David Cameron-led Tories would have won an absolute majority in the House of Commons had only 16,000 voters spread across 19 constituencies voted differently in the May 6 U.K. general elections, experts said on Sunday.
The findings by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher claim that the Tories came tantalisingly close to securing a clean victory at the polls.
“Cameron came so near and yet so far,” write the directors of the elections centre at Plymouth University.
“Just 16,000 extra votes for the Tories, distributed in the 19 constituencies in which the party came closest to winning, would have spared us a weekend of negotiation and speculation,” the Sunday Times quoted them as saying.
The Labour party, meanwhile, saw its tally slump to 258 in a House of Commons with a strength of 650 seats, with 649 results declared. The Conservatives have won 306 seats and Liberal Democrats won 57 seats. A total of 326 seats are required for an absolute majority.
The Tories failed to win majorities in about 30 Labour-held marginal constituencies they had expected to win, suggesting that in some seats the extra funds of Lord Ashcroft, the billionaire party donor, were less effective than hoped.
The smallest Labour majority, just 42 votes, was secured by Glenda Jackson, the former actress, in the Hampstead and Kilburn constituency in north London.
In several others, the Tories failed by a small number of votes, falling short by 92 in Bolton West, Ruth Kelly’s former seat. Ed Balls, the schools secretary, scraped home with a majority of 1,101 in his West Yorkshire seat.
The Rallings and Thrasher analysis shows the Tories ended up with 36 per cent of the vote in the U.K., followed by Labour on 29 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 23 per cent.
With turnout in the election up from 61 per cent in 2005 to 65 per cent, the Tory share of the entire electorate, 24 per cent, was higher than the 22 per cent who voted for Labour in 2005.
Had the positions of the parties been reversed, and Labour secured 36 per cent of the vote, Gordon Brown would have been returned with a majority of 64.
The analysis also suggests that a relatively small push would give the Tories a majority if a second election is held in the near future.
A swing of 1.8 per cent from Labour would give the party an overall Parliamentary majority, while a swing of 2.5 per cent would put Mr. Cameron 20 seats ahead of all other parties in the Commons.
Another reason why Mr. Cameron failed to win outright victory was because the Lib Dem swing to the Tories was just 1 per cent.
