Eighteen years ago, the last time Britain had a close general election, the opposition seemed well placed until it was too late. Then, as now, the government had been in power for 13 years. It had changed prime ministers, but the new incumbent still looked tired and grey. The country was slowly extricating itself from a recession largely of the government's making. The opposition had modernised its policies and personnel, and had been ahead in the polls for years. The voters, it was widely assumed, had decided to make a change.

In the run-up to the election, and during the contest, the polls tightened. But the opposition generally stayed ahead, and the expectation of change remained. Then came election night: "The first result," wrote the Labour shadow cabinet member Bryan Gould in his memoirs, "produced a familiar sinking feeling . . . I remember the night as being punctuated by a series of blows, each one presaging a worse overall result . . . [First] it was clear we had no chance of an overall win, then the prospect of being the largest party also disappeared, then the chance of denying the Tories an overall majority slipped away, and finally, by about 4am, it was clear that [prime minister] John Major would have a working majority." Two hours later, the defeated Labour leader Neil Kinnock addressed colleagues and journalists in the chilly spring dawn outside party headquarters. "He read out his speech in a strong voice," wrote Gould. "Glenys [Kinnock] and I were both in tears."

To suggest that a similar fate could await David Cameron still feels massively counter-intuitive. For almost four and a half years, longer than any opposition leader in modern British history, he has looked the inevitable winner of the next general election. Except for a few faraway months in 2007, when Gordon Brown enjoyed his brief prime ministerial honeymoon, Cameron has had an overwhelming momentum: among political commentators and politically ostentatious celebrities, among voters at local and European elections, and, more discreetly, with the senior civil servants and private sector leaders making plans for the next government. You can sense this momentum, still, in the eve-of-government features on Cameron and his party in many current glossy magazines; and in the titles and themes of current political books: Back from the Brink: the Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection by Peter Snowdon; The End of the Party: the Rise and Fall of New Labour by Andrew Rawnsley.

And yet, since the autumn, since these books went to the printers and the monthly magazines commissioned their pieces, something has changed. For most of last year, as every year since Cameron became Conservative leader, the opinion polls put his party at 40% or above and Labour well below 30%, giving the Tories a lead in the low to high teens – more than sufficient, even in an electoral system that currently favours Labour heavily, for a comfortable Conservative majority.

Then, in early November, their ratings started slipping. That month, they averaged only 39%; in February, 38%. This month, polls have put them at 36%, even 35%. Meanwhile, Labour have begun to rise from the dead: 27% on average in November, 30% in February, 34% yesterday in a YouGov poll. The Conservative lead is now low enough for a hung parliament to be a real possibility, even a probability. It could be low enough for Labour to sneak another term in office. Reactions to this week's budget have reflected this shift: until recently, Labour's fourth-term plans were treated by most analysts as essentially academic, yet Alistair Darling's cautious measures have been intensely scrutinised.

'February was not good. We gave up 30 or 40 seats in February'



"Public opinion is certainly not in the same place as it was nine months ago, or even three months ago," says the veteran pollster Bob Worcester of Ipsos Mori. "If the Conservatives don't get to 40% [in the election], they're in trouble, and in almost all the polls in March they're below 40%." A well-connected Tory shadow minister says: "February was not good. We gave up 30 or 40 seats in February." Even on the record, senior Conservatives admit their party is nervous. The shadow business secretary, Ken Clarke, recently told the London Evening Standard that some of his colleagues had "started to flap". Just as revealing was his insistence that the Tories would still win the election, with a majority of 20 – until this year, such a slim mandate would have been considered a failure and a liability by Cameron and his lieutenants.

