Yep, if you add up all the conservative votes from last week, you get to 40% if you’re lucky. This is after 13 years of Labour Party rule and after one of the deepest recessions in history.
Perhaps if the Tories had a different leader they may have scraped over the finishing line with a majority, but claims that another Margaret Thatcher-type leader would have walked the election are just not credible. People tend to forget that she was a deeply polarizing figure, and still is to some extent, and there has been little evidence that a majority of Brits would welcome a return to Thatcherite policies.
Thanks to her, Britain is a very different place today than it was 30 years ago, but the political landscape is not the same as it was back then, which is why the Tories could not will a solid majority this time around even under the most favorable of circumstances.
I don’t envy Cameron’s job. After Thatcher made deep spending cuts in her first term in office she was polling way down in Bush ‘07/’08 territory, and she was somewhat fortunate that the Falklands crisis happened when it did. Assuming nothing like that happens this time around, Cameron is going to have a steer a very careful course in the next couple of years if he wants to be more than a one term PM. I suspect that’s why the Labour members scuppered a deal with the LibDems — they anticipate capitalizing on the unpopular spending cuts that will be necessary to balance the books to win the next election once the Conservatives and LibDems tire of each other, which they will eventually.