Doug Saunders explores the hometowns of the two men trying to unseat Prime Minister Brown and other battle zones that illustrate just how bizarre the ideological landscape has become
Village of Hidden Opposition: Peasemore, Berkshire
To find the future of British politics, it might be best to ignore the TV coverage, get off the highway and head down a series of increasingly narrow lanes through dense woods, around a sequence of perilous blind bends, past people and structures that seem to have been forgotten by time.
Here, beneath tall oaks and fragrant cherry trees in tiny Peasemore, is a conservative idyll: A big, active Anglican church in the middle, a comfortable pub nearby, a cluster of perfectly preserved thatched-roof cottages and tastefully huge houses surrounded by walls and long driveways - and no sign of national government, multinational commerce or cosmopolitan modernism to be seen.
This is where David Cameron, the young Conservative Party leader and the most likely man to unseat Gordon Brown as prime minister in Thursday's hotly contested election, spent his formative years and where much of his family is still based, in a big house called the Old Rectory. He played, studied and hunted here, and then, after being sent to boarding school at 7, it was the haven to which he returned on holidays. It is the place, by his own account, where his core ideas and his vision of the world took shape.
But you will not be seeing Peasemore in the election campaign. Mr. Brown and Liberal Democrat challenger Nick Clegg won't be visiting, because this riding is almost genetically Tory - blue signs dot every lawn. Mr. Cameron won't be coming here with cameras in tow, either, or mentioning it in speeches: It is the place, and the identity, he desperately needs to hide.
This campaign has turned the institutions of British politics on end, transformed the future from one in which Mr. Cameron was sure to become PM and the only question was whether he could secure a majority into one in which the future is obscure. An unprecedented series of fate-changing debates and campaign missteps have turned Britain into a genuine three-party nation, one that may face Canadian-style minorities and quasi-coalitions for a decade. The vicissitudes of the Westminster electoral system - the same one Canada uses - could well mean that the party that wins the most votes Thursday will have the fewest seats Friday morning. A slim Tory majority now seems possible, but Mr. Brown could still be returned with fewer votes than either other party. Almost anything is possible.
It is an election that has replaced ideology with trigonometry. And for Mr. Cameron, a gifted communicator hoping to pull a Tony Blair and turn an ideologically secluded Conservative Party into a big tent that can encompass all of Britain, the last thing he wants to be is the man from Peasemore.
For this is a place where a lordly inheritance and a stockbroker father sent young David to Eton and Oxford, on childhood trips aboard the Concorde, a cloistered world of the upper-class elite. His cut-glass accent sounds, to British ears, like the return of the landed gentry.
So, instead of Peasemore, Mr. Cameron has made much of his current home, Notting Hill, the multiracial, mixed-class west London neighbourhood, a former slum turned organic-food haven. He proudly mentions the National Health Service, which kept his severely disabled son, Ivan, alive for six difficult years, and pledges not to touch its funding. His Notting Hill home has a wind turbine, he bicycles to Westminster (followed by an SUV carrying his briefcase), he openly tolerates gay marriage, and he can rant about tougher criminal penalties and fewer immigrants as an aggrieved urban homeowner - that familiar figure in British debate - rather than from the alien and dubious perspective of an indignant country squire.
Yet Peasemore, unmentioned, occupies the very centre of Mr. Cameron's bid.
In stump speeches and baby-kissing stops and leaders' debates, he constantly speaks of "the big society," the key concept in his party's manifesto, the central idea in his proposed reshaping of Britain. The phrase, applied vaguely to almost anything, is meant to sound like a libertarian's answer to "big government" without invoking the spectre of big business. In this vision, borrowed from the Red Tory philosopher Phillip Blond, he speaks of government carved up and handed over to small community councils, volunteer groups, charities, church organizations.
It sounded vague and somewhat confusing until I visited Peasemore. Suddenly, reading the notices on the church bulletin board, with its charity sales and committees to deal with tumbling walls and needy neighbours, it all became clear: Mr. Cameron is proposing a Britain to be operated like a country village, where everyone gets together and solves problems with no help from Westminster, thank you very much.
Of course, it's a happy vision to be presenting voters when the party that comes to power on Friday will be forced to slash hundreds of billions from the budget: The "big society" and its bake-sale government are a way to make virtue of necessity. For many Britons, his speeches immediately bring to mind warm images of places like Peasemore. Others have no idea what he means.
