91Èȱ¬

I am writing this from Belfast where, amid concern over the future of the Northern Ireland government, another major political agreement here could also be on the point of collapse.

The Conservative Northern Ireland spokesman Owen Paterson is seeking an urgent meeting with the Ulster Unionist leader Sir Reg Empey today over the future of the Conservatives' pact with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP).

This follows revelations on 91Èȱ¬ Northern Ireland last night that the Orange Order helped organise a secret meeting last month to discuss a different electoral pact - between the Ulster Unionists and the Democratic Unionists.

The concern among unionists is that a three or four way party split in unionist ranks may enable the former IRA commander Martin McGuinness, now of Sinn Fein, to become First Minister here after the next Stormont elections.

I understand this secret meeting took place without the knowledge of Mr Paterson.

Some in Belfast think that the Conservative-UUP pact is now effectively dead, and that Conservative leader David Cameron will be forced to announce its demise within the next few days.

Last week, three of the most prominent Conservative candidates in Northern Ireland resigned over the situation.

UPDATE at 15:58:

Commenting on UUP & DUP talks, Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Owen Paterson said: "In his capacity as Ulster Unionist leader, Sir Reg Empey regularly meets all strands of opinion throughout Northern Ireland. He referred 'in passing' to a meeting, requested in October and held in December, but I was not aware of the content or the participants. 

"As there was nothing of consequence arising from the meeting he did not mention it to me again. Sir Reg Empey has made clear to me that it has no bearing on our joint determination to stand together as 'Conservatives and Unionists at the forthcoming Westminster elections to bring national, mainstream and non-sectarian politics to Northern Ireland."

I may be jumping the gun here, but with today's announcement by the Labour MP David Clelland that he is retiring at the next election, we now have roughly as many retirements (128) as in 1945, the previous record in modern times.

I say roughly because one can argue about the figures, and my colleagues in the 91Èȱ¬ Political Research Unit still have the total on 127.

They don't include Iris Robinson, who actually stepped down last month, though there won't be a by-election in her seat of Strangford and they won't get a new MP until the general election.

Nor do they include David Taylor who died last month, having already announced his retirement, and again there will be no by-election.

On the other hand the 91Èȱ¬ list includes the ex-Tory independent Andrew Pelling who has told me more than once that he may contest the next election after all.

Anyway, with more than three months to go, we seem to be heading for around 150 retirements, almost a quarter of all MPs.

There's been huge fuss in recent weeks because a lot more results at this General Election won't be declared until the next day, Friday.

The website has a . There's a cross-party effort on , and in the Commons last week the Conservative MP Peter Bone attacked what he called "tin-pot, upstart little town clerks" for deciding to count the following day, Friday, rather than overnight.

Even the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, has weighed in, and last week told Prime Minister Gordon Brown to sort the problem out, saying:

"Frankly, it should not be beyond the wit and sagacity of humankind - or indeed of local authorities - to ensure that that happens. I politely suggest to the House that what is required is not a passive acceptance of the particular views of individual local authority chief executives, but rather an assertion of leadership nationally and politically, at a local level, to achieve what I sense the House is uniting in wishing to see."

Let me upset a few 91Èȱ¬ colleagues - and many political anorak friends - by saying I back the tin-pot town clerks.

First, the statistics are hardly revolutionary. The Electoral Commission told me today that:

• 586 returning officers have so far replied to their survey.
• Of these, 330 plan to start their count on polling day - ie declare overnight.
• And another 17 will do that if the election ISN'T 6 May.
• Just 52 so far have said they will start on the Friday morning, and 187 are still undecided.
• So most seats will be counted overnight, with maybe 100-200 on the Friday.

That will string out the drama, surely. In all probability we'll still know the outcome of the election before midnight, simply by analysing the swing.

It's possible, though, that like February 1974, we won't know who has won until Friday afternoon. I doubt whether civilisation as we know it will collapse as a result.

Anyway, overnight counts aren't really that traditional. The veteran psephologist David Butler tells me that up until 1950 most counts were held the next day.

I love election night, but I also believe in stretching out the pleasures in life. If you're enjoying a good meal, you don't wolf it down in a few minutes.

