The radio went off marginally before 2am at Swanvale Halt rectory on Friday morning. It had just been announced that the Liberals had failed to win Guildford not far away, and in fact failed to win it in style, so I knew everything I needed to.
We tend to keep quite quiet about politics here, but it is no secret that Hornington, the market town which Swanvale Halt is always adamant it is NOT part of, votes Tory, while the Halt itself is defiantly Liberal. Everyone was curiously subdued when I went down to church on Friday, or cheerful in an 'it's really bad but I'm determined not to admit it' sort of way, the manner you imagine the inhabitants adopting sixty-odd years ago if they'd woken up to find a bloody great German bomb sticking out of the duckpond.
What on earth happened? How did the great Lib Dem breakthrough turn into a worse performance than last time? I don't think it was anything to do with the campaign, with the bubble of Cleggmania bursting, with people having doubts about Lib Dem policies or anything respectable like that. The polls had us level with Labour hours before the elections began: it was a last-minute shift. I'm convinced that all those thousands of people who told the pollsters and the media that they were going to vote Liberal got into the polling booths, stood with pencil poised over the ballot paper, and thought, 'No. If I vote Liberal, I'll get Labour/the Tories', and reverted to type at the last possible minute. It was tactical voting in reverse, a colossal failure of nerve. 'Some people should be shot', said a local Lib Dem councillor who's part of our congregation. I congratulated him on his interpretation of the 'Liberal' bit.
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