OK, I was wrong – Prime Minister Cameron it is.

I just hope I’m also wrong in my dread of our new Foreign Secretary, William Hague – the most strongly eurosceptic person ever to hold that position, the mastermind behind the Conservatives’ withdrawal from the EPP in the European Parliament, and a man who, back in 2001, led an explicitly anti-EU general election campaign that revolved around the populist nonsense-slogan “Ten Days to Save the Pound”.

Recent devolopments have not been much more promising, an alleged draft letter from Hague leaked to last weekend’s Observer, promising “to demonstrate to the British people and beyond that the UK’s relationship with Europe has really changed… the British relationship with the EU has changed with our election… we will fight our corner to protect our national interests”.

Of course, there’s a good chance that Hague’s euroscepticism may be countered by former MEP and Commission employee Nick Clegg also attending Cabinet in the apparently-offered role of Deputy Prime Minister, but as of 11pm on Tuesday it remains unclear just what role the Liberal Democrats are going to take in this apparent new coalition.

I hope I’m proved wrong. In Hague’s favour, he’s certainly not stupid. And it’s always far easier to take tough, controversial stands in opposition than it is in government. He may yet temper his rhetoric and the Cameron government may yet start to take a more sensible, pragmatic approach towards the EU. I very much hope so – because I, for one, am convinced that the only loser in a “fight” between Britain and the EU (Hague’s phrase) would be the UK.

Just back from Japan, from where I was closely following the UK election on Twitter (your best place for my day-to-day political commentary these days, though be warned they’re usually more jokey – and sweary – than here…)

After 30 hours offline, and 44 hours after the polling booths closed, the UK still doesn’t have a new government. As such, witness the wonders of my jetlag-inspired political guesswork!

I’d be surprised if this lack of a government lasted beyond Monday morning, largely because the next government will want to look responsible – and we had some serious global financial trouble on Friday for a variety of reasons (NY stock exchange hiccough, Greek crisis, UK election uncertainty, etc.). They’ll want to have a government before the markets open, if they can…)

Here’s what I currently reckon will happen, rejigged from a few comments on Twitter:

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s playing this absolutely perfectly so far – he has solid offers to join coalitions from both Labour and the Conservatives, and significant policy differences with both, and has explicitly stated that the Tories – with more seats and more of the vote – should have the right to “seek to form” a government first.

But the Tories can’t get a parliamentary majority without Lib Dem support. At least, not a stable one. Not the sort of majority that they’d need to do, well, just about anything.

But Labour and the Lib Dems combined can’t get a parliamentary majority without other parties’ support either.

Clegg has also repeatedly mentioned “the national interest” and equated this with electoral reform (unsurprising, considering Labour got only 5% more of the vote than the Lib Dems, but 5 times the parliamentary seats).

The Tories are fundamentally opposed to the sort of Proportional Representation-style electoral reform that the Lib Dems want (usually single transferable vote) – which is hardly surprising, as it would almost certainly lead to a permanent Labour/Lib Dem coalition (there being very few other parties on the centre right that are likely to end up big enough to give the Tories the backing they’d need under such a system).

So, Clegg is giving the impression that he’s willing to work with the Tories – and probably is – but his one major condition is a deal-breaker for Cameron and co.

So I’m now fairly convinced that Prime Minister Cameron’s not going to happen. If Cameron rejects PR, as he must to keep his party behind him (there have already been dire warnings from the right wing of the Conservative Party about such a move, in the shape of Thatcher-era relic Lord Tebbit), then a Lib Dem/Labour/Scottish National Party / Plaid Cymru coalition has first dibs (SNP leader Alex Salmond has already openly proposed this).

Constituionally-speaking, Gordon Brown retains first right to try to form a government, as the sitting Prime Minister in a hung parliament. With Lib Dem, SNP and Plaid Cymru support, the coalition would have an outright majority – able to outvote the Tories and their allies on anything. As such, despite his unpopularity (and calls from within his own party to step down), Brown could yet remain as caretaker PM of a coalition expressly set up to bring in electoral reform.

This would actually be a very sensible option, for several reasons:

1) It would be constitutionally unprecedented for Cameron to form a minority government in the current circumstances – he is impotent until he has enough supporters to claim an outright majority. This looks to be impossible.

2) The constitution explicitly states that Gordon Brown remains Prime Minister, so using him as a figurehead for any new coalition is – constitutionally – the least harmful in the short term.

