Anyone reading the weekend’s newspapers could have been forgiven for thinking that Westminster had been replaced with a bouncy castle, and our political class with hysterical children. As the long-anticipated rise of the SNP looms closer into sight, the Conservative press seems to have wet itself in fear.

The Daily Mail front page on Saturday shrieked that Nicola Sturgeon is “The most dangerous woman in Britain”. The Times’ front page story declared that Labour is panicking and likely to run to the left after Sturgeon’s debate victory. The Telegraph gave up on any remaining pretence of journalistic standards and ran a story about a conversation between Nicola Sturgeon and the French Ambassador without asking either of them for a quote on it (both deny it).

It’s worth considering for a moment why this is. Conventional wisdom in the Labour Party, after all, is that a strong SNP is good for the Tories. Why, then, would the Tory press be so quick to attack them? Particularly in a way, as with the Telegraph, which might actually have damaged them, had the punch landed?

The answer is that Britain’s papers are in the process of re-writing our constitution to keep Labour out – and Jim Murphy is helping them.

The papers aren’t just preparing for the 7th of May, but also for the following week. Most polls recently have, when filtered through Britain’s absurd election system, shown roughly the same result: the Tories will have slightly more seats than Labour, but Labour plus the SNP will have more than the Tories plus the Lib Dems.

If this is the result, then what will happen next? Without a written constitution, there’s a surprising extent to which that’s up for grabs. In a move slammed (in an email to OpenDemocracy from Graham Allen, chair of the Constitutional Reform Select Committee) as “an affront to the electors”, David Cameron has postponed the return of Parliament until the 27th of May.

Without a proper constitution, and without Westminster meeting for three weeks, it’s not just the parliamentary arithmetic that matters (though it does). There will also be, in the immediate hours after the election, an important question around what will be called the “mood of the nation”. And that will be defined, at least to some extent, by the front pages of the newspapers.

It seems the press, which is hugely dominated in the UK by the right wing, intends to do this in two ways. The first is by setting the goalposts in terms of defining what it means to “win”. The second is what’s on display at the moment – an attempt to delegitimise any partnership between Labour and the SNP.

When the former debate comes up, it’s interesting to pose a question: who won the 1951 general election in the UK? According to the history books the answer is obvious: the Tories, led by Winston Churchill. But it’s not quite as simple as that, as noted on this interesting recent blog post.

The MPs who elected Churchill for a second spell as Prime Minister in fact ran with a number of different names on their ballot papers and technically came from a number of different parties. These included the Ulster Unionists in Northern Ireland, the Unionist Party in Scotland, and groupings called the National Liberals and Liberal Nationals who were a split from the Liberal Party who had a pact with the Tories.

In fact, in 1951 the party with the most seats – 295 to the Conservatives’ 267 – was Labour. But contrary to what the party insists now, that didn’t give them any right to govern. Most MPs were elected while being clear that they’d vote for Churchill as Prime Minister. That’s what they did.

Although the SNP clearly aren’t to Labour as the Scottish Unionists were to the Conservatives (a closer analogy would be Labour and the Co-operative Party), the fact is important because it reveals the democratic mechanism in play. If someone votes for an SNP MP in this election, or a Green MP, or a Plaid Cymru MP, then they can reasonably expect that that MP is going to vote to sack David Cameron and replace him with Ed Miliband – because that’s what they’ve said they’re likely to do.

If that’s true for the majority of MPs, then the democratic outcome is for Ed Miliband to be Prime Minister, even if Labour on its own has a smaller parliamentary group than the Tories. Who gets to govern if Parliament is hung, as outlined here, ultimately boils down to who can pass budgets and win votes of confidence, which has nothing intrinsically to do with being the biggest single party.

However, this is not how the Tory press will interpret the election. If they can possibly get away with it, they’ll find any way they can to declare Cameron the winner, even if it’s going to be almost impossible for him to command a parliamentary majority. In doing so, they’ll seek to make it impossible for Miliband to govern.

This circumstance would in effect be a coup by newspaper proprietors against the people of the country. Because our constitution is written not in statute but in headlines, this is perfectly possible.

It’s important to read this story in the Daily Mail today in that context. By saying that the SNP have vowed to “prop up Ed Miliband in Downing Street – even if he loses the election”, it redefines what it is to “win” an election in the UK’s parliamentary system – changing the goalposts from a funcitoning majority to biggest single party.

In reality, if Labour and the parties to their left have a parliamentary majority, then no Tory government can survive long. But it doesn’t need to. If Cameron can stay even briefly as PM, then he can call a second election and use his party’s superior wealth to secure a better position against a Labour party that’s already financially crippled.

In this context, Labour should be doing everything they can to ensure the goalposts stay where they are – who can command a parliamentary majority – and are not shifted to which party is the biggest. Unfortunately for Ed Miliband, Jim Murphy and other Scottish Labour MPs are selfish enough to be more concerned about saving their own seats than they are about getting Cameron out of Downing Street.

As a result, Scottish Labour’s main strategy has been to endlessly insist that the biggest party gets to be the government. If we do end up with the circumstance outlined above – as seems reasonably likely – we can assume that these comments will be pulled from the shelf and played back at Labour on a loop.

To put it bluntly, Murphy is making a Conservative government more likely, even if there’s a majority of MPs against one. This has been pointed out to him by allies and opponents alike. He seems not to care.

The second attempt to keep Miliband out on the 8th of May has been more explicit. Attacks on the SNP from both the Tories themselves and their allied press are about winning votes from Labour on the election day – “you can’t vote for them, because the SNP will be calling the shots”.

But they’re also designed to make the Labour bigwigs fear the long-term implications of relying on the SNP, and to encourage them to put pressure on Miliband not to form a government, just as they pulled the plug on Brown’s attempted negotiations in 2010.

In this context, the debates were telling. For anyone who believes the Telegraph’s unchecked smear that Sturgeon wants a Conservative government, it’s worth thinking about a simple question: why did she spend most of the time in the debate reaching out to voters in England, Wales and Northern Ireland?

This does almost nothing to boost the vote for her party. In fact, the attacks on the SNP only push Scotland further from Westminster and make a future Yes vote more likely. The obvious explanation is that she was softening the ground for a post-election loose pact between Labour and the SNP (and possibly also the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SDLP).

To have any chance of forming the government, Labour needs to learn from this, and quickly. While in Scotland it’s only reasonable that they fight hard for every vote, Miliband needs to start softening the English up to his most likely route to Downing Street – an arrangement with Sturgeon. To an extent, he did this in the debate – saving his attacks for the Tories rather than turning on the SNP.

But with Scottish Labour screaming at him through the Times front page, begging him to kick Sturgeon harder in the challengers’ debate, it’s vital to his own future that he ignores those threats, and allows the First Minister to do his work for him by reminding English voters not to believe the hysterical screams from the Tory press.

It’s likely that this election is as much about the 8th of May as the 7th. The press are lining up to push Cameron into Downing Street even if most of the UK has just voted to sack him, and Labour need to fight back. Unfortunately, they seem too distracted by the ground in front of them to look up.

.

*A version of this article was originally published on OurKingdom.