Operation Toys Out The Pram: How the Tories plan a scorched earth strategy if they win the most seats but cannot rule

On Friday morning, after what has been an insufferably protracted and bitter campaign, we will know the results of the election but probably not the winner.

We will know how many seats each party has won, but we are unlikely to know whether or not David Cameron can keep his red box and stay in Downing Street because it has long been predicted to be another hung parliament.

But we can be fairly sure that if, as polls suggest, the Tories win the most seats but cannot command the support of a majority of MPs, Mr Cameron is going to kick up an almighty fuss in a bid to stop Labour from doing anything so dastardly as raising the top rate of income tax to the level paid in Canada, Austria, Israel and a host of other countries that aren’t exactly communist, or dare to make multi-millionaire homeoweners contribute a little more to the country that helped massively enrich them at the expense of modern first-time buyers.

I have no idea what those cunning tacticians at Conservative Campaign Headquarters are calling this scorched-earth strategy, so I will christen it here “Operation Toys Out The Pram”, although, frankly, I admit it sounds a little too benign for something that will be hugely damaging to this country.

Having long ago begun fanning the flames of English nationalism and so pushing Britain closer to break-up in a desperate bid to woo win back UKIP supporters, these “defenders of the Union” are now planning to condemn any minority Labour administration that relies on the support from Scottish MPs as “illegitimate”.

The Tories have said they will “declare victory” if the party wins “most seats and votes” regardless of the number of other left-wing MPs – including what is likely to be a large contingent from the SNP and a handful of Green, Plaid Cymru and Norther Irish SDLP members - who have vowed to oppose them.

In their first attempt to stoke a “legitimacy” emergency, Home Secretary Theresa May said almost three weeks ago that an SNP-backed Labour government would represent “the worst crisis since the abdication” (while stupidly suggesting that the king’s choice of bride in 1936 was a bigger threat to Britain than the Second World War that began three years later).

So, on May 8, we face a situation where Mr Cameron may start a period of squatting in Downing Street, perhaps with the connivance of Nick Clegg, a man who has shamelessly colluded with the Tory lie that the global financial crash was caused because Gordon Brown gave free bus passes to pensioners, the same Nick Clegg who willingly surrendered his own pledges waved through all the Tories most destructive policies during the last Coalition government.

Even if he cannot command the support of a majority, Mr Cameron may insist on staying in No 10 until his legislative agenda, announced at the Queen’s Speech on May 27, can be voted down and his administration is forced to resign and give Ed Miliband the opportunity to form a government.

But before this date, the Tory leader may rely on his brazenly self-interested and venomous allies in the right-wing press to help cook up a national emergency.

As I have spent years working in Fleet Street, I know their first tactic will be to find as many Labour supporters as they can who are willing to suggest a Miliband government may not be “legitimate”.

Despite the historical precedents of the party that came second governing with the support of other MPs, including Irish nationalists, and basic arithmetic having always decided who governed in the past, none of this will matter to a venal elite who utterly resent the idea of anyone other than men with money calling the shots.

Amid the tension and political uncertainty, perhaps we could see a falling stock market and plummeting pound – allowing these same people to sneer: “Look, we told you there would be chaos, now it’s time to elect the party of stability.”

The culmination of such sustained, cynical and calculated pressure would surely be a vote to dissolve parliament and to hold fresh elections.

Of course, this destabilising scenario may not happen if Mr Cameron wins a majority on May 7 or chooses to be magnanimous if a left-wing majority of MPs is victorious.

But, if neither of these situations comes to pass, be prepared for a stormy few months in which the future of our country and our democracy are put at risk.