Although it is often said that apathy helps the Conservatives, the massive drop in turnout seen in 2001, and sustained this year, merely made Labour’s vote distribution even more efficient, further highlighting how the odds are unashamedly stacked in their favour.

FPTP discriminates against parties whose support is spread across the country and also those parties that rack up massive majorities in certain core areas. The best scenario is, therefore, to have ‘lumpy’ support – moderately high enough to win a seat in some areas, and low where you don’t stand a chance. This is exactly how Labour’s voters are distributed.

This is in part due to luck, but also due to the fact that Conservative voters are more inclined to go the polls, even when they know their candidate will be returned with a thumping majority, thus piling up towers of useless votes in traditional Tory strongholds.

When turnout fell from 71.5% in 1997 to 59.4% in 2001, a large proportion of the fall came from safe Labour seats, which ultimately made no difference to the result. Conversely, the Labour vote in the marginals it had won from the Conservatives in 1997 held up remarkably well.

The idea of efficient vote distribution can be illustrated by comparing Northamptonshire and Liverpool between 1992 and 2001. Labour lost about 40,000 votes in Liverpool between 1992 and 2001, yet they still safely held all the seats in the region. In Northamptonshire, by contrast, Labour's vote rose by just 13,000, which was enough to rob the Conservatives of five of the six seats up for grabs.

The Conservatives lose out on efficiency of vote distribution, but not nearly as badly as the Lib Dems, who despite receiving 22% of the vote, nabbed only 9.6% of the seats. UKIP can also feel aggrieved: they polled more than twice the number of votes of the DUP, but have no members of parliament, compared to the DUP’s nine.

Perhaps the most publicised feature of the system working against the Tories is the biased state of the constituency boundaries. There is a bias, and the average Labour seat currently has about 5,500 fewer electors in it than the average Conservative one, thus meaning it took fewer votes to elect a Labour MP. However, in 1979, the gap was even worse, but the system as a whole was fairer, suggesting that other factors are more instrumental in skewing the system towards Labour.

If the 2005 general election had been fought under the now updated boundaries, it would only have meant an extra dozen or so seats going to the Conservatives. The next general election will be fought under updated boundaries, but by the time this comes round, the data will already be the best part of a decade out of date.

Either way, it’s simply not that important, but it offers a nice way for Conservative MPs to complain about the iniquity of the system, without having to address the voting system, or admit to their substantial image-related failings.

The image problem that has beset the Tories since goodness-knows-when is well-documented, but its effects, which have grown in stature since 1992, are rarely elucidated upon. With the increase in tactical voting over the last decade, however, the problem is as big an electoral issue for the Conservative vote-share as boundaries and shifting demographics.

The cult of criticism that built up around the Thatcher and Major governments following the poll tax and Black Wednesday has done as much to bury the Tories as a serious political force as Tony Blair’s charm has. Preying on a public scared by the hobgoblins of street rioting and 15% interest rates, the Lib Dems conspired with Labour to keep the Conservatives out of power.

YouGov’s election analyst Peter Kellner estimated that anti-Tory tactical voting deprived the Tories of 43 seats in 2001. And while the blue vote has remained as barren as the successive leaders’ heads, tactical voting has blossomed.

In recent years, the Conservatives have faced further problems from the more minor parties, but this time the problems have arisen on the right. If UKIP and Veritas had supported the Tories on May 5th, the Tories would’ve won another 27 seats.

Tactical voting is carried out because in many areas, voting for who you really support is either pointless, or dangerous, or both; we all remember Tony’s scare stories about how going to bed with Charlie meant you woke up with Michael. On a crude level, therefore, changing to a preferential system, such as STV, should be amenable to the Conservatives, as it encourages positive voting, rather than these negative anti-Tory shenanigans.

However, if there is one thing that you can count on in the discussion about voting systems, it is that crudity gets you nowhere.

A system that allows you to rank candidates, and thus represents the complicated will of the nation better than FPTP could easily work against the Tories more than the current system, so one can understand their reluctance to embrace change. Better the devil you know and all that.

The trouble comes because just as FPTP distorts the votes cast into seats won, preferential voting distorts people’s actual feelings. Like most decisions which allow emotion too great a sway, anti-Tory sentiment is prone to getting a little out of hand. Despite the arguable point that New Labour is as close, if not closer to the Conservatives than the Lib Dems, a large proportion of Labour voters would rank Labour and the Lib Dems ‘1’ and ‘2’, before placing the Tories at the bottom, below both the Monster Raving Loony candidate and the local farmer campaigning for the right to marry his goat.

This is taken further by people like Jonathan Freedland, who have argued that PR is the best way to keep the Tories out of power indefinitely.

But just as militant members of the Left are prejudiced by emotion, staunch right-wing supporters of FPTP are shackled by inertia and atavism.

There is another way. In a top-up system, such as the one proposed by the 1998 Jenkins Commission, the Tories would likely get most of the ‘extra’ MPs, elected to make sure that parliament more accurately reflects the popular vote shares.

It might not be perfect, and from a Tory perspective it might be no better than FPTP, but it demands to be looked at, at the very least.

Proportional representation has already saved the Tory party in Scotland and in Wales, it could yet save them in Westminster too.

The Tories clearly aren’t the incompetent ignoramuses they’re made out to be, or at least not all of them are, and certainly no more so than any other party. They’re not even (Widdecombe aside) characters from a horror story that parents tell to frighten their children.

They are, however, a little scared of the public. And of change. So a change that gives the public more say makes many Conservatives rather hesitant. Hesitancy, however, is no way to win power, unless you merely wait for the opposition to mess things up. But hoping that Gordon will take the Labour party far enough back to the left to re-inherit the voters that jumped aboard bandwagon Tony back in 1997 is probably wishful thinking. The Chancellor will have waited for a decade for his chance to be PM, when he presumably takes over in a few years’ time; he’s not going to risk blowing it straight away by alienating the middle-classes.

The Tories, it would appear, haven’t yet spent long enough in opposition to bother looking seriously at the ways in which the system they so ardently support is so prejudiced against them. It obviously didn’t matter when they were in power, then the natural choice for the next Tory leader turned up on the other side, while a succession of odd little bald men led the party from one embarrassing defeat to another. They may yet spend another generation in the political wilderness, but looking at all the possible solutions, including electoral reform, would surely be a good idea.