3) Anyone unhappy with Brown remaining as PM simply adds to the case for major constitutional reform with their objections.

4) This would also give both Labour *and* the Conservatives time to sort themselves out, as they are blatantly in a shambles at the moment.

So, what I’d suggest is a short-term multi-party national coalition *explicitly* for electoral *and* parliamentary/constitutional reform, as well as to maintain some form of stability in the midst of an ongoing financial crisis, keeping Gordon Brown as a figurehead Prime Minister for constitutional reasons alone, with an explicit promise that he will step down once the basic reforms are in place to have a fresh election under a new electoral system.

One final note: There’s nothing to say – constitutionally – that the Prime Minister has to be a party leader. Nor even that he has to be an MP… The question is, is there *anyone* who could be seen as a sufficiently impartial lynchpin to take on the task of leading a coalition of (at least) four parties?

Slight winners? Labour, I’d say. In real terms, at least. They’ve still got the Scottish Parliament (despite – or perhaps because of – dire warnings about the rise of the SNP). They’ve still got the Welsh Assembly. In both cases, it looks like they haven’t lost anywhere near as many seats as everyone was expecting. That, under their present circumstances, is a major victory.

Losers? The Tories – they look not to have made anywhere near the gains that they should have done, considering just how God-damned AWFUL and unpopular Labour have been for the last few years. Hardly any progress, once again, outside England – meaning that all other parties can paint any Tory attacks on Gordon Brown thanks to the West Lothian Question as mere sour grapes because the Scots and Welsh don’t like Tories. (Not that that will stop them.)

The major losers? The Lib Dems (bar our very own Nick Barlow – long-time blogger and contributor to both The Sharpener and Fistful). Looks so far like both Labour and the Tories have increased their overall share of the vote at the Lib Dems’ expense. The last couple of General Elections were, after all, an aberration. As the Tories begin to be taken more seriously again, little surprise that the third man of British politics is forgotten once again – people like to back the winner.

More major losers? The Electoral Reform Society. In Scotland it’s being claimed that “tens of thousands” of ballot papers have ended up spoiled – in (at least) one constituency with so many spoiled ballots that they outnumbered the votes of the winning candidate. This doesn’t appear to have been a coordinated “None of the Above” effort, but sheer confusion at the experimental and muddled electoral system north of the border. Which will, for years to come, be used by politicians across all parties to show that proper electoral reform is silly, and shake off all calls for a better system of electing Westminster MPs. This is a very bad thing.

The major winners? The electorate. Despite problems in Scotland, by the looks of things they didn’t allow themselves to get carried away with anti-Blair and anti-Iraq war nonsense, nor with ill-considered nationalist rhetoric in Scotland. The voters of the (still) United Kingdom would, it would appear, generally have based their local votes on local issues – just as they should have done. They also aren’t stupid enough to have got so annoyed with Labour that they’ll vote for the Tories in a landslide, as so stupidly and damagingly happened the other way around in 1997. This is A. GOOD. THING. – replacing a Blair with a massive majority with a Cameron with a massive majority is just about the worst thing that could happen to this country (bar Charles Clarke in charge*)

* Note how the Sun was the only paper stupid enough to interpret Clarke’s comments praising Brown as “faint praise” indicating a last-ditch challenge. No one else (who noticed) did. What a bunch of idiots.

Has anyone got the full version of Menzies Cambell’s speech on Britain’s relationships with the EU and US? Because this looks to be the second speech by a relatively minor British politician (with a certain amount of influence) in a matter of a few weeks which is pushing for the kind of more pragmatic, less ideologically-charged approach to the EU that I reckon is needed.

Ignore the guff about how “Britain should distinguish its own foreign policy from that of the United States”, and the standard, oft-repeated line “We can more effectively lead the way from within Europe than we can on our own, whether in carrying weight in the wider world or in influencing our ally, the US”, there are a couple of others in there that seem to echo the line taken by Gordon Brown’s right hand man Ed Balls a few weeks back.

Namely, despite reaffirming the Britain needs to be more involved (standard Lib Dem line for a while now), old man Campbell’s also started publicly saying what many loosely pro-EU types have been saying for decades:

“We need a Powers Audit of the European Union. And that Audit should take place on the basis of a simple principle: only where issues are most effectively addressed by collective action, should the EU act.”