Village of Rising Fortunes: Chalfont St. Giles
Only an hour's drive from Peasemore, in Buckinghamshire west of London, is another breathtakingly pretty town, once home to John Milton, with the almost comically posh name of Chalfont St. Giles, the birthplace and childhood home of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.
Beneath this town's weeping willow trees and tastefully arrayed brick façades, you will find much in common with Peasemore. The towns seem easy to confuse, as do the two leaders vying for 10 Downing St. Both are 43 years old, pale-skinned, private-school-educated and from backgrounds of aristocracy.
Yet there is a crucial difference between the towns that helps to explain the contrasting ethos of the two. Peasemore is a country village; Chalfont St. Giles, much closer to London, is a commuter town, a wealthy outer suburb. It has government offices, chain outlets, people who work in government and social services, and ties to other countries. In the precisely delineated realm of the British class system, this is crucial, for it means that the people in the big houses in Peasemore generally live off their inheritances, place value in centuries-old surnames, read the Telegraph, drive Land Rovers and vote Tory. People in Chalfont have made their fortunes within the past generation, come from diverse and often immigrant backgrounds, read the Times or Guardian, drive Mercedes and willingly vote Liberal.
Nick Clegg was born here in 1967 to parents who typify this contrast: His father, a wealthy banker, was the child of English intellectuals and Russian aristocrat immigrants (he is a cousin of Canada's federal Liberal Leader, Michael Ignatieff); his mother is Dutch. He boarded at the exclusive Westminster School and went to Cambridge, but then entered a very different world, studying in the United States, interning under firebrand journalist Christopher Hitchens at The Nation, then entering politics and embracing the free-market capitalism and big-government paternalism that characterizes liberalism.
Unlike his Tory counterpart, Mr. Clegg has no qualms about mentioning, or visiting, Chalfont St Giles, or the south London suburb where he now lives with wife Miriam González Durántez and their children. Instead, his secret location, the place he would rather keep hidden, is farther away, across the Channel. It is Brussels, where he lived for five years, owned a house and represented the East Midlands in the European Parliament, which is held in great contempt by British voters - and the Daily Mail.
The newspaper wields the sort of power that political parties envy, and has launched a campaign to discredit Mr. Clegg as "only a quarter English," with an "exotic lineage and cosmopolitan lifestyle." It has noted, with disdain, that he speaks five languages, employs a German spin doctor" and has a wife who has kept her surname and her Spanish citizenship and is a partner in a law practice in Madrid. To maintain his high-flying status, he will have to play the Buckinghamshire townie rather than the Brussels jet setter.
Town of loose lips: Rochdale, Lancashire
In his early years as Prime Minister, after the departure of Mr. Blair in 2007, Gordon Brown avoided dwelling on his Scottish roots, despite his accent, comportment and doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, for fear of losing the support of nationalist-minded English voters. Today, he tends to wear his Scots prudence as a virtue, and has a brand new "place that dare not speak its name" that is farther south, in the rough-and-tumble former Victorian industrial belt north of Manchester.
It was Mr. Brown's misfortune on Wednesday to take a stroll among the tiny terraced houses and public-housing towers of Rochdale just as Gillian Duffy, 66, stepped out to buy a loaf of sliced white. The Prime Minister had been criticized earlier in the week for a campaign that seemed to consist of visiting Labour Party faithful and having cups of tea, as if he were a member of the House of Windsor. His sidewalk encounter with Ms. Duffy was part of a new strategy of meeting "ordinary" people.
That she would have a chip on her shoulder about Polish immigrants (although Rochdale is almost 80 per cent ethnically English), that Mr. Brown would awkwardly but politely rebuff her on this, and that he would describe her as a "bigoted woman" into an open microphone in the back of his departing Jaguar are now part of electoral history.
Even if "bigot-gate" doesn't destroy his campaign, it offers some lasting lessons about the state of British politics, and the tricky calculus of running a modern campaign.
Mr. Brown failed to realize something that Mr. Blair had mastered and Mr. Cameron is trying hard to manipulate: that voters today no longer fall into fixed and discrete camps. There is not one group called "progressive lifelong Labour supporter who backs strikers and works with disabled children" and another group called "angry Daily Mail reader who hates immigrants and wants to crack down on criminals." Ms. Duffy, as he was horrified to discover, belongs to both groups, and both must be satisfied by anyone who hopes to command the country.
