Tories Gain but Fail to Take Parliament
Matt Dunham/Associated Press
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown arrived at 10 Downing Street in London on Friday. More Photos »
By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL
Published: May 7, 2010
LONDON — After one of the most passionately contested elections in decades, Britain faced the stalemate of a hung Parliament on Friday, with no party likely to command an outright majority despite significant gains by the opposition Conservatives and damaging losses for Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
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Times Topics: Gordon Brown |David Cameron | Nick Clegg
Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Votes were counted on Thursday in London. The Conservatives are hoping to win enough seats to obtain an outright majority. More Photos »
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But, as the country braced for days of wrangling to form a new government, Mr. Brown signaled that he would not immediately step down, even though his party lost its parliamentary majority, shedding at least 86 seats while the opposition Conservatives surged ahead with a 92-seat gain.
“The election results are likely to show there is no clear majority for any single party,” Mr. Brown said in a statement. In effect, the results brought an abrupt and messy end to 13 years of unalloyed Labour majority power.
“As I said last night, it is my duty as prime minister to take all steps to ensure Britain has a strong, stable and principled government,” Mr. Brown said, adding that he had asked senior civil servant to assist all the parties in talks to devise an exit from the impasse, the first of its kind since the 1970s.
Mr. Brown’s statement was issued with results declared in more than 620 of the 650 voting districts, showing that none of the three main contenders had achieved their ambitions.
The Conservatives, led by David Cameron, were set to win the largest number of seats but not an outright majority. Labour, seeking a fourth term, lagged in second place while the third party, the left-of-center Liberal Democrats, failed to make the gains forecast before Thursday’s vote.
Mr. Brown’s lieutenants nonetheless sought to coax the Liberal Democrats toward some kind of an alliance that would enable Labour to cling to office. But, the BBCreported, the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, said he believed the party with the most votes and the most seats — the Conservatives — should seek to form a new government.
The outcome plunged the political elite into frantic calculations to devise an alliance able to produce a parliamentary majority, but the results offered no easy computations. Barring a last-minute swing, the only obvious arrangement yielding a majority would come from an alliance of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats — but they have profound ideological differences.
Britain’s uncodified constitution does not offer clear guidelines.
Parties with a plurality of the votes, for instance, may form a minority government, as happened in the 1970s, but the rules also permit the incumbent prime minister to remain in office and try to negotiate an alliance.
Any new government must be able to withstand an early confidence vote in Parliament.
By late morning on Friday, the Conservatives had gained 92 parliamentary seats, Labour had lost 87 and the Liberal Democrats were down by five seats compared to the 2005 vote. The Conservatives also won an estimated 36 percent of the ballot compared to 29 percent for Labour and 23 percent for the Liberal Democrats.
A BBC projection forecast that the Conservatives would secure 306 seats, Labour 261 and the Liberal Democrats an unexpectedly low 54.
The electoral math seemed to have left even the most experienced politicians baffled about what the vote meant. “The public have turned a page, but it’s not clear what chapter they want to open,” said Peter Mandelson, the Labour Party’s chief strategist.
Labour, he said, had “the right to seek to form a government” with other parties if the Conservatives fell short of a majority.
In a series of radio interviews, he said the only way for the Liberal Democrats to achieve their policy goals was now through an alliance or some other arrangement with Labour. But the unimpressive performance of the Liberal Democrats stood as a potential obstacle to that plan, since the projected combined vote of Liberal Democrats and Labour would not yield a parliamentary majority.
The uncertainty helped drive the British pound to $1.46, its lowest level against the dollar $ in over a year. As the morning progressed, the country’s leading politicians huddled with aides or grabbed a few hours sleep before mapping out strategies for a slice of power.
As he won re-election in his Oxfordshire constituency, Mr. Cameron said his party appeared likely to win more seats than in any election in 80 years, but avoided making claim to the keys at 10 Downing Street, saying, “What will guide me will be what’s in the national interest.”
If that hinted at a Conservative bid to govern with the Liberal Democrats, he was unsparing in his remarks about Labour. “I believe it’s already clear that Labour has lost its mandate to govern,” he said.
Nonetheless, a long line of powerful Labour figures appeared on television to set out what appeared to be an orchestrated rationale for hanging on to power.
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