Women's Support Gave Blair The Edge

It was women voters who last Thursday delivered a comfortable majority for Tony Blair. That is the clear message from a detailed analysis of nearly 18,000 MORI interviewees weighted to the final result.

Thirty-eight per cent of those women who voted gave their support to Labour, 32 per cent to the Conservatives and 22 per cent to the Liberal Democrats. By comparison, men voted 34 per cent each for Labour and Conservatives and 23 per cent for the Lib Dems.

If just women had voted, Labour's majority would have been nearly 90, and Blair's 'comfort level' would be much higher than the 66-seat overall majority he now has. If only men had voted, he would be facing a wafer-thin majority of only 23 on the Labour benches, many of them anxious to see him off.

Blair's options would have been severely limited: compromise with his rebels on most of New Labour's agenda; compromise with the Liberal Democrats, who probably would do a deal with the promise of a referendum on proportional representation; or resign -- sooner, rather than later.

Blair may be back in 10 Downing Street, but he will realise that a combination of low turnout and a sharp fall in Labour's share of the vote resulted in his party receiving the support of just 22 per cent of British electors.

The 2005 general election saw a slight recovery in citizen participation. Turnout was 61.3 per cent, up just 2 per cent from the record low turnout (59.4 per cent) four years ago, far from the post-war average turnout of over 76 per cent.

Part of this could be accounted for by the increase in two-home families, whose voting inhabitants each receive two polling cards and therefore might be voting twice, and also by students registering both at home and at university. It could also be explained in part by the rise of postal voting.

The government's third term begins on a disappointing vote, down six points from 2001. Labour's historic majority of 179 in 1997 was followed by a second landslide in 2001, when it lost just six seats. This time Labour lost nearly 60 MPs, including several junior ministers.

Labour's share of the vote in 1997 was 44 per cent, but this delivered 65 per cent of the seats. In 2001, Labour's share fell to 42 per cent; it still received 64 per cent of the seats. This seemingly unfair distribution hurt the Liberal Democrats most; as in 1997, their 17 per cent share resulted in only 7 per cent of the seats, and in 2001 a two-point increase to 19 per cent only provided them with 8 per cent of the seats. The Conservatives were also hard done by; their 2 per cent increase from a 31 per cent share in 1997 and 33 per cent in 2001 provided the same percentage of seats.

Over the 17 elections since the war, the average turnout was 76 per cent. It was higher than this in the close-fought contest of 1992. Then the result was so close that if one person in 200 who voted Tory had voted for the second party in their constituency there would have been a hung Parliament instead of a Conservative majority of 21. Much concern was expressed by politicians and media alike after the low turnout in 2001. Only 39 per cent of possible 18-24 year old voters turned out. The Electoral Commission was drafted in to raise awareness of the election and encourage participation.

But, despite this, there was a further decline in the youth vote, to just 37 per cent this time. The 'grey power' vote, however, went up. People 55 and over now make up 35 per cent of the electorate, up 2 per cent since the 2001 election, and as 75 per cent voted they represented 42 per cent of voters last Thursday.

Floating voters in marginal seats make their votes count. For more than two decades I have calculated these to be between 800,000 and one million electors. They are the focus of the parties' efforts, to the exclusion of nearly everyone else.

Three dimensions drove their votes. The first was the parties' policies and their salience to the voter's own concerns. Leading the list was health care. Two people in three whose intentions we tracked in the run-up to the poll said that this was very important for their decision on how to vote, six in ten mentioned education, more than half crime and pensions.

Iraq was just 14th on the list of the 16 issues we tracked, with only one person in six saying it was important to them as an issue. But the results show that it played particularly strongly among students, who delivered several seats from Labour to the Liberal Democrats on conspicuously high swings, and in constituencies where there is a large Muslim presence. Labour's vote fell by three points and the Liberal Democrats' vote rose by four, above the average in these constituencies. For most other people Iraq was an 'image issue', not an 'issue issue'.

The second dimension was the image of the three party leaders. While only 32 per cent said they trusted Tony Blair to tell the truth last January, and again in April, Michael Howard came from 28 per cent in January to overtake the Prime Minister during the election campaign. One in six of those not intending to vote Labour said that while they could consider voting for the Labour party otherwise, they could not bring themselves to vote Labour with Blair as its leader. People see him as a 'capable leader' who is 'good in a crisis' and who 'understands world problems' (44 per cent say they like Blair, 32 per cent Howard). He is, however, also seen as 'inflexible'.

Contrast his image with that of Howard, who was perceived as 'narrow-minded', 'out of touch with ordinary people', who 'talks down to people' (but is 'patriotic'). People see Charles Kennedy as 'honest' and 'down to earth', but has the stamp of 'inexperience' all to himself.

The third key factor in the decision of the floating voters was the image of the parties themselves. Labour was seen as having a 'good team of leaders' but is 'too dominated by its leader'. Labour's traditional image strength has always been its 'concern about people in real need', but has now lost that to the Liberal Democrats, who are also seen as 'moderate' and have 'sensible policies'.

All three leaders must be licking their wounds this weekend. Blair suffered a massive loss of public support, mainly to the Liberal Democrats, before the election ever began, Howard did not even achieve the election of as many MPs as Michael Foot in 1983. Kennedy failed to meet the Liberal Democrats' minimum expectations of raising their 51 MPs at the last election to 70, much less to the taking of 20 seats from each of the two other main parties whispered around Westminster in the final week of the election.

This article first appeared in The Observer