Our five‑party politics makes a clear majority almost impossible in the future

A hung parliament has been predicted at pretty much every general election since 1992. I worked on the BBC’s election-results programme then and remember the controlled panic as, 10 minutes before the exit poll was announced at 10pm, David Dimbleby’s big red backdrop with Neil Kinnock’s face was replaced with a blue screen featuring John Major.

A late rush of figures changed the forecast from “Labour largest party” to “Conservatives largest party”, and Major eventually won with a majority of 21.

Even in 1997, there were senior executives at The Independent – who shall remain anonymous – who insisted that “the Tories are coming back” and that Tony Blair’s opinion-poll lead would vanish when the new dawn broke. It was only in 2001, 2017 and 2024 that everyone expected a clear majority – and in 2017 we were wrong, as Theresa May fell eight seats short and had to be rescued by the Democratic Unionist Party.

When I predict a hung parliament at the next election, therefore, you should bear in mind that the only time I have been right in the last 34 years was in 2010. Even so, it is becoming harder to see how it can be avoided next time.

There will be a lot of talk about the eclipse of the two main parties after the Scottish parliament, Welsh Senedd and English council elections in a month’s time. Labour will probably fail to dent the Scottish National Party’s hegemony in Holyrood and is likely to struggle in Wales, with the Conservatives nowhere in either.

In the English local elections, it is quite possible that the Tories will come fifth in the number of seats held, behind the Greens and Labour, with Reform and the Liberal Democrats taking first and second place.

If Labour does really badly, it might trigger a leadership challenge to Keir Starmer on the Daniel Finkelstein principle – the idea that bad results may be “priced in” before they happen, but panic still sets in when the votes are counted and the full horror sinks in.

I suspect that Starmer will survive, though, and I agree with Patrick Maguire, Labour Party chronicler and Finkelstein’s fellow columnist on The Times, that the number of Labour MPs who think it would be a good idea to replace Starmer with Angela Rayner as prime minister will remain below 81 for some time after 7 May.

Even so, there will be apocalyptic readings of Labour’s losses. Stephen Fisher of Oxford University projects Labour losing three-quarters of its English council seats, making it possible that the Greens could overtake it in total seats held.

Meanwhile the Tories are likely to be nearly wiped out, with Reform taking much of their ground.

And yet we will still be some distance away from the “Reform versus Green – and nothing in between” scenario that I wrote about before the Manchester Gorton by-election.

The iron law of our new five-party system is that every party seems to have a ceiling on its support. For Labour and the Tories, their record in government is likely to cap their chances of winning a majority next time. For the Greens, the limits of eco-Corbynism are starting to be tested. As for the Liberal Democrats, the English local elections may serve mainly to remind us that they still exist, trailing fifth in the opinion polls.

Nigel Farage’s increasingly professional outfit may be in the lead, but it hit a peak of 30 per cent in the opinion-poll average six months ago and is now down to about 27 per cent. It has collided with anti-Reform tactical voting, mobilised in the Caerphilly and Gorton by-elections. Farage has enthusiastic supporters, but he also faces a greater number of committed opponents.

And most of the parties also have a floor. Although the Kemi Badenoch bounce in the polls seems to be over, the Tories are not going to curl up and die yet. If you ask voters which of each pair of party leaders they would prefer as prime minister, she tends to beat them all. Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats beats them all except Badenoch. Starmer loses to two and beats two. And Farage is preferred to Zack Polanski of the Greens, who loses to everyone.

So the leaders of the two new parties, who aim to replace the two main old ones, are regarded as the least prime ministerial. This does not look like a new two-party system waiting to be born. It looks more like a continental European, rainbow smorgasbord of parties – the kind generated by proportional representation systems, but in a first-past-the-post country.

I disagree with proportional representation, so this strikes me as a worrying prospect. We got lucky in 2010 and 2017. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was not terrible, although I still think Alan Johnson could have led a minority Labour government that would have been better, if Gordon Brown had stepped down immediately. And May and the DUP at least saved us from prime minister Jeremy Corbyn.

But next time we might really be rolling the dice. A minority Farage government, propped up by the Tories, might be preferable to a Reform majority. And the Scottish experience suggests there is a limit to the damage the Greens can do as a semi-detached part of government. But even what might once have seemed the natural outcome – a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition – could go wrong. As a Labour former special adviser said to me, “it would be the worst of both parties”.

That is the problem with multi-party democracy: you don’t get what you voted for – you get whatever the parties stitch up afterwards.