And having a lot more declarations on the Friday will make it easier to digest all the results, instead of having to cope with a huge rush between midnight and 3am.

But there's a more serious argument for delay.

I've done a lot of stories on election fraud in recent years, and the government's introduced new rules since 2005 so that election administrators have to check all postal votes to see that voters' signatures and dates of birth comply with those on the application form. By law they have to check 20% of the postal votes, but the guidelines suggest ALL postal votes should be checked. Quite right too.

And this is a skilled job, that requires special training, and can't be done by any old bank clerk or unemployed youth recruited off the street.

True, a lot of this work can be done in advance, as most postal votes arrive before polling day, but not all of them. Another new law allows voters to bring their postal ballots along to a polling station at any time on election day. So substantial numbers of postal ballots may have to be checked overnight.

And you cannot expect them to made sensible decisions about accuracy in the early hours of the morning, having been up since 5am the previous day.

Sue Reid, the secretary of the , works for South Leicestershire Council where they're planning to count on the Friday. She tells me that in 2001, when the General Election and council polls were held on the same day, she herself started work at 5am, and the result for the Parliamentary seat of Blaby wasn't announced until 6am the next day - a 25-hour shift. She got home at 8am, but then had to back at the count for 11am for the local election results. It's a mad way to run things, which is why South Leicestershire has chosen to postpone matters until the counting staff are properly refreshed.

It's ridiculous for journalists and politicians people to berate returning officers for allowing fraud, and then berate them for being too slow.

So roll on the next day counts. Let's have more of them.

And with a bit of luck the overall result may come throught after 10.30pm on the Friday evening, just in time for the nation to hear the outcome on Newsnight.

It's now clear that TV election debates will now happen.

The original plan was to hold one every Wednesday for the last three full weeks of the campaign.

So if, as expected, the election is on 6 May, then it was hoped the debates would be broadcast around 8pm on following nights:

Wednesday 14 April (ITV)
Wednesday 21 April (Sky)
Wednesday 28 April (91Èȱ¬)

Only there's a big problem.

The first two weeks are also the weeks of the two legs of the semi-finals of the European Cup - what's absurdly called the Champions League by many people these days.

(I refuse to call it by such a stupid title. If it's a "league" then tell me who came third last year, or fifth, or bottom? And, as one of the few political journalists who has actually touched the trophy, I can assure you that the words European Champions Cup are engraved upon it - only in French.)

Anyway, with three English teams still left in the last 16 of the competition - Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United - and given recent performances by English sides (three English clubs got to the semis in each of the last three seasons) it's pretty likely that at least one English side will be involved this April, quite possibly more.

And Sky and ITV will be broadcasting the games live at 7.45pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Any TV scheduler would be an idiot to run the election debates against the European Cup semi-final.

Switching the debates to Tuesday simply confronts the same problem.

And we won't know which English teams are still in the competition, or what days they are playing, until the quarter finals are over on 6 April.

OK, the broadcasters could hold the debates on the Thursdays, but that runs up against the subsidiary European football competition, the (equally stupidly named) Europa League.

There Liverpool must have a good chance of reaching the semi-finals, and Everton and Fulham are also strong contenders.

Europa League matches, as we Manchester United fans keep reminding our Liverpool friends, are televised on "Thursday nights on Channel Five" and this year's semi-finals are scheduled for Thursday 22 and 29 April.

The only solution, surely, is to go for Mondays or Fridays, or even a day at the weekend?

On Monday I revealed in this blog, and on the programme, that the government's plans to legislate now for a referendum on the Alternative Vote had effectively been scuppered by Ed Balls and the Chief Whip Nick Brown.

At the beginning of December the Cabinet agreed not just to have an AV referendum in the manifesto (as Gordon Brown announced at the party conference), but to legislate before the election to ensure a referendum on AV is held after the election even if Labour loses power.

This was designed as a wheeze to put David Cameron on the spot, and also a way to cosy up to the Lib Dems in case of a hung parliament.

But so successful have Mr Balls and Mr Brown been in their lobbying against the plans which ministers agreed last month that it is now probably too late to get the referendum measure through Parliament before the election.

