[user104658]

Originally Posted by Cherie

Nicola did a great job of that all on her own, if she kept her trap shut about labour needing the SNP to gain access to No. 10, who knows what would have happened, the English electorate did not want her power sharing and squeezing Ed's proverbials and gaining advantages for Scotland that England can only dream of.

I wouldn't say ALL on her own but I think there's some truth in that. The initial scare-reports of the SNP playing "kingmaker" came from the press and almost certainly originated with the Tory press machine, but the SNP allowed their egos to be inflated and played right into it, failing to consider that there could still be one majority or the other. They allowed themselves to get a little too big for their boots. They should have played the whole thing down. If they had there would have been more chance of it actually happening, ironically.

However, I suspect a slim Tory majority was on the cards either way, there wa a lot more to the propaganda-of-fear than that and it was all already quite firmly established. It was the "don't risk the recovering economy" fantasy that secured the win in the end.