Hung Parliament: I was a fool to fall for electoral reform

It took me several decades to fall in love with electoral reform. It has taken me less than a week to fall out of love again. Like many disillusioned lovers, I feel nothing but disgust and shame at my folly.

I have sat on platforms and committees with Nick Clegg and Helena Kennedy and Andrew Adonis, and many another supporters of reform. I regarded them as decent and well-meaning people, who were serious about spreading democracy to the parts of Britain which it did not reach under the present system. And I nodded sagely as they piously chanted that their sole purpose was to make every vote count.

Only now do I understand fully that the only votes they wanted to count were their own. Their underlying purpose was to put a Lib-Lab lock on the system, to shut out the Tories or anyone else, and keep themselves in power for as far ahead as the eye could see.

In short, I have been had for a sucker. I have been what Lenin would call "a useful idiot". At least Lenin had to smash the Constituent Assembly in order to install the Bolsheviks in power in 1918, just as Adolf Hitler had to burn down the Reichstag in 1933 (it should be recalled that Hitler delivered a rather better result in the elections to the Reichstag than Gordon Brown achieved last week – 44 per cent of the vote, as against 29 per cent). Yet in Britain, the Lib-Lab combo attempted to slip itself into permanent power in the middle of a financial crisis, past a bruised and battered public and a House of Commons largely made up of bemused novices.

By a statistical accident, last week's general election delivered the kind of result that is very rare under the first-past-the-post system, but would be extremely frequent under any version of PR. So, for the past five days, we have seen exactly the kind of post-election manoeuvrings that would be standard under PR. We have seen the future – and it stinks.

I could not have imagined that these circumstances should overnight so utterly corrupt the judgment and erase the consciences of people I had previously regarded as decent and level-headed. I long ago gave up any attempt to believe a single word uttered by Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell. But that not a single member of the Cabinet should have protested publicly against the proposed stitch-up until Andy Burnham took his stand yesterday, that not a single member of the Liberal cabal should have warned Clegg not to start parallel talks with Labour without informing Cameron and the Tory negotiators – all this suggests that the merest glimpse of power sent their moral compasses haywire, or smashed them beyond repair.

After this dismal experience, it is clear that "electoral reform", far from drawing us towards the sunlit uplands of fairness and partnership, drags us back into the 18th-century world of Old Corruption.

The effect of PR can now be precisely and clearly delineated. The result of a first-past-the-post election concentrates the politician's mind on how the voters actually voted. In a PR system, by contrast, politicians consider themselves free to interpret and invent the voters' intentions to suit themselves. The election merely puts the ball in play to allow the dazzling footwork to start.

The fact that Labour lost a substantial majority, lost nearly 100 seats and lost a million votes could, for a while, be brushed aside. For my own part, I lost count of the number of times Alastair Campbell said on TV "the fact is that no party won a mandate", and so anyone was licensed to talk to anyone about forming a coalition. This is like saying that there was really no difference between the position of Manchester United, who failed to become Premier League champions at the weekend by a single point, and that of Mr Campbell's preferred club Burnley, who were relegated.

I should emphasise that I thought at the time that Ted Heath behaved shabbily when he attempted to hang on to power by doing a deal with the Liberals in February 1974, after he had lost that "Who Governs Britain?" election. But at least Heath had won more votes than Harold Wilson, and had only four fewer MPs. That was more in the nature of a pinprick to the British constitutional tradition. In contrast, Brown's behaviour looked more like a rather nasty abscess. And it will be remembered for even longer than Heath's has been. These have been desperate and squalid antics, unprecedented in our political lifetime.

If you think I am exaggerating, consider the fact that it was seriously proposed, and not denied by Labour's deputy Leader Harriet Harman, that one of the first actions of a Lib-Lab coalition would have been to install the alternative vote system without a referendum. AV does not necessarily deliver a result that is more proportionate in seats to the numbers of votes cast, but both Labour and the Lib Dems believe that it would deliver a tidy batch of Conservative-held marginals to each of their parties. They may or may not be wrong about that. Voters might well adjust their behaviour to frustrate the parties. But there is no doubt that this was the intention and the hope of both the parties.

This was supreme impudence – to take advantage of a delicate and difficult moment without seeking the agreement of the people, in order to bring in a system which they hoped would keep them in office until most of their present generation were drawing their agreeable Parliamentary pensions.

Brown, Mandelson and Campbell are probably the most disreputable trio to manipulate British politics since Bushy, Bagot and Greene in the reign of Richard II (actually Bushy, Bagot and Greene probably weren't as bad as all that). But we should, I think, look beyond the pantomime villains on the stage to the evil corrupting influence of the system; in this case, PR, which separates the people from power rather than representing them in its exercise.

In the end, the Liberal Democrats seem to have abandoned Labour and returned to the answer they first thought of, and rightly so. But in the process, the shameless duplicity and the wholly cynical and unprincipled manoeuvring of both parties have done permanent damage to the idea that electoral reform is the high-minded option. When and if we are asked to vote on it, I at least will know what to do.

Ferdinand Mount is the author of 'The British Constitution Now' and was vice-chairman of the Power Commission on political reform