How UKIP's dodgy dealings helped to defeat horse manure expenses MP

The Wells Journal, like most local newspapers, tends not to get involved in political controversy.

But it published a most extraordinary editorial on Election day, revealing an attempt by UKIP to get their members to vote Conservative in three local constituencies (all of which have now returned Liberal Democrat MPs).

By way of background, you need to know that David Heathcote-Amory, who lost his seat on Thursday after 27 years as Tory MP for Wells, is about as anti-European as it's possible to be. However, the local UKIP candidate had refused to stand down, as he'd been asked to do by the party's leadership.

Mr Heathcote-Amory was defending a majority of 3,000, and faced the additional pressure as a result of having had to pay back £30,000 (including £388.80 for horse manure) following the expenses scandal.

By its normal non-partisan standards, the lead editorial in the Wells Journal on 6th May not only expressed extreme displeasure at the way UKIP had treated the newspaper, but also came very close to recommending its readers not to follow UKIP's advice:

'Embargo respected
Lord Pearson of Rannoch left me in a difficult position last week.

'He phoned me on the Tuesday in his role as leader of the UK Independence Party to offer the Mid Somerset Series an exclusive statement asking the electorate in the Wells, Somerton & Frome and Taunton Deane constituencies to vote Conservative rather than for his own party, on the basis that we would not publish it in the paper or on our websites before the Thursday.

'I agreed and Lord Pearson emailed me the statement in letter form on the Tuesday afternoon.

'So I was surprised the next morning to see a BBC reporter revealing Lord Pearson's extraordinary position in a broadcast from Wells Cathedral Green on their nationwide BBC1 Breakfast programme.

'His report featured interviews with four of the Wells candidates, including the Conservative who has taken considerable flak over his expenses and was delighted by Lord Pearson's support.

'UKIP's candidates and supporters felt angry and betrayed.

'So we watched our exclusive on BBC television. Then saw it copied by BBC radio and ITV, all two days before our newspapers were published.

'But we could do nothing. We could have had the story on our website within minutes of the BBC broadcast on the Tuesday morning but we had agreed to the Thursday embargo.

'Anyway, the Mid Somerset Series does not presume to advise anyone on how to vote but I do think it is a valuable right not to be wasted.

'Philip Welch'

ELECTION RESULT: UKIP votes could have saved another seat for the Tories

Jake Baynes, the local UKIP candidate, received 1,711 votes. Liberal Democrat Tessa Munt's majority of 800 over Mr Heathcote-Amory (Con) was less than half the number of UKIP votes.

What's more, if the Conservatives hadn't demanded a recount, the winning margin would have been half the final figure, as Ms Munt's majority after the first count was only 400.

Constitutional change will depend on architectural change

Adversarial politics
When I show video clips of British politicians in action to audiences from other European countries, it often prompts comments about how aggressively adversarial our politicians are compared with those in other parts of Europe.

The point my audiences make is that the possibility/probability that they might have to work together in a coalition government means that politicians in countries like Germany and the Netherlands can't risk completely alienating competitors who might soon become their colleagues.

I then start waffling about the history of church architecture and the way in which our adversarial attitudes are built into the palace of Westminster itself, where the House of Commons is arranged in choir stalls, with government and opposition confronting each other across a central aisle.

Sometimes, I complain about Winston Churchill's insistence, after it had been bombed during WW2, on having the chamber rebuilt as it always had been - when it could have perfectly well have been rebuilt as a horseshoe (and with enough seats for all MPs to be able to sit down at the same time).

The biggest 3rd party vote in Europe with the smallest 3rd party representation in Europe

Then, if time allows, I go on to point out that, since the foundation of the SDP and its merger with the Liberal Party to become the Liberal Democrats in the 1980s, Britain's third biggest party has received a higher percentage of the votes cast in general elections than any other third party in Europe - in spite of which they only get a pitiful and completely unrepresentative proportion of the seats in parliament.

My point is that, at least since 1983, we have not been living in a country neatly divided into two rival political positions, but in one where we're divided into three main groupings, the third biggest of which averages around a one quarter of the votes (ranging from 25% in 1983 to 23% in 2010).

Time to turn the choir into a horseshoe

Now that 52% of the electorate has just voted for parties committed to electoral reform, I fear that the Conservative Party is the only one left that's failed (or simply refuses) to recognise that we no longer live in a society made up of 'us' and 'them', especially as it's going to be at the heart of the crucial negotiations currently taking place.

So I want to remind everyone involved of something I've seldom heard discussed in arguments about different voting systems, but which will need to be resolved as part of whatever package is eventually agreed, namely:

For the results of elections held under new voting arrangements to work effectively, they MUST be accompanied by new seating arrangements.

This was clearly acknowledged in the design of the new chambers for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly (right), both of which are elected by proportional voting systems.

Current negotiations about constitutional change should therefore include the essential question of architectural change.

And the best suggestion I've heard so far is that the present House of Commons chamber should be turned into a museum and replaced by a new horseshoe chamber across the road at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre.

Exit poll denial (and a handy tip for the pollsters)

Channel flicking between BBC and ITN on election night, I was astonished by the cavalier over-confidence with which the assembled politicians and pundits wrote off the 'obviously' misleading exit poll that had been commissioned from NOP and Ipsos MORI by the BBC, ITN and Sky News.

When presenters employed by the said news outlets joined in the chorus of scorn, it raised the question of why their bosses had bothered to commission such pointless polls in the first place.

Time and again, we were treated to glib reminders that "It's only an exit poll", "exit polls are notoriously unreliable" and "they don't take postal votes into account" from pretty well everyone in the studios and on location around the country - all of whom had been afflicted by a collective amnesia about the awesome precision with which the same polling companies had used the same polling procedures to predict the outcome of the last general election.

Exit poll 2005

As the polling booths closed five years ago, a headline had come up on the TV screens of the nation telling us that the exit polls predicted a Labour majority of 51 seats. When the all the votes had been counted, the actual figure was a Labour majority of 51 seats.

Yes, they had slightly overestimated the number of Conservative seats (predicting 209 against the actual 198) and underestimated the number of Liberal Democrat seats (predicting 53against the actual 62). But they were spot on both with Labour's overall majority of 51 and their number of 356 seats.

Exit poll 2010

With all that in mind, you'd have thought that the chatterers might have thought twice before writing off a poll conducted by the same companies using the same well-proven methodology of previous years. But not a bit of it. They knew best and trotted out the same repetitive refrains.

Meanwhile, as the results came in, it gradually became clear that we could all have gone to bed a lot earlier if only we'd been allowed to believe the news from combined forces of NOP and Ipsos MORI.

For the record, here are their hopelessly flawed predictions and the actual results:

Con: 306/305

Lab 255/258

LD: 59/57

In the words of John Rentoul of the Independent on Sunday: 'a crowning triumph of the opinion research business'.

A more reliable exit poll?

In the Wells constituency, where I live, an interesting new predictive measure emerged this year. It became clear that the Liberal Democrat candidate had won when we learnt that far fewer of her posters had been ripped down this year than in 2005 (when she'd lost by 3,000 to David Heathcote Amory).

I've advised the IpsosMORI high command that they might like to take this into account in any future exit polls they do.

The good news is that they've agreed to consider building in a 'defaced poster count' next time.

The bad news is that, with their fastidious methodological caution, they're worried about how to control for whether or not poster removal results from the actions of a lone ripper or many rippers - and, if the latter, there would then be the question of how representative they are of the electorate at large.