John Prescott tried to rubbish my story live on air on Monday night, but now, more extraordinary still, I'm told that government whips are actively lobbying MPs to argue and vote against the AV referendum legislation at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party this coming Monday night.

The whips office is thought to be pretty hostile to the AV referendum, not just because Mr Brown is their boss (and his Newcastle seat would be at risk from AV) but also because many whips represent northern and Scottish constituencies - regions where Labour would probably lose seats from AV, whilst maybe gaining them elsewhere.

Willie Sullivan, campaign director of the cross-party Vote for a Change campaign told me: "We understood that this was the agreed government position. It seems bizarre that government whips are organising against the government in the interests of what seems to be protecting their own seats for the future."

The Votes for a Change campaign is so annoyed about Mr Balls' efforts to block the AV referendum legislation that today they called him a "hypocrite" for publicly backing AV, yet privately opposing the referendum.

Today the group launched an e-mail appeal amongst their 40,000 supporters for a slogan for a billboard they plan to hire in Balls' constituency in Normanton.

I'm told the government will next week finally announce its plans for a referendum on the Alternative Vote system of electoral reform, by tabling an amendment to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill. I revealed this move on Newsnight as long ago as 1 December 2009.

But in effect the measure has been scuppered. It had seemed that an alliance of pro-electoral reform Cabinet members, including Alan Johnson, Ben Bradshaw, John Denham and Peter Hain had persuaded Gordon Brown it would be a good idea to pave the way in legislation before the election to hold a referedum on AV after the election.

This, it was argued, would help expose David Cameron as "phoney" on the issue of democratic reform. And it would also land Mr Cameron with a problem if he became prime minister, as he would only be able to scrap the legislated-for referendum by passing new legislation to repeal it, and such a bill would probably not get through the Lords, where the Tories no longer have a majority.

Labour's electoral reformers were confident they had the backing of the Lib Democrats for the referendum move, even though the Lib Dems want a more proportional form of electoral reform, the Single Transferable Vote.

By delaying for seven weeks since the decision was taken by Cabinet it will now be almost impossible to get the measure through Parliament before the election.

So the referendum amendment, if not the whole bill, is likely to fall in the rushed negotiations that traditionally take place to see which legislation gets through once the election date has been announced - the so-called legislative "wash-up".

If, as expected, ministers had pressed ahead with the amendment before Christmas, then it might have got through before the election, and put the Conservatives on the spot.

Electoral reformers are furious over what's happened, and are blaming two senior figures for the delay - Nick Brown, the Chief Whip, whose own seat would be at risk under AV (see previous blog), and also Ed Balls, who I had a meeting with Mr Brown to express his strong reservations about the referendum.

Reformers say that in pursuance of his leadership ambitions Mr Balls is keen to ally with northern and Scottish MPs who tend not to favour reform.

"He's a complete pillock," says one angry minister. "AV is the only chance we've got of returning to power in 2014. He [Balls] would rather sacrifice the chance of being prime minister in 2014 to improve his chances of being leader in 2010."

UPDATE MONDAY 11.11PM: Although Ed Balls is on record as being a supporter of AV, I'm told he has argued within government that it would be wrong tactically to spend time on what would be a distracton, and that instead Labour should concentrate on core issues such as public services and the economy.

We're told that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will go to tonight's meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party flanked by his three big general election chiefs - Peter Mandelson, Douglas Alexander and Harriet Harman.

So what's new in this?

We've long known that this trio would be key figures in the election. Ms Harman was bound to have some role when Mr Brown appointed her party chairman (in addition to being deputy leader) when he was elected leader in 2007.

Mr Alexander became "election co-ordinator" at the same time. And ever since Lord Mandelson returned to government it has been assumed that Mandy would play a key election role, as he has in so many previous campaigns.

The big question is not their titles, but who does what, and balancing the egos and ambitions of the three individuals, not to mention Ed Balls, who would clearly like a say in how election strategy is run.

A huge problem for Mr Brown, which I suspect he'll never resolve satisfactorily.

But David Cameron has a similiar problem, of course. Who will run the Conservatives' campaign?

George Osborne, who is in overall charge of strategy? Or Eric Pickles, the party chairman? Or Lord Ashcroft, who runs the operation to finance and win target seats?

