The people of Britain have spoken, and all is now murk. With the results now mostly in from yesterday’s general election, there is indeed a hung parliament as was widely predicted, with Labour smashed and the Tories gaining the largest number of seats but with no one party gaining an overall majority.

But in an election campaign of surprises, the result delivered another shock. The campaign had been turned upside down by “Cleggmania,” the sudden public acclaim for Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg after his strong showing in the televised leaders’ debates. Opinion polling had suggested that this third party of famed knitted-yoghurt sandal-wearers was accordingly poised to do spectacularly well and be in a position to hold the balance of power, making Clegg’s support for either a Labour or Tory administration conditional on the key Lib-Dem policy aim of changing the entire electoral system to proportional representation and a state of permanent coalition.

In the event, however, the Lib-Dems actually lost seats. Who’d have thought it? Only those wise souls who had concluded that, given the unprecedented volatility of the current British electoral mood, nothing could be assumed at all.

Despite their unforeseen loss of seats, however, the Lib-Dems still have a key role to play. With no overall majority David Cameron’s Tories, as the largest party, look set to try to form a government but can only do so provided the Lib-Dems do not try to bring them down, in particular by voting against the Tories’ first finance bill, which they will bring in to address Britain’s parlous economic situation. Early indications suggest surprisingly, however, that Clegg will make no demands on Cameron as the price of such support but will effectively hand Cameron the keys to 10 Downing Street — leaving implicit the threat that Clegg could still bring down a Tory administration at any time.

But who knows? Horse-trading is still going on and frankly anything could happen. At time of writing, Gordon Brown has not yet conceded defeat; fantastic as it may seem, the possibility that despite the wipe-out of Labour seats he may think he can still cook up a deal with Clegg cannot be ruled out just yet.

And then there were the unprecedented scenes of chaos at the polling stations, with voters actually being turned away, unable to cast their vote through a series of administrative foul-ups; not to mention the apparently significant fraud committed through postal votes. It’s not quite hanging chads, but there may be quarrels about the vote in some constituencies for weeks to come. Such abuses and incompetence are more commonly associated with some third-world banana republic than the country which once had the cleanest and most effective electoral system in the world.

But then, Britain today is not what it was — and the election result is a fitting commentary on its current decline into economic, social, and philosophical bankruptcy and demoralization. For the British electorate has delivered the strongest possible message to the political class: a plague on all your houses. Before the election, Labour and the Conservatives issued increasingly panicky warnings that a decisive result was imperative and that a hung parliament would be a disaster for the country because it would paralyze effective and strong government. But with voters terminally alienated by a political process they regard as utterly indifferent to their interests and by politicians they regard as universally rogues, cheats and liars, what these politicians failed to grasp was that the British electorate really has had it up to here with “effective and strong government” and positively wanted to end it.

Well, now they know.

– Melanie Phillips is the author of The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power.