A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published around the 1st October 1998.

Margaret Beckett’s comment (report, Sept. 29th) on our present voting system – “The British people understand it and know how to use it to get a result they are prepared to live with” – is borne out by the votes and seats obtained over the 15 general elections since the war.

If you add up all the votes cast and seats obtained by the Conservative and Labour parties from 1945 to 1997, you find that 39,500 votes provided Labour with a parliamentary seat, while the Conservatives needed 40,000, i.e. seats have been almost exactly proportional to votes in the long run.

Given that the British people, in the main, voted for either a Labour or Conservative government, our much maligned system has thus exactly reflected their choices.

Of course the Liberals’ view is different, but they have had over 50 years to persuade the electorate that they can constitute a national government alternative to either Labour or Conservative.  Since these two parties are themselves overlapping coalitions, the electorate have clearly concluded they do not want a third coalition overlapping the other two in the centre.  Lord Jenkins’s report will doubtless present a ponderous series of arguments about “fairness”, but its essential thrust will be to overturn the electorate’s verdict, repeatedly given.