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Roland Watson

Political Editor

After asking the Queen to dissolve Parliament, Gordon Brown returned from Buckingham Palace to Downing Street and declared: “I come from an ordinary family in an ordinary town.” As the opening line of the 2010 general election, it was designed to draw attention to the privileged background of his Eton-educated Conservative rival, David Cameron. It ill served as a guide for what followed, though, which was, by any standards of modern British political history, extraordinary.

None of the three leaders had led their parties into a general election and each faced a monumental task. Mr Brown was seeking an historic fourth term for Labour against the backdrop of the deepest recession for 60 years. He was also looking to overcome the memory of the election-that-never-was in October 2007 when, five months after inheriting the job from Tony Blair and revving up Labour’s campaign machine, he ducked out of going to the country at the last moment.

Mr Cameron needed to achieve the biggest swing since the war to gain the 116 seats required for a Commons majority. His party had endured a jittery few months in which questions about its economic policy and a tightening in the polls fed off each other to spread deep unease through Tory ranks. He was beginning the campaign with a seven-point lead, well down from the double digits the Tories had enjoyed for most of the past year and not enough for an outright win.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, needed to capitalise on the prospects of a hung Parliament. He also had the first televised debates between the leaders to look forward to. They would offer him a stage never before enjoyed by his predecessors: equal prime-time billing with his two rivals. Initially, though, the campaign conformed to type, focusing on the two established parties. Mr Cameron pre-empted Mr Brown’s return from the Palace to stage a rally on the south bank of the Thames, across from Westminster. Waving his finger at the Houses of Parliament, he vowed to “make people feel proud again of that building over there”. He was, he said, campaigning for “the Great Ignored”, a group that encompassed black, white, rich, poor, town and country folk. It was a slogan he ignored for the rest of the campaign.

The styles of the Tory and Labour campaigns differed starkly from the start. As Mr Cameron tore round the country on a leased private plane, Mr Brown made political capital out of financial necessity, travelling by rail in standard class. Labour had raised less than half the Tories’ £18 million war chest, and had spent much of it during the phoney war since the start of the year. Once at his campaigning destinations, Mr Brown rarely delivered speeches, preferring to meet small groups of voters in supermarket canteens or the living rooms of Labour supporters, fuelling questions about whether he was reaching swing voters. Mr Cameron, boasting a campaign team with a sharper eye for “optics”, was pictured repeatedly, sleeves rolled up, in warehouses or stock rooms surrounded by workers and clearly visible logos of well-known brands.

The contrast carried through to their manifestos, in which Labour offered a “smarter” State, the Tories a smaller one. Mr Brown unveiled a traditional-looking pitch in a newly built and soon-to-be-opened wing of a Birmingham hospital. It promised to tailor public services to people’s needs, giving them guarantees on rights of redress against schools, hospitals and police forces if services failed to reach certain standards.

The Tory manifesto was unusual and innovative, and not just for being presented in the semi ruins of Battersea power station. A hard-backed blue book on A5 paper titled An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain, it urged people to take more control over their workplaces, children’s schools and how they are policed and ruled, offering a glimpse of life in what Mr Cameron billed the Big Society.

Mr Clegg chose the City of London as his launch pad, an attempt to show that the party often criticised for having uncosted policies was serious about its finances. The signature policy was to raise the starting threshold for income tax from £6,500 to £10,000, costing £17 billion. The document even included tax tables at the back to show that the sums added up, calculations immediately disputed by Labour and the Tories.

The choice between an empowered individual in a smaller Tory State and a smarter Labour State that provided service guarantees offered the central intellectual dividing line, although both sides fought surprisingly shy of their offering on the stump. Instead, the debate revolved around the economy, in particular whether the £6 billion of immediate savings the Tories were proposing to make in Whitehall, and subsequently used to ease Labour’s proposed rise in national insurance contributions, would help or hinder the recovery.

