Isabel Hardman

Most of the new SNP MPs celebrated their party’s amazing result in the general election today with a photo call outside Parliament. They certainly looked an impressive bloc of parliamentarians, illustrating just how different this Parliament will look and feel from the last. But one of the interesting questions is how much freedom will these new MPs have to pursue their own interests, or whether they will be expected to operate as a bloc, and not outside the bloc. Many backbench MPs take up personal campaigns on a matter affecting constituents, or a small issue where they hope they can effect a change in the law. Some do this when it is not their party’s policy, in the hope that they can change the party too.

Lord Mandelson and his protégé Chuka Umunna ended up sitting next to one another on the Marr sofa at the end of the programme. Both had spent their interviews setting out what Labour had been doing wrong for the past five years, though Mandelson was markedly more savage than Umunna. The Labour peeer was particularly keen to make the point that New Labour had been too quickly discarded in favour of an ‘experiment’. He said that ‘the awful, shocking thing about this election is Labour could have won it’, adding: ‘The reason we lost it and lost it so badly is in 2010 we discarded New Labour, rather than revitalising it and re-energising it and making it relevant for the new times, the new policy challenges that we faced. That was a terrible mistake.

Inevitably, the Sunday papers are full of pieces by Labour leadership hopefuls dissecting why their party did so badly and offering their initial prescriptions. They are actually all rather slow out of the blocks as David Lammy said this morning that ‘certainly for people like me it’s absolutely time to step up into a leadership role’. So in the Observer we have Chuka Umunna, positioning himself, unsurprisingly, as the Blairite candidate. He says the party had ‘too little to say to the majority of people in the middle’ and that ‘we need a different, big-tent approach’ (referencing the master).

So there could be a Labour leadership contest coming up. Who might have a pop? Chuka Umunna: Some members of staff in Ed Miliband’s team had concluded Chuka Umunna was worth giving serious assistance to, having concluded that their current boss was a goner a while ago. The smooth Blairite Shadow Business Secretary has also been very good at charming colleagues in the party, taking time to have coffee with those who Miliband has ignored. He believes he has the support of the party’s New Labour wing, mostly represented by Progress. Andy Burnham: If Umunna has the Blairites sewn up, Burnham has the other side of the party. He has clearly positioned himself as a man of the left, a populist figure who sends the Labour conference to raptures.

So now the wait for results begins. Talking to Tories who have been on the ground today, I’ve been struck by how dissatisfied so many of them were with the get out the vote operation that their party ran. The VoteSource database crashed for an hour, which would have been fine on any other day, but it meant that canvassers didn’t know which doors they should be knocking on. Labour has, as expected, flooded key seats with activists. But campaigners were genuinely surprised by quite how many they saw on the doorstep. Many reported being outnumbered three to one by Labourites who not only knew whose door to knock on, but had the time and manpower to go back and knock on the doors that weren’t answered first time round.

Tonight’s a nervous night if you’re an candidate for re-election in a marginal seat (or in Scotland). You might have an impressive get-out-the-vote operation, or you might have spent the past five years wheeling and dealing in Westminster on behalf of your constituents so that you have a strong personal brand, but it might be that voters just aren’t that into your party. Or, in spite of your best efforts, you. A good number of the Tory candidates in marginals who I spoke to today feel as though the race is too tight for them to have any idea whether they will be back in Westminster next week. The same goes for Labour and Lib Dems in Scotland, but for slightly different reasons.

As well as trying to prepare voters for what may happen after 8 May, David Cameron needs to make sure he has his party on board for the ride after the election, too. The 1922 Committee will need to approve a second coalition, but the hope in the Cameron camp is that this will be made easier by making the approval a show of hands from Tory MPs, rather than the secret ballot 1922 Committee chair Graham Brady wants. Two interesting points that loyalists advance is that the Lib Dems approved the 2010 Coalition with a show of hands and that many prominent 1922 Committee Executive members were against the plan to elect the Speaker by secret ballot that the government tried to introduce rather sneakily in its last few hours.

One of Britain’s great traditions is the open garden afternoon: an opportunity for folk revelling in being both middle-aged and nosy (like me) to wander around other people’s plots and peer at what they’ve planted while scoffing large slices of cake. The National Gardens Scheme and Open Squares are two of the most popular, and while they do allow people to see the true beauty of someone else’s well-maintained dahlia bed or snowdrop collection, they also help us indulge in that also very British tradition of pointing at the strange things people put in their back yards.

Nicky Morgan’s record as Education Secretary is coming under fierce attack in the Loughborough market place where she’s campaigning. A furious man is telling activists that he will never vote for the Tory candidate because of ‘what she’s done’. The campaigners brace themselves for a diatribe about Tory education policies. Instead, it turns out that his complaint is that ‘she’s kept all the kids in school for longer’. This has had a devastating effect, not on the kids themselves, but on the fish and chip shops in Yarmouth and Skegness, where this particular voter cannot now buy a delicious feast as he’d wish. ‘Rubbish!’ he bellows, as one Tory member tries to tell him that a better education is a good thing for children.

Tonight’s ‘Question Time’-style TV debates will be followed by what has become probably the most hated aspect of this rather uninspiring general election campaign: the spin room. This spectacle of journalists interviewing journalists as they listen to frontbenchers from all the parties parroting lines about how their leader was the best (or, in the Tory case, how well Nicola Sturgeon has been doing) is odd enough inside the room, let alone for those watching at home. The way the politicians spinning talk is even less natural than usual: it’s like a Westminster version of Made In Chelsea, stuffed with people acting at being actors.