And there, in those two simple sentences, is the single best way for the EU – and Britain’s relationship with the EU – to progress. As I’ve been saying for years, the major problem with trying to defend the EU – let alone press for further involvement – is that nobody can really keep tabs on just what benefits the EU brings, or even quite what it’s responsible for. (Largely due to the difficulty of deciding precisely what “the EU” is, considering the bizarre power struggle between the Commission, Council of Ministers, Parliament and the courts – which part should be blamed and which praised is never clear…)

He also, according to the BBC, seems to have utterly rejected the EU constitution – which would tend to suggest that now all three major parties in the UK are against the thing. Which rather buggers up any plans from some of our more determined continental cousins to push ahead with ratification, as there’s no way it can come in to force without unanimous support from all 25 member states.

Although this is, after all, only the leader of the Lib Dems speaking (and let’s face it, who ever listens to them?), as the party which has been the focus of most pro-EU hopes in the UK for the last couple of decades, if the Lib Dems shift towards a more honest, rational take on EU policy, it’s just possible that other parties might start to do the same, rather than leap to either extreme on the EU (and then act exacly the same way as each other anyway).

Politics.co.uk has more, including the prescient line, “An unpublicised meeting here, a lukewarm press report there. These are no substitute for public recognition of the salience of Europe, and the potential it offers for British leadership and the furtherance of British interests” – which is spot on, considering the lack of coverage this seems to have got, even for a Campbell speech.

He also, again quoted in that Politics.co.uk piece, used the (spot on) line “Europe has lost its focus”. Which is an effective – if possibly accidental – paraphrased translation of French Foreign Minister Catherine Collona’s take, covered back at the end of August, not to mention German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s declaration, back in May, that “Europe needs a new reason for its existence”.

So, the French situation could change come the Spring, but Merkel is going to be heading up Germany for a while. Menzies Campbell will never see power, but his words seem similar to those of Ed Balls, whose boss/buddy Gordon Brown should be inside No. 10 in less than a year. Ignore Merkel’s desire to press ahead with the constitutional ratification process – that’s largely through desperation to see some kind of progress. The important thing is that, within the next year, we could see a situation in which the big three of Europe, Britain, France and Germany, could all be of a similar mind that a genuinely radical rethink is necessary.

And, on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome next year, when could be a better time to revise the EU’s entire raison d’etre?

The always tip-top Jim Bliss has a follow-up to my post of yesterday, with some intriguing points about the constitutional implications of the Republic of Ireland’s apparent involvement with secret CIA flights:

“An independent neutral republic not only has a right, it has a duty, to regulate any foreign military traffic that crosses its border…. So that we are not complicit in acts inconsistent with our international obligations. If a US airforce plane lands in Shannon and it contains people snatched from the street by the CIA en route for torture in an Uzbek detention centre, the Irish authorities have an absolute legal obligation to detain that flight and prevent a crime against humanity.”

Of course, as pointed out before, under UN resolution 47/133 (and we all remember how seriously breaches of UN resolutions are taken by Bush and Blair, right?), both the UK and the US also have an absolute legal (and, indeed, legally-reinforced moral) obligation to detain such flights…

Update: Davide also has more. The final report is being presented at a press conference this morning (though not voted on by MEPs until February), so perhaps the big boys of the proper press might get on to this at last…

Update 2: the Lib Dems and SNP have today called for an enquiry into the British government’s involvement with the flights, as well as the official government line on using information extracted under torture.

More (potential) postal vote fraud in Birmingham in the run-up to next week’s local elections. Only this time it’s the Lib Dems, not Labour… Nice one, guys.And herein lies the reason why local elections should be voted for on local, not national issues. The Lib Dems may be a valid protest vote at a General Election – but locally they’ve got just as much potential for corruption as the rest. It varies from council to council, ward to ward – and can be bloody complicated to work out even if you live there, let alone if you don’t. Expecially at local elections where votes can actually carry some weight, think carefully where you mark your “x” – because put it in the wrong box and you could live to regret it.

Yet more proof that you can’t believe the polls… 57% is a landslide in a thee-way race, second choice votes not withstanding. Huhne and Hughes evidently didn’t have a chance.

Now can we finally get some kind of standardised form of writing the guy’s sodding name? It’s MENZIES, not Ming. You don’t go around spelling Edinburgh “Edinburuh”, so why spell his name differently?

Either way: Blair, Cameron and Campbell – those Campaign for and English Parliament bods must be pleased to have the three main parties led by people with Scottish surnames…