I waited up for Balls

And all I got was this lousy t-shirt.  Actually, I didn't on either count.  The phrase "I waited up for Portillo' has entered lore when dearest Michael Xavier was ejected from office in 1997 from an ultra-safe seat.  I set my alarms for 4 am and my bodyclock woke me up at 3.30 am, so I didn't really wait up in the strictest sense to see the shadow chancellor lose his far from safe seat of Morley at 8.15 am.  It really capped a night of disaster for centrist-leftist parties as both Labour and the Liberal Democrats suffered severe decapitation results.  In Scotland, it was no surprise that big-hitters would be drowned in the SNP tsunami, both the Alexanders, Danny and Douglas (no relation) biting the dust, along with Charles Kennedy and Jim Murphy.  But it was devastation for the Lib Dems in the south as Simon Hughes and Vince Cable were carved up between Labour and the Tories and the Conservative Party stormed the Lib Dem citadel of the south-west and effected a wipeout.
Unlike Angela Merkel who gobbled up her coalition partner to the extent that she got tantalisingly close to an overall majority but her partner failed to reach a parliamentary threshold of 5%, thus leaving Merkel without any suitable coalition stablemate and forced into a grand coalition with the socialists, David Cameron destroyed the Lib Dems in England as paving the way to an overall majority (plus snatching a few seats off Labour for good measure).  The only real disappointment was Employment Minister Esther McVey becoming unemployed and coming within a whisker (348 votes) of having two Scottish Tory MPs and thus being able to boast to having more Scottish MPs than Labour.  Small details as they've won and can rely on the Northern Irish DUP and reborn UUP when backbenchers get too rowdy.
For Labour, Scotland was the dominant issue. Yes, Miliband was repeatedly lampooned by the media who were ferocious in their treatment of him and gushing in their praise of the Coalition and wasn't any great shakes as a leader until the last few weeks of the campaign, by which point it was too late.  But the real trouble was that Labour were outflanked on being left-wing by the SNP in Scotland (plus lingering grievance in opposing independence) while were too left-wing for England and Wales.  In the marginal seats especially, electorates were terrified at the SNP 'propping up' (as if a minority Labour administration would be an invalid) Ed Miliband in power, so Labour was squeezed from both sides and stood little chance.  The next election will be worse because the Lib Dems blocked boundary change in the last government which the Tories can now alter to their hearts content to favour them.  It was the worst result by the Labour Party since 1987 (though its performance in England and Wales was superior to that year) and that only by three seats.
There is some real anger about the the most unexpected result since 1992, the polls consistently showing the main parties neck-and-neck and a hung parliament in prospect.  Despite the moaning of UKIP, a Tory majority has kicked electoral reform into the long grass far more effectively than the 2011 referendum.  Even the exit polls underestimated the size of the Tory majority while overestimating the number of seats UKIP and the Lib Dems would take - only in Scotland were they accurate.  I am ambivalent though as I am not in a bad way and the married tax allowance (which introduces equality into the government's approach to relationships) will benefit me.  The prospect of an In/Out referendum on the EU is not a bad thing, as I expect Cameron to campaign in favour of staying in and an 'In' vote to be delivered as people see where there economic interests lie - it will lance the boil that has been festering since the semantics of the Blair years.  I trust the Conservatives more than ideological Labour over education but the scale of the cuts they can introduce across the public sector unfettered is scary and the determination to shrink the state (inevitably affecting the NHS which they have made a mess of) is also an ideological misstep.  This is not a result on from which the poor and disabled can take any comfort and the gap between the haves and have-nots will grow even more rapidly than before.