Clegg's followers were all students. They spent all day on their computers, then turned up too late to vote

And so to the detailed autopsy. Blogs and tweets and emails pour in from every side, trying to make sense of what’s happened and what’s coming next. I’ve surprised myself: yesterday I thought I never wished to think of domestic politics for several months, and now here I am psephologising, along with most of my friends.

First of all, my stubbornly Labour soul is gladdened by the fact that the bedrock Labour vote remained firmish. That was the nearest we’ve come to getting pushed into third place (except for 1983), and it didn’t happen and won’t in my lifetime. But there were a few warning signs. The first results of Thursday night, from Sunderland as always, looked really rather ominous for us: there were very large anti-Labour swings in the first two. But they were safe seats; in Sunderland Central, the one we really had to fight, the swing was much smaller. Right across the country horrendous swings were seen in safe Labour seats, with much smaller ones in the marginals. The lesson surely is that we have got away once more with neglecting our traditional core vote, but we won’t be able to do so again. I mean, for Pete’s sake, Lib Dems in Redcar?

And then the great mystery – the Lib Dem surge that wasn’t. Here in Lancaster traffic in most city polling stations was depressingly slow – we in Labour found this rather ominous for us, and we weren’t wrong. But reports from the university campus told of hour-long queues at the polling station, consisting entirely of eager but patient young Liberal Democrats. The conclusion I have come to – doubtless unfair but all’s fair in love and politics – is that Clegg’s following consisted entirely of students, and I shall refer to the LDs henceforth as “the students’ party”. And – again unfairly – I strongly suspect that an awful lot of them spent all day fiddling with their computers and then decided en masse to roll along to the polling stations at ten to ten, with chaotic results. Students are great devotees of the last possible minute.

Not that I have anything against students, as the extremely fond father of two of them. Nor against Lib Dems – anybody who genuinely “agrees with Nick”, or has grasped the gist of their policies and personally endorses them, may vote for them with my blessing. But I suspect that many students vote Lib Dem thinking: “I’m too cool to take sides, so I’ll vote for someone vaguely in the middle. It would spoil my pose to look too enthusiastic for one side or the other.” And students really are the most appalling poseurs, and always were. But there aren’t enough of them to put Clegg in Downing Street, and with upcoming higher education cuts there never will be. Heh-heh.

And one reflection based on freely acknowledged envy: How on earth do the Tories manage to get their vote out so effortlessly? Throughout the campaign I never saw a single Tory poster displayed in the constituency. There were the odd couple of leafleters in town on market days, but no real sign of intensive campaigning on their side. While knocking-up on Thursday in the company of a very experienced senior local councillor, I mentioned this in an attempt to raise our spirits. “It doesn’t matter,” she said wearily. “The Tories always come out.” Campaigning by osmosis, it would seem. We must try to steal the secret: ours is bloody hard work.