Your election predictions please

[UndercoverElephant]

Not many people willing to make predictions then... I don't blame you. Even when the BBC exit poll comes out it is going to be hard to know what's going to happen. 1992 is the last time that happened.

I can hardly contain my excitement. I guess it makes me a bit sad, but this is first class entertainment.

[JohnB]

I can hardly contain my excitement. I guess it makes me a bit sad, but this is first class entertainment.

But it's not supposed to be entertainment is it! It's the serious issue of choosing who is going to do the least damage to the country.

It does seem to have turned into entertainment though. Someone who I've heard is some kind of celebrity wrote this today, so presumably politics is now part of the entertainment industry.

[UndercoverElephant]

I can hardly contain my excitement. I guess it makes me a bit sad, but this is first class entertainment.

But it's not supposed to be entertainment is it! It's the serious issue of choosing who is going to do the least damage to the country.

It does seem to have turned into entertainment though. Someone who I've heard is some kind of celebrity wrote this today, so presumably politics is now part of the entertainment industry.

Ugh. Horrible little man.

[Quintus]

I can hardly contain my excitement. I guess it makes me a bit sad, but this is first class entertainment.

I'm a bit of a politics nerd, I'll be up until the early hours Thurs/Fri. A bit different this time though, it may be days before we know how things will pan out.

[JohnB]

I can hardly contain my excitement. I guess it makes me a bit sad, but this is first class entertainment.

But it's not supposed to be entertainment is it! It's the serious issue of choosing who is going to do the least damage to the country.

It does seem to have turned into entertainment though. Someone who I've heard is some kind of celebrity wrote this today, so presumably politics is now part of the entertainment industry.

Ugh. Horrible little man.

Who, me, or the person who wrote the article? If it's me, I'm 6'2", so hardly little

[emordnilap]

Oh, that's a good point. I'd be inclined to send them to Hell in a handcart

Sending them by car would be better, as there are far too many of them. We could make better use of the handcart here

I thought, "I thought it was 'handbasket', not 'handcart' but who cares?"

These people do, as this arrived in my inbox five minutes ago, saying 'handcart' is possibly the older of the two:

Going to hell in a handbasket

Meaning

To be 'going to hell in a handbasket' is to be rapidly deteriorating - on course for disaster.

Origin

It isn't at all obvious why 'handbasket' was chosen as the preferred vehicle to convey people to hell.

(Incidentally, and apropos of nothing in particular, the mediaeval English word for handbasket is 'maund'. This is the source of the name 'Maundy Thursday (the day before Good Friday) on which the English monarch distributed alms to the poor. This tradition survives, although the use of a basket to carry the goodies appears to be optional these days.)

One theory on the origin of the phrase is that derives from the use of handbaskets in the guillotining method of capital punishment. If Hollywood films are to be believed, the decapitated heads were caught in baskets - the casualty presumably going straight to hell, without passing Go.

The first version of 'in a handbasket' in print does in fact relate to an imaginary decapitated head. In Samuel Sewall's Diary, 1714, we find:

"A committee brought in something about Piscataqua. Govr said he would give his head in a Handbasket as soon as he would pass it."

Sewall was born in England but emigrated to America when he was nine, and this citation reinforces the widely held opinion that the phrase is of US origin. That is almost certainly the case and, even now, 'hell in a handbasket' isn't often used outside the USA. The expression probably had English parentage though. The English preacher Thomas Adams referred to 'going to heaven in a wheelbarrow' in Gods Bounty on Proverbs, 1618:

Oh, this oppressor [i.e. one who was wealthy but gave little to the church] must needs go to heaven! What shall hinder him? But it will be, as the byword is, in a wheelbarrow: the fiends, and not the angels, will take hold on him.

'Going to heaven in a wheelbarrow' was a euphemistic way of saying 'going to hell'. The notion of sinners being literally wheeled to hell in barrows or carts is certainly very old. The mediaeval stained glass windows of Fairford Church in Gloucestershire contain an image of a woman being carried off to purgatory in a wheelbarrow pushed by a blue devil.

The thought behind the phrase is 17th century, but the precise wording 'going to hell in a handbasket' and its alternative form 'going to hell in a handcart' originated in the US around the middle of the 19th century. The 'handbasket' version is now the more common.

'Going to hell in a handbasket' seems to be just a colourful version of 'going to hell', in the same sense as 'going to the dogs'. 'In a handbasket' is an alliterative intensifier which gives the expression a catchy ring. There doesn't appear to be any particular significance to 'handbasket' apart from the alliteration - any other conveyance beginning with 'H' would have done just as well. The similar earlier phrases 'hell in a basket' and 'hell in a wheelbarrow', not having the same catchiness, have now disappeared from common use. Let's launch 'going to hell in a hovercraft' and see if that flies, so to speak.

The first example of 'hell in a hand basket' that I have found in print comes in I. Winslow Ayer's account of events of the American Civil War The Great North-Western Conspiracy, 1865. A very similar but slightly fuller report of Morris's comments was printed in the House Documents of the U.S. Congress, in 1867:

Speaking of men who had been arrested he [Judge Morris] said, "Some of our very best, and thousands of brave men, at this very moment in Camp Douglas, are our friends; who, if they were once at liberty, would send the abolitionists to hell in a hand-basket."

'Hell in a handcart' is found in print before 'hell in a handbasket'. The earliest citation I can find for that is in Elbridge Paige's book of Short Patent Sermons, 1841:

[Those people] who would rather ride to hell in a hand-cart than walk to heaven supported by the staff of industry.

Were they reading this thread?

[biffvernon]

Remember Chris's blog on 3rd February: Why the Tories Won't Win the 2010 Election?

I'm still hopeful for my prediction:

And then Brown resigns, Miliband becomes PM with Clegg Foreign Secretary and Cable Chancellor.

The coalition of Labour (new and old), Liberal and Social Democrats eventually form a new centre-left party with the support of around 70% of the electorate and the Tories are are banished to the wilderness for ever.

And John was partly right with

the Lib Dems doing well comes to nothing, and when people are in the polling booth it will be the usual Tory/Labour choice

[2 As and a B]

Final results, with the vote at one safe Tory seat due to the death of that UKIP candidate still to come at a by-election:

Conservative 306
Labour 258
Liberal Democrat 57
Democratic Unionist Party 8
Scottish National Party 6
Sinn Fein 5
Plaid Cymru 3
Social Democratic & Labour Party 3
Green 1
Alliance Party 1

If the five Sinn Fein again don't take up their places, then 323 is required for a majority (or 322 if a Tory and a Lab are knocked out for the Speaker and Deputy Speaker, but that doesn't affect the totals above which would then need to be reduced by one each, so ignoring the Speakers has no effect on the maths).

Lab + LD = 315, so 8 short of a majority, so requires multiple parties (assuming DUP don't get on board).

Con + LD (366) is the only two party majority possibility.

My prediction was very accurate.

[biffvernon]

The exit poll at 10pm was very accurate: 307 Tory, 155 Labour, 59 Lib Dem.

[goslow]

SDLP take the Labour whip, so that adds 3 to any Lib-Lab coalition....

I can see why Gordon would like to talk also to the Scots and Welsh nats.

+Caroline Lucas for Energy and Climate Change secretary!

[JohnB]

And John was partly right with

the Lib Dems doing well comes to nothing, and when people are in the polling booth it will be the usual Tory/Labour choice

Sort of. They got their highest every vote, but still lost seats. So they appealed to people in the wrong constituencies, proving there's something wrong with the current system.