The outcome of the 2015 election looks like a dramatic win for the Tories. Polls had shown Cameron’s party neck-and-neck with Ed Miliband’s Labour Party throughout the campaign, and everybody seemed sure the result would be a hung parliament. Instead, the cock-a-hoop Conservatives have ended up with a slight overall majority, boasting that they are the first incumbent party to increase its number of seats since Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government did so in 1983.Yet what does the Tory victory amount to? The party has increased its share of the vote since 2010 by just over half of one per cent – from an unspectacular 36.05 per cent to 36.7 per cent. Some polls had the Tories on that sort of mark during the campaign, while the ‘poll of polls’ tended to have them hovering around an average of 34 per cent. That extra couple of points hardly looks like any dramatic ‘late breakthrough’.
It might be useful to step back from the intense focus on the immediate results and put things in a bit of historical perspective. Last time the Tories won a parliamentary majority, way back in 1992, John Major got 41.93 per cent of the vote. Go back further to when UK politics was a two-party system and the contrast is even starker. When the Tories lost to a Labour landslide in the famous postwar election of 1945, Winston Churchill’s Conservatives still won 40.26 per cent of the votes cast. Five years later, when Labour won a tiny majority, the losing Tories received 43.44 per cent of the vote – the sort of support that the ‘triumphant’ Cameron, aka Mr 36.7 per cent, can only dream of.
