When playing the board game of British politics, you always want to be the Conservative Party, because you’ll win most of the time. And thanks to first-past-the-post, you don’t even need a majority of the vote.
In each election that the Tories have won or ended up as the largest party since 1979, in all but two of them (2010 and 2015), they secured a remarkably similar share of the vote – never lower than 41.9 per cent or higher than 43.9 per cent. And in four of those elections, they achieved either a landslide or comfortable overall majority.
