It seems a bit sad to say this, as it’s been an integral part of the way we think about elections for so long, but is it time to get rid of the swingometer?

One of the features of last Thursday night was lots of people saying ‘just what the hell is going on out there?’ As Andrew Marr put it on the BBC, the election campaign itself may have been boring, and it was the voters who delivered the excitement. Every time a result came through, we all struggled to work out how it fit into the national picture, what the swing in Loamshire South West would tell us about the projected result in Borsetshire North East, but each time we missed the real message they were telling us: there was no national picture. It seemed almost appropriate that this should be the election where the exit polls were right, just when they’d stopped meaning anything.
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I know you’ve all been waiting on tenterhooks with baited breath for this, my first post on The Sharpener – how could you not, eh? I hope it meets or even surpasses your expectations, and you tell your friends to read it. It is, as with most things now, a reflection on the implications of Thursday’s General Election. (Be warned, it’s a very long reflection.)

As you might guess from my oh-so-subtle nom de blog, I’m a conservative. For that reason, this piece is a bit of navel-gazing because we Tories have now a brief opportunity to do that, and an urgent need to do so. In what follows, I’ll make some observations on how it all went for my lot, and then where we go next, before closing with my own reckless suggestions on what that should mean. Read More