On the influential Tory website ConservativeHome, some contributors are breathless with the shifting polls' implications. "There is a huge problem here," says Victor M. "If Tory HQ don't solve [it] as of now, we are doomed to five more years of the fat Scottish droner." David Alan says: "We are flatlining at around 36/37%. That is frankly a disaster. If we do win it's going to be as a minority government or with a very small majority. Either way Cameron will have a bust-up with [the] party soon after, so allowing Labour back in." Craig says: "Cameron is a bloody beauty queen but a disaster of a politician. We have been sold down the river by him. He can't beat Brown. We should get [Oliver] Letwin in now." Angry Womble replies: "It's already too late . . . David Davis would have made a better leader." Jacqui D says: "Let someone else take the plunge – Boris [Johnson] would have no such qualms."

All parties have their worriers, and the internet vastly amplifies their fretting. But more objective political observers, too, are beginning to downgrade Cameron's prospects and achievements. Tim Bale, a politics lecturer at Sussex University, recently published an acclaimed history of the Tories' troubled history since they deposed Margaret Thatcher in 1990. "The amount of change Cameron has achieved is fairly limited," he says. "If you look at the deep polling, what the public identify with the Conservative party hasn't changed that much. The leadership does drip money. What the party really needed was someone with David Cameron's skill-set but David Davis's [working-class] background, but they had to choose."

Bale says the Conservatives' present problems are "qualitatively different" from the passing wobbles it has previously suffered under Cameron. His leadership has always been sustained as much by good polls as by his considerable political skills, and the polls "haven't drifted this low before . . . People say they get tired of governments. Maybe they also get tired of oppositions."

To John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde, a longstanding authority on British voters, the public's enthusiasm for Cameron has always been a slight mirage: "The Tories never did 'seal the deal'. Their poll share was never much above 40%. In the winter of 1978-9 [when Thatcher was close to power], they were at 50%. Under Cameron, the lead [over Labour] has been primarily a function of the unpopularity of the government. Recently, Brown has managed to look a bit more comfortable in the job. The poll figures on Labour and Conservative economic competence have come back to even-stevens." How does he see the election? "I'd probably expect the Tories to be the largest party, but not by enough to get an overall majority."

Bale is more positive: "I've still got a feeling they'll just squeak it. But I find the idea of Labour being out for a generation unlikely. There will be nothing like the rejection of the Labour brand there was in 1979." And if Cameron loses? "You'll get lots of huffing and puffing on ConservativeHome. But I can't see a serious leadership challenge." Not even from Boris Johnson? "No." Bale pauses. "Then again, people did say he had no serious chance of becoming mayor of London." In the latest issue of Vanity Fair, an otherwise gushing Cameron profile is enlivened by a typically mischievous Johnson quote that the Tory leader has "alchemised a position of more or less glutinous consensus". It does not sound like a pledge of absolute loyalty.

'A Lib Dem coalition could be a hard sell to Tory MPs'



The last time a Conservative government had a small majority, under John Major between 1992 and 1997, it was tormented by leadership challenges and Commons rebellions. "If you win by 20 or 30 seats," says the shadow minister, who was an MP then, "quite a lot of people have you by the goolies." Eurosceptic Tory MPs squeezed hard in the 90s and could well do so again. "If Britain's relationship with the EU is fundamentally the same after five years of Conservative government," warned Tim Montgomerie, the founder of ConservativeHome, last year, "the internal divisions that ended the last Tory period in government will look like a tea party."

The shadow minister says that only 10% of Tory MPs remain strong supporters of the Cameron project. "Decontaminating the party's policies and image – I'm OK with that, so are lots of our MPs. But the way it was done: top down, a few people – some of them hated – telling us: 'Do this to win.' So if we don't win, whose fault is it?"

If there is a hung parliament, a coalition with the Liberal Democrats could be a hard sell to Conservative MPs: "It would be pretty difficult to tell us to swallow all these Cameron reforms, and then put [the Lib Dem leader Nick] Clegg in the cabinet." And if neither a coalition nor a majority materialises? The shadow minister chuckles: "A pretty grim and uncertain future for Cameron's lot!" And some pretty hasty U-turns by Cameron's suitors in showbusiness and the civil service, you imagine.