So far, so normal. The campaign was turned on its head from the moment Mr Clegg stared into the cameras of the first TV debate, hosted by ITV in Manchester, and told the 10 million viewers that he was offering something other than business as usual. Presenting himself as a fresh alternative to the tired old parties he was fighting, he spoke crisply and directly about bringing fundamental change to politics. Mr Brown, sensing the early mastery of the medium shown by Mr Clegg and keen to isolate Mr Cameron, used the words “I agree with Nick” half a dozen times. (The following day, the phrase was appearing on Lib Dem badges, posters and banners.) But Mr Clegg would not be caught in a Labour bear hug. Mr Cameron, expected to shine on a stage apparently made for the ease and informality of his communication skills, tried to look prime ministerial but instead appeared stiff and awkward.

Mr Clegg ran away with the verdict of viewers. In the course of 90 minutes he had wrested from Mr Cameron the mantle of change, in which the Tory leader had cloaked himself for the past four years. Within days, the Lib Dems shot up ten points in the polls. One found Mr Clegg to be the most popular political leader since Churchill. And so the game changed. Although campaigning continued, the oxygen sucked up by the first debate in effect suspended the state of the race while all sides waited for the second debate. Hosted by Sky in Bristol, it saw Mr Cameron recover some of his poise. Mr Clegg, despite his first success, refused to play safe, showed that his first offering was no fluke and cemented his place as a contender.

Shortly before the third debate, Mr Clegg, in an interview with The Times, said that the Lib Dems had replaced Labour as the progressive force in politics and that the election now boiled down to a two-horse race between him and Mr Cameron. Two weeks previously such an assertion would have been laughed out of court. With many polls showing the Lib Dems nudging ahead of Labour, it now carried weight.

Mr Clegg’s success, or Cleggmania to give it its official media term, forced Labour and the Tories into tactical switches. They both turned their guns on Lib Dem policies, such as an amnesty on some illegal immigrants, softer sentencing and a refusal to guarantee the future of Britian’s nuclear deterrent. The Tories did so with menaced warnings whereas Labour, with an eye on the possibilities of a Lib-Lab deal if voters returned a hung Parliament, were less harsh.

Mr Brown also re-wrote his personal campaign. Labour strategists, faced with selling a leader who was unpopular with voters, had kept the Prime Minister to a routine of small meetings largely behind closed doors. It had left Mr Brown frustrated. He would spend the final ten days meeting more “real people” and making more speeches. The new style made a calamitous start. In Rochdale, Mr Brown was accosted by a Labour-supporting grandmother, Gillian Duffy, who took him to task on issues ranging from student fees to immigration. She walked away happy to have had her say and quietly thrilled to have met the Prime Minister. He got into his official car and branded the mild confrontation a disaster, called her a bigoted woman and blamed an aide. The remarks were picked up by a radio microphone he had worn for his walkabout and had not yet taken off.

For the rest of the day Mrs Duffy became the centre of an extraordinary maelstrom. She was devastated to learn of Mr Brown’s remarks, which were played repeatedly on news channels. They were doubly damaging: Mr Brown had appeared deaf to the concerns of millions of voters on immigration; and his apparent instinct to blame aides underlined a wider perception of character flaws. Over the next six hours, Mr Brown apologised six times. He tore up his schedule, abandoned preparation for the following day’s final debate and returned to Rochdale where he spent 40 minutes in Mrs Duffy’s living room trying to explain himself.

The third and final debate, hosted by the BBC in Birmingham, was Mr Brown’s last chance to turn the campaign around. Labour aides had negotiated successfully for its theme to be the economy, Mr Brown’s perceived strongest suit. Although he put in his best performace, he again trailed in third place, according to snap polls. In the final days, he was at his best, delivering his most passionate speech on social justice to an audience in London. Some wondered where this fiery campaigner had been for the previous three weeks, and why he had not been let loose. Others concluded that he was able to let himself go because he suspected he had lost.

On the eve of polling day Mr Cameron campaigned through the night, a self-consciously arduous bus trip from Scotland to Bristol via Grimsby where he met night workers in depots and sorting offices along the way. Such a gruelling final lap was hardly the best preparation for what was to follow.

Polling day itself was marred by near tragedy when Nigel Farage, an MEP and the former leader of the UK Independence Party, escaped with his life from a light plane crash after a campaign stunt went disastrously wrong. The aircraft carrying Mr Farage, who was standing against the Speaker, John Bercow, in Buckingham, was trailing a 15ft banner that read: “Vote for your country – Vote UKIP”. The banner became entangled with the plane’s tail about 10ft above the ground, causing it to nosedive. Mr Farage said that he and his pilot, Justin Adams, had had a miraculous escape.

