Editing a newspaper is all about knowing your readers and anticipating their likes and dislikes. But how can you do that when they are strongly Labour one week and Tory the next?

Newspaper editors love a drama, and for the most part they will have enjoyed the story of the November 2007 election-that-wasn't. Gordon Brown teased; David Cameron called his bluff; Brown backed down in embarrassment - it was politics as high theatre, played out in three short acts that delivered front-page headlines every day.

But there was something about this affair that should have left the more thoughtful editors uneasy, and it was to do with readers rather than politicians. The readers, you see, went a little bit bonkers.

In the words of Peter Kellner, the former journalist who now heads YouGov, we witnessed "the most violent earthquake in public opinion for 25 years". One day Brown was sitting pretty with a lead of nine or 11 points, depending on the poll, then barely a week later (before he had even announced the decision that got him labelled Bottler Brown) he was actually behind by between one and four points. Not since the Falklands War, Kellner declared in the Telegraph, has voter sentiment shifted so far in so short a time.

The Sun, the Telegraph and the Mail - all in their different ways seriously off-message as Tory papers a few weeks ago, but suddenly true-blue again when it seemed there might be an election - are no doubt congratulating themselves on turning things around for Cameron. But they must acknowledge not only that the earthquake was on a scale even they could not expect to conjure up, but also that it was out of all proportion to events.

The only piece of hard policy involved, so far as I could see, was George Osborne's inheritance tax promise, and although that may have its attractions, it hardly compares in enormity with the decision by Margaret Thatcher in 1982 to ship a task force halfway around the world to fight Britain's first war in a generation.

Moreover, as Tim Hames pointed out politely in the Times, the detail of the upheaval left voters open to the charge of crass inconsistency. In one poll, for example, they seemed to want a Conservative government with Gordon Brown as prime minister. In another, 44 per cent of respondents declared themselves ready to vote Tory even though only 37 per cent thought the Tories were ready for power. Explain that.

Editors are paid to be in tune with readers. They are supposed to know how they think and what they like and dislike. Their success depends on an ability to walk in step with the readers, perhaps occasionally edging ahead, but never by much. All the great editors have had this ability.

How can they do these things when people are so unpredictable?

It is not an entirely new feeling for editors, the queasiness that comes when the readers suddenly decide, of their own accord, to pick up the pace or head off in a new direction. Most famously it happened on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the week after Diana's death: papers that had exhausted themselves churning out supplements and extra pages by the dozen were horrified to find, when they looked up, that the public mood was not the one the press had been articulating. A great emotional tiger was on the loose, and editors were not riding it.

More recently it happened with the Madeleine McCann case, when public demand for coverage outstripped by far the available supply of information. Editors missed this until the Express stumbled across it, and then, in a desperate effort to get astride the tiger, some of them decided to slap any old rubbish on the front page under a McCann headline.

When this sort of effect reaches politics, when the readers become a little wilful, it poses special problems for editors. Party politics is one area where they like to be half a step ahead of the readers, where traditionally they have believed they knew better. They all trim every now and then, but they like to think that they are broadly consistent over time, even wise.

Now, though, for reasons it would be difficult to explain plausibly to an outsider, it seems that the public can be strongly Labour one week and Tory the next - and presumably Labour again the one after. If editors try to keep in step with that they will only end up looking bonkers, too.

Who called it?

Which commentators understood events sufficiently well to see what was coming, and then had the nerve to write, "There will be no election"? Not many, is the answer. Steve Richards went close, declaring in the Independent that an election would be crazy, but most of his colleagues and rivals preferred to hedge their bets.

We could find only two clear-cut cases (though no doubt if there are others they will let us know). So our 2007 Brass Neck Award goes to Benedict Brogan of the Daily Mail website and our own Peter Wilby, writing in Public Finance magazine. Sadly there is no actual prize, but then I am sure both organs have already paid these far-seeing writers tidy bonuses.

Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University

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