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe, who went to London at week's end to confer with Heath. After the election, Thorpe had declared that his party was "going to stand firm." Many experts thought that made good sense. Said one Laborite: "It would be the kiss of death for the Liberals if they were to be seen propping up Ted Heath in power."

Even with Liberal backing, the Tories would still be eight short of a majority in Commons. That means Heath might try to dicker with the eleven Unionists from Northern Ireland.* But all of the Unionists are supporters of Protestant Extremist Ian Paisley, who has rejected the Tory-imposed peace settlement for the troubled province. By contrast, Labor might have better luck in garnering support from the nationalist M.P.s. Wilson himself avoided comment on Heath's decision, but another top Laborite spat out that Heath was "a very, very stubborn bastard, just like Nixon."

Classic Style. A few short weeks ago, Wilson's comeback had looked as improbable as Heath's rebuke. In the first two weeks of the campaign, nothing Wilson touched seemed to go right.On public platforms, the acknowledged maestro of the fast quip and the telling statistic repeated tired jokes and muffed his facts and figures. "He looked and behaved more like an old actor making positively his last appearance than Moses leading us back to the promised land," said a Labor precinct worker.

But as the campaign entered the final stretch, Wilson found his touch. At a mass meeting in Birmingham, he took on Heath's "Reds under the bed" campaign theme in classic Wilson style. "In three short weeks," he said, "the Conservatives have achieved what Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and Brezhnev never were able to do--make the British Communist Party look important." As for the Pay Board's belated discovery that the miners were not being paid 3% above the average industrial wage but 8% below, Wilson drew cheers with the Churchillian parody that "never in the history of arithmetic had so stupid a miscalculation done so much damage to so many millions of people."

In the end, it was more likely the simple arithmetic of inflation on which the election turned. A series of horrendous new figures testifying to Britain's economic plight dropped into the campaign: 1) food prices up 20% in the past year, 53% since the Tories came to power in 1970; 2) a rate of inflation of 12% for 1973; 3) a $9.1 billion balance of payments deficit in place of the $1.4 billion surplus left by Labor 3 1/2 years ago; 4) a January trade deficit of $880 million --an alltime record.

The indecisive outcome of the election seemed to reflect the country's disillusionment with its political leaders as much as its lack of confidence in either party's ability to govern. That does not bode well for firm solutions to Britain's profound problems. It means, moreover, that before long Britain will almost certainly have another election.

*Whose representatives in Parliament no longer include Radical Catholic Bernadette Devlin. Campaigning as an independent, she was defeated in her home district of mid-Ulster by a hard-line Protestant. Winners included Tories Winston Churchill, grandson of the late Prime Minister, and John Rathbone, who took the Sussex seat once held by both his mother and father.

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