On the stroke of 10pm, the exit poll commissioned by the BBC, ITN and Sky suggested that the Tories would win 307 seats, Labour 255 and the Liberal Democrats 59, pointing to the first hung Parliament for 36 years. Its forecasting was immediately doubted by psephologists, both amateur and professional, who believed that a survey of 18,000 voters at 130 polling stations would fail to catch the Lib Dem surge. In fact, it turned out to be remarkably prescient.

An eleventh-hour surge of voters, Lib Dem or otherwise, did, however, surprise election officials across the country. Queues of voters, some who had been waiting up to an hour, were turned away from polling stations in Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, Chester, Lewisham and Hackney. There, officials applied the letter of the law and closed the door on anyone who had not been admitted and received a ballot paper. Their counterparts in Newcastle and Sutton Coldfield defied electoral law and stayed open past 10pm to let people vote. The scenes of chaos, to which the police were called in some cases, triggered a review by the Electoral Commission that could have far-reaching implications for the way Britain votes.

Britain woke on May 7 to a landscape unfamiliar to this generation of politicians. There was no clear winner and each party leader had reason to feel disappointed. Mr Cameron had failed to translate an economic crisis and weariness with 13 years of Labour into an overall Tory majority. Mr Brown had polled 29 per cent, only marginally above the party’s disastrous showing in 1983, and had lost 91 seats. For all the enthusiasm that surrounded Mr Clegg during the campaign, he had lost five seats.

Voters had handed them not just the first hung Parliament for 36 years, but the most complicated Commons arithmetic since the 1920s. Mr Cameron, with 306 seats, was well short of the 326 that guaranteed a Commons majority. To soldier on alone as a minority government, he would at least need an assurance of broad Liberal Democrat support, known as a “confidence and supply” arrangement, under which the third party would not stand in the way of a Budget or Queen’s Speech in return for some concessions.

On the other side, Labour, with 258 seats, and the Liberal Democrats, with 57, were also well short of being able to form a Lib-Lab pact that commanded a Commons majority. The only certainty was that the Queen would not be receiving any of the party leaders this post-election Friday. Instead, she, and the rest of the country, witnessed an extraordinary three-act drama played out across Westminster as the three leaders began to play the hands dealt them by voters.

Mr Clegg moved first. Arriving at Liberal Democrat headquarters in Cowley Street after taking the dawn train from his constituency in Sheffield, he said that Mr Cameron had the right to try first to form a government. It was a momentous nod, but one that he had set himself up for by insisting during the campaign that he would respect the rights of the party that won the most seats and most votes.

Mr Brown was not for giving in. He pre-empted a Tory response with a brazen assertion of prime ministerial power, emerging from the front door of No 10 to remind the country that he remained in charge. He said his two leadership rivals should take as much time as they felt necessary to see if they could reach a deal. “For my part, I should make clear that I would be willing to see any of the party leaders.”

Within the hour, Mr Cameron was making what he called “a big, open and comprehensive offer to the Liberal Democrats”. Speaking at the St Stephen’s Club in the shadow of a portrait of Churchill, himself at different times a Liberal and a Conservative, Mr Cameron sketched out a possible deal for “collaborative government” between the parties. He did not use the word coalition. After a night grappling with the possibilities, though, that was what he was pitching.

With theatrical timing, Saturday required the three leaders to attend the Cenotaph for the 65th anniversary of VE-Day. Normal service would have seen the Prime Minister approach to lay his wreath first, followed by the two other party leaders in turn. The occasion was choreographed, though, to reflect the election result: the three approached the Cenotaph together. The body language ranged from uncertain to icy.

The first public sign of the talks came on Sunday when the negotiating teams – William Hague, George Osborne, Oliver Letwin and Ed Llewellyn for the Tories; Danny Alexander, Chris Huhne, David Laws and Andrew Stunell for the Lib Dems – arrived at the Cabinet Office. The arrangement for the use of government property with civil servants on hand to answer questions about policies and costings was a first, codified in advance by Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, in preparation for just such an electoral outcome.