The Tories, meanwhile, will benefit little from this gaffe, and not just because Ms. Duffy has apparently stayed loyal to Labour. Her riding is held by a Liberal Democrat, and disgusted Labour voters who defect are likely to go to Mr. Clegg. In other ridings across the country, the electoral triangulation is even more complicated.
Riding of Infinite Angles: Clwyd West, Wales
Voters in this corner of Wales have become Britain in miniature, their riding a precise echo of the national transformation: They are discovering that life in a three-party system is very different from a two-way race. Since the last election in 2005, this collection of large towns and retirement communities along the English border has been held by the Tories by a paper-thin margin of 133 votes, making it one of seven ridings Labour felt could be easily retaken.
But Mr. Clegg's rise to prominence after the leaders' debates has changed everything: What was previously a Tory-Labour battleground with minor roles played by the Lib Dems and Welsh-nationalist party Plaid Cymru is suddenly a pie chart with the national parties commanding almost equal shares of the vote.
Expecting this to be a simple battle with the Tories, Labour flooded the riding with inflammatory leaflets suggesting that a Conservative government would deprive seniors of their free bus travel and parents of their child tax credits. These flyers exploded into the first debate when Mr. Cameron denounced Labour as lying scaremongers. The reaction was swift - but it seems to have sent undecided voters to the Lib Dems, rather than Labour voters to the Tories, resulting in, to the horror of the Tories, an apparent Labour advantage.
The national outcome is even more of a guess. Even if Mr. Clegg's party wins the most votes, there is no way it can win the election: Unlike the Tories, who are concentrated heavily in rural ridings, or Labour, which tends to be urban, Lib-Dem support is spread evenly across the country, meaning its new votes are more likely to shift the margins of the older parties. At first, an analysis by Ipsos MORI suggested that this would benefit Labour over the Tories, and some projections showed that a third-place Labour finish could result in Mr. Brown winning the largest number of seats, due to the three-way-race effect.
But this week's catastrophes may have changed that, turning Lib Dem gains into Tory wins - in Clwyd West, and many other places.
Pond of misfortune: Gosport, Hampshire
This should have been a safe Tory riding. The party had held it securely, under the patrician eye of Sir Peter Viggers, since its creation in 1974.
But last year Gosport, and Sir Peter, became synonymous with the phrase "duck house," and the public's revulsion with the big established parties.
Sir Peter, it was revealed, had billed the taxpayer £1,645 on his parliamentary expense account for the purchase and upkeep of a wooden enclosure to house any ducks who found themselves in the middle of the pond on his country estate. Mr. Cameron forced him to resign from the party, along with other infamous Tories who expensed moat cleaning, tennis-court heating and other fripperies.
This lurid expense-account scandal helps explain why Mr. Clegg rocketed so dramatically into public affection after the first debate: Voters were looking for someone, anyone, to flee to, and the Liberal Democrats are comparatively clean. In this riding, the shift of votes to the Lib Dems seemed likely to produce a Labour victory.
But the new politics of punishment are having their effect elsewhere. In Lincoln, a small city in northeast England, heath minister Gillian Merron ought to be the safest of Labour candidates, as she can boast of huge increases in health and hospital spending under her party's watch. But she was caught expensing a home-theatre setup, and forced to repay £6,305.17. Now a disgruntled NHS manager, fired for swearing on the job, is running a tough independent campaign that could drive Labour out of this riding.
Across Britain, this is the motivating factor in hundreds of races: Revenge, anger and disgruntlement with once-respected pols. This, too, is making the outcome unpredictable.
Region of angry futures: Tynemouth
If David Cameron does end up prime minister, he may have to spend much of his early months undoing the damage of this campaign.
During a speech in which he made an enthusiastic bid for large-scale spending cuts, he made a statement that enraged voters here in the far upper-right corner of England: "In some parts of the country," he said, naming Northern Ireland and Northeast England, "the state accounts for a bigger share of the economy than it did in the communist countries in the old Eastern Bloc. This is clearly unsustainable."
It was a line that held great appeal to angry Conservative voters, so he repeated it in a TV interview. To suggest that he was going to cut off an entire region, of course, was inflammatory. In a way, it was safe comment: The northeast is largely solid Labour, except for hard-up Tynemouth, where the Tories actually had a chance until he said that - and the Lib Dems came along.
If he makes it into office, Mr. Cameron may find the country divided against him: A Scotland that is both separatist and distrustful, a Northern Ireland and northeast terrified of him, and a country whose political map is an awkward hodgepodge. It will be, for whoever occupies Downing Street after May 6, an awkward voyage into the unknown.