Everyone's a loser

At least in the cold light of morning the misery is fairly widely distributed.

For Labour, Gordon Brown has lost large numbers of seats, and is now in second place in votes and seats. For the Conservatives, although he has the most seats and the most votes, David Cameron has failed to secure a majority in the House of Commons. For the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg is left with fewer seats than before the election, only a few percentage points behind Labour in terms of votes but with only one-fifth Labour's share of seats.

For the Murdoch press, their attempts to terrorise people into voting for a Conservative majority by warning of the horrors of a hung parliament have resulted in the election of the hung parliament they urged against. For the television media, the outcome of the election seems to have reduced them to a condition of total inability to understand the simplest and most straightforward statement made on the doorstep of Liberal Democrat HQ at 4 Cowley Street. For the pollsters and pundits, they're left scratching their heads at how what appeared to be happening during the campaign turned into the result that finally occurred.

And for the British public, once again they've been denied what they wanted to vote for, by a crooked electoral system which has delivered a totally distorted result, and which the likely party of government is unlikely to want to reform.

At the time of writing, Nick Clegg has announced that the Liberal Democrats are going to keep to our word, and allow the party with the largest number of seats and votes to try to govern. Let's see what Mr Cameron has to say this afternoon.