To the background clatter of news helicopters overhead, a crowd of political tourists joined reporters outside the teal door of 70, Whitehall, to await news of who would govern and how. The parties left after nearly six hours without a deal. Meanwhile, ominously for the Tories, Mr Brown returned from Scotland and went almost immediately into a meeting with Mr Clegg at the Foreign Office. Cabinet ministers, including Lord Mandeslon, Lord Adonis, Alan Johnson, Ben Bradshaw and Peter Hain were offering increasingly vocal support for the idea of a “rainbow coalition” of Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the nationalist parties and independents. It was clear that Mr Clegg was making Mr Cameron sweat.

Tory perspiration turned to desperation on Monday when Mr Brown played his final card. After two further conversations with Mr Clegg, he stood in Downing Street to announce that the Liberal Democrats wanted to open formal talks with Labour and that he intended to step down. His announcement reversed the chronology of his discussions with Mr Clegg. The Liberal Democrat leader had made clear during the campaign that he could not prop up a defeated Mr Brown in Downing Street. The Prime Minister’s departure, even if at a later date, was a pre-requisite for the start of Lib-Lab talks.

Nonetheless, Mr Brown’s bombshell took the Tories by surprise. Labour, it turned out, had sent its own team of negotiators – Lord Mandelson, Lord Adonis, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband – to talk to the Liberal Democrats on Saturday. Throughout the weekend senior Liberal Democrats, including Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, Charles Kennedy, Sir Menzies Campbell and Vince Cable, had been urging Mr Brown to budge and thus usher in the “progressive alliance” or realignment of the Left that they, in varying degrees, had devoted their political lives to achieving. The message received in Downing Street from the senior Lib Dems was clear: we do not want to go into coalition with the Tories.

Mr Cameron and those around him had woken on Monday believing that they were heading to Downing Street. Despite offering Mr Clegg a referendum on the alternative vote system and Cabinet seats, they went to bed fearing that they were out of the game. The proposed Lib-Lab deal hit immediate problems, however, on the Tuesday morning. First, senior Labour figures including David Blunkett and John Reid hit the airwaves to warn that the country would not wear what was being dubbed a “coalition of the losers”. The maths were also against it: adding the three Welsh nationalists, four non-Unionist Ulster MPs, one independent Unionist and Britain’s first Green MP to the Labour and Lib Dem ranks gave such a coalition only 324 MPs, hardly the basis for stable government.

Secondly, the two parties’ negotiating teams fared badly. Labour subsequently accused the Liberal Democrats of making unrealistic spending demands; the Liberal Democrats accused Labour of posturing and failing to take them seriously. The upshot was that shortly after lunch, the Tory and Liberal Democrat negotiating teams were back in the Cabinet Office. There, they hammered out terms of a seven-page document that expressed where they agreed and where the Lib Dems would be allowed to opt out of government policy, such as on the future of Trident.

With every passing minute it became clearer that whatever emerged, Labour had lost the negotiations as well as the election. Mr Brown gathered his entourage in Downing Street for his farewell. With the sun beginning to set, and stung by accusations that in fulfilling his constitutional role to remain Prime Minister until an alternative emerged he had tried to cling to office, Mr Brown’s dignity could wait no longer.

In a telephone conversation with Mr Clegg, witnessed by the photographer Martin Argles who was in No 10 to record Mr Brown’s final hours for posterity, the Prime Minister said: “Nick, Nick, I can’t hold on any longer. Nick, I’ve got to go to the Palace. The country expects me to do that. I have to go. The Queen expects me to go. I can’t hold on any longer.”

In Downing Street he ended 13 years of Labour rule that had begun with Tony Blair being cheered from Whitehall to the front door of No 10. In a moment of poignant self-awareness, he said that the job had taught him about the best in human nature and about its frailties “including my own”.

He and his wife, Sarah, walked to the waiting car holding hands with their two sons, John and Fraser, a very rare sight of the family together after years in which the Browns had protected their sons’ privacy.

Within the hour Mr Cameron travelled from a Buckingham Palace bathed in late evening sunshine to the gloom of Downing Street at dusk. He arrived as the youngest Prime Minister since 1812, the twelfth to serve under Elizabeth II and the first Tory for 31 years to depose a Labour prime minister.