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@Fox
If anyone's interested I went for a drink last night with someone who was very high up in the whole process of forming the coalition Government and saw it all happen from the inside.
He said The Lib Dems were incredibly close to a deal with Labour, which was always the preferred option (even for Clegg), but Milliband and Balls sabotaged everything. Mandelson and Adonis were both spitting feathers about the breakdown of the talks. Labour wouldn't actually go as far on electoral reform as the Tories did, which is one of the main reasons the talks broke down.
There were 15 hours of talks with the Tories, about half of these were about free schools, the Lib Dems desperately didn't want to agree to them and really didn't want Gove in Education.
Brown really did try to hang on right until the end, but once the talks had broken down Mandelson persuaded him to go for the good of the party. He should really have waited but went straight away, resulting in the Lib Dems and Tories getting calls from Buckingham Palace with a message from the Queen saying 'one does not have a PM and one would like one immediately' - or words to that effect.