Hanging on

DISASTROUS. Calamitous. Cataclysmic.

Catastrophic. Devastating… There’s a thesaurus of words waiting to be employed to describe Labour’s performance in the European elections.

Perhaps a single fact paints a clearer picture.

Labour won 15.7 per cent of the vote – its lowest since 1910.

There are similar facts for Wales and Scotland, for the South-East and the South-West where it slumped to fifth, to Cornwall where it plunged to sixth, beaten even by the Cornish nationalists.

The North-East is the only region Labour won, but even in somewhere like Darlington, it trailed in a sorry second.

In the Eighties, the town was a marginal.

Since Alan Milburn’s victory in 1992 it has been increasingly Labour – at the 2005 General Election, his majority rose to 10,404.

Mr Milburn has not been caught doing terrible things with his expenses. He is not tainted by his closeness to the Prime Minister.

In the election for the distant European Parliament, his party fielded two faces that were recognisable close to home: Stephen Hughes and Nick Wallis.

Yet Labour still won only 20 per cent of the vote. Well behind the Conservatives’ 28 per cent.

And if you add in UKIP’s share of the vote – much of which will surely migrate to the Conservatives in a domestic battle – the respectable right totalled 44 per cent.

If Labour can’t hang onto Darlington, it has no prospects in Stockton South, nor closer to the coast where, in the Redcar and Cleveland council area, it limped in third behind UKIP.

And if Labour can’t hang onto Darlington, it is finished as a government and even as a creditable opposition.

Yet, because the result was so disastrous, calamitous, cataclysmic etc, Gordon Brown’s position was perversely strengthened.

Signatures of 71 Labour backbenchers are required to trigger a leadership contest. They were not forthcoming at last night’s Parliamentary Labour Party meeting because no backbencher – certainly not someone in the position of Mr Milburn, Dari Taylor or Ashok Kumar – would sign their own death warrant.

They will see Mr Brown in the disastrous, calamitous etc figures, but they will hope that, make him less of an electoral disaster. They will also know that Labour couldn’t appoint a third Prime Minister without holding a General Election.

The constitution would allow it, but the people wouldn’t wear it. The electorate knew in 2005 that if they voted for a party led by Tony Blair it would probably end up with Mr Brown, so Mr Brown has a tenuous democratic mandate.

The electorate certainly did not think they’d finish up being led by an Alan Johnson or a David Miliband.

And so Mr Brown soldiers on, unable to shuffle his own Cabinet, too tainted to clean up politics, and without the moral authority to lead the country.

In a way, you have to admire him. If a contestant on a reality TV show got only 15.7 per cent of the phone vote, they’d be fired before Sir Alan Sugar could raise a finger.

Mr Brown has such chutzpah that, day after day, he gets out of bed and ploughs on regardless of resignations, plots and disastrous, calamitous etc results.

For the voter, this was an election where participation was almost impossible – that’s why nearly two-thirds of them stayed at home.

In the privacy of the village hall polling booth, how do you choose between moatclearers, wisteria-pruners, mortgage fiddlers or church collection reclaimers?

The results show the country is not crying out for David Cameron’s Conservatives. Although they are the most popular party, they lost three MEPs and their share of the vote increased only marginally.

Nor is it calling out for Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems.

Their share of the vote dropped by 1.1 per cent to 13.8 per cent, back into the territory of the traditional small third party.

Stubby pencil poised, the voter cried “a plague on all your houses”, and plumped for UKIP – the only party, ironically, to have had two of its MEPs face criminal charges for fiddling expenses.

UKIP beat the Lib Dems in Darlington, Stockton and Sunderland. It came second in Middlesbrough, South Tyneside and Redcar and Cleveland, and was the most popular party in Hartlepool.

Nationally, it beat Labour into second place and picked up four more MEPs. It will be very content even though, in this most fractured of elections, its overall share of the vote only rose 0.4 per cent.

THE Green Party will also be happy, improving its share from 2.4 per cent to 8.65 per cent. In a huge swathe of North Yorkshire – Richmondshire, Hambleton, Harrogate and Ryedale – it beat Labour.

And the British National Party sounds ecstatic at gaining its first two MEPs.

In one way, its success is just a pimple on the backside of democracy. In a ridiculously large constituency like Yorkshire and Humberside, MEPs are irrelevant. Only a third of people voted and the BNP, even in Yorkshire, won less than a tenth of that third. In the North-West, despite fearsome organisation, the number of BNP voters fell as the party won a seat.

In another way, the BNP’s success is an enormous kick up the backside. Nationally, the party’s share rose from 1.35 per cent to 6.26 per cent as people felt forced into the darklands to express their alienation, their grassroots fears and their desperation for change.

Is Mr Brown the man to heed such a kick up the rear when, daily, his own friends are plunging knives deep into his back?

The disastrous, calamitous etc results left him perversely strengthened enough to come through last night’s meeting, but now he staggers on to the next hunting season in the autumn.

The hope must be that the party conference will bring him down. By Christmas, there would be a new leader who’d immediately announce a spring General Election.

If Mr Brown drags his own battered carcase through to polling day, there will probably be no words left in the English language to describe what happens.