The words ‘hung parliament’ remind MPs that their own parties are coalitions

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics

MPs have a new favourite game: Hung Parliament. To solve this communal Rubik’s Cube you have to work out how a coalition could be put together if no party wins an overall majority — and what concessions would have to be made. But the real fun comes when you start working out which party leaders would have to be sacrificed to make any deal work. One scenario even ends up with leadership challenges in all three main parties — so with multidimensional fear, loathing and civil war.

Those MPs who will leave at the next election — just over half, when you count retirement and likely defeat — are taking special pleasure in forecasting chaos. The Lib Dems, runs the argument, would not do a deal with Labour if Gordon Brown were still leader — so he would finally have to go. David Cameron would face some kind of challenge if he did not secure an overall majority because his party would be so furious that they had lost an election that they should have won. While if Nick Clegg made any arrangement with either Labour or the Tories, his own party could be expected to revolt.

MPs who are staying are looking forward to the return of power to parliament. In the Blair years, parliament mattered little. Downing Street was where the action was. But in a hung parliament, every vote is on a knife-edge: every disgruntled MP suddenly counts. It would shift the locus of power from Whitehall and Downing Street back to the tea rooms, corridors and cloakrooms of the Commons. Party leaders and their aides would have to wait on backbench MPs rather than the other way round.