9 may 2015, 331 not out

Tony blair was right, warning his successor as labour party leader, ed miliband, some months ago not to make the election a rerun of those before him "in which a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result" of a conservative win. We took the kids to vote after work, and they were suitably interested in the morning to discover I now have a conservative mp for the first time in my life. Within hours, miliband was gone, as was his other half, justine, who I spent a very pleasant if obscure week with in kazakstan and krygystan in the 1990s. Clegg resigned too, as the final hope of reward for their noble narrative of national sacrifice proved entirely unfounded; the liberals now return to their traditional corner of also-ran eccentric think tank. For all the heat and light of ukip, the greens and the me-too welsh nationalists, they managed just 5 seats between them, although the lion that did roar was of course the scottish nationalists. I stayed up until after 4am to watch the biggest swings ever seen in the uk and the 100-year old political certainties of labour scotland come spectacularly crashing down as a 20-year student easily beat labour's shadow foreign secretary in a seat that had been labour since 1924, and gave a very decent speech. And on it went, until there were more pandas in scotland that conservative, liberal and, incredibly, labour mps (see 10 february 2014, less than chinese pandas). Although the new government's agenda, especially on europe, and a poor, poor labour result leaving a quasi-existential crisis for the main opposition will quickly become the legacy stories, the biggest one of all is the uk's now very-different politically-coloured nations: yellow scotland, red wales, london and northern/urban england and a blue south. And can we finally get around to changing the voting system as well, please: the snp's 1.5 million votes gave them 56 seats in parliament; ukip's 4m gave them 1.