All this uncertainty is waking up the other parties. "These are the best circumstances for the Liberal Democrats for a long time," says Julian Astle, a former party adviser and now director of the thinktank CentreForum. "The Lib Dems, historically, are beneficiaries of Tory unpopularity. The Lib Dems are not counting on a hung parliament but they see it as a likely outcome."

Would they form a coalition with the Conservatives? Astle says the parties are "oil and water" on most issues, from the economy to tax policy to Europe, and that many Lib Dem activists and MPs are instinctively closer to Labour. Yet Clegg is more right-of-centre and dismissive of Labour than any previous Lib Dem leader, and many Lib Dem voters are former Tories. Astle suggests that the most likely scenario is Lib Dem support for a minority Conservative government on a bill-by-bill basis. But he concedes that were Labour to win the most seats, the Lib Dems might informally support a Labour minority government. Clegg wrote recently in the Times that in a hung parliament, "the party with the strongest mandate" – he did not say whether in seats or votes – would "have a moral right to . . . govern on its own or . . . seek alliances with other parties".

An outright Labour victory still feels outlandish to contemplate. No one I spoke to for this article was quite prepared to predict it. There are Brown's stubbornly negative personal ratings; this spring's strikes and Labour scandals; and the difficulty of giving a fourth-term government an appetising rationale – "Our work is not yet done" was Brown's dour offering at the launch of Labour's campaign themes this month.

And yet, there are precedents for a shock Labour comeback. The thoughtful leftwing Labour MP Jon Cruddas cites one: "Before the Australian election in 1993, [the former Labour chancellor] Paul Keating had recently taken over from Bob Hawke as prime minister. It was the government's fifth election. People said no Labour leader could win it. They were 20% behind a year from polling day. But Keating won." This year, Cruddas argues, "The attacks on Brown have played in his favour. The Tories look like public-school bullies. The centre of gravity of the country is moving left because of the financial crisis. There's still a bit of energy around the cabinet."

'Will voters wake up and say: "God, five more years of Gordon Brown"?'



Compared to most senior ministers in elderly governments, many of Brown's key allies are young. And many of them – Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper – are more left-of-centre than their Blairite predecessors; were Labour to continue in office, Cruddas expects them to continue to move cautiously in that direction. Judging by the budget's tax rises for rich property owners, Brown and Darling intend to do so as well.

Yet governments that win an unexpected extra term tend not to end happily. Gould is mindful of what happened to Major after 1992: "If Labour won this time, would voters wake up the day after the election and say: 'God, five more years of Gordon Brown'? I think they would."

Whatever the outcome of the election, the easy ascendancy of Cameron's Conservatives may be over for good. "Their plan A was always predicated on the economy ticking along quite nicely, and approaching the election as a kind of simple air war," says Bale. "Now they are involved in street-to-street fighting."

Neal Lawson, of the leftwing pressure group Compass, says: "This election feels a lot to me like the 1970 election, the start of a long period of interregnum." The 70s saw the slow retreat of the left-of-centre notions that had dominated postwar Britain, and the hesitant advance of the ideas that would become Thatcherism. Lawson now thinks, like Cruddas, that the reverse process may be under way, with the Conservatives' apparent inability to sweep to power in favourable circumstances an early symptom.

Perhaps. But whether foreign investors and the financial markets will be patient with Britain while it works out its next political direction is another question. "The period of easy global credit is coming to an end," says Michael Saunders, the consistently gloomy senior economist for Citigroup. "The fact that the markets haven't punished us so far doesn't mean they won't. The credit ratings agencies will put their assessment of Britain on hold until the election." After that, whoever ends up in power, "the markets will ultimately force the government's hand, regardless of whether the public support cuts in government spending."

It sounds a bleak prospect. But immediately after the election, if Labour are somehow still in office, they may not care for a day or two.