The answer, I suppose, somewhat clearer than with Labour, is it will be Mr Osborne.

Mr Osborne's problem, though, is that he can't be seen to devote too much time to political strategy when there are still so many in the City, and elsewhere, who think he's doing a pretty lightweight job as shadow chancellor.

Hence the interesting development before Christmas, when Mr Osborne appointed George Bridges as his many strategy sidekick.

Mr Bridges is a canny and highly-respected campaign brain who has experience of Tory campaigns dating back to the John Major years.

What makes the set-up especially is that for many years Mr Bridges and Lord Ashcroft were not the best of friends, and in his book Lord Ashcroft accused Mr Bridges of encouraging The Times newspaper to run the campaign against him which led to Lord Ashcroft taking libel action against the paper.

Jack Straw is extremely upset with my 91Èȱ¬ colleague Nick Robinson today for his report last night in which he named the justice secretary as one of six Cabinet members whom the rebel leaders had been hoping might resign in response to their operation.

Mr Straw today described Nick's report last night as a "very sub-standard piece of journalism".

But Nick didn't actually say that he himself saw Mr Straw as a potential rebel. He merely suggested that sources close to yesterday's coup-leaders thought Mr Straw might quit.

Nick stressed that the coup-leaders had no contact with any of the six Cabinet members.

Mr Straw, of course, ran Gordon Brown's successful leadership campaign back in 2007, but it's no secret in politics that he's been worried at the way things have gone since then.

Indeed I was told by a senior government figure in 2008 that Mr Straw and Geoff Hoon - who was then Brown's chief whip - had a series of agonised meetings in the summer of 2008 to discuss the problem of Mr Brown's disappointing performance as leader.

These discussions came to nothing, it seems.

Pro-Brown figures yesterday were quick to paint Mr Hoon as something of a serial plotter, and not just against the current prime minister.

They accused Mr Hoon of involvement in two attempted coups against Tony Blair in 2006, the year when Blair demoted Mr Hoon from the Cabinet (where he'd spent six years, as defence secretary and then leader of the House).

Mr Hoon's hands "were not untainted," one of the leaders of the successful September 2006 coup told me.

When I put these suggestions to Mr Hoon yesterday, however, he firmly denied it.

But another leading government source says that Mr Brown was so grateful for Mr Hoon's assistance in the 2006 operation that it explains why he rewarded him with promotion to chief whip when Mr Brown took over as prime minister.

There's a general consensus in politics today that that's it, that Gordon Brown is now secure in his post until the General Election.

I agree that's almost certainly true, but would say there's still a small chance - perhaps 5-10% - that Mr Brown might still go before the election.

There are a few Labour people - both pro and anti-Brown - who think it's still a possibility, though pretty small.

Their reasoning goes like this.

Yesterday illustrated very publicly just how little confidence Gordon Brown enjoys within his own Cabinet.

That was shown by how slowly Cabinet members came out to back him, and how lukewarm, or even tepid, the statements were when they finally did emerge.

Over the next few days it may sink in amongst Labour big-wigs just how dangerous it is for the party ahead of an election for this position to have become so publicly exposed - a prime minister who lacks the support even of his own Cabinet.

It's a far worse position than John Major was ever in.

It is just possible that a combination of Labour big beasts might get together and agree they collectively have to go and tell Mr Brown that the game is up.

That would mean three or four of the following people: Peter Mandelson, Jack Straw, Harriet Harman, Alistair Darling, Alan Johnson and David Miliband. Ed Balls would be a pretty unlikely extra bonus.

The first we'd get to hear of such an operation would be when Mr Brown announced he was resigning.

The big beasts might even agree amongst themselves who should take over - perhaps a dual arrangement with Mr Straw as acting PM, and Ms Harman as acting party leader.

There might even be time for a proper leadership election. Some reckon it could be done in 21-23 days, or up to eight weeks if union members were consulted, which would produce a new leader by mid-March.

Such a process might not tear the Labour Party apart; the debate could reinvigorate Labour, in the much same way the leadership election of 2005 did for the Conservative.

OK, it almost certainly won't happen. But it's a remote possibility.