Paul Goodman

Election day polling by Michael Ashcroft showed a Britain divided not so much by class or region as age. The 45-54 age group split almost evenly between the two main parties. Older voters went for the Conservatives; younger ones for Labour. Among 18-24 year olds, only 18 per cent voted Tory, while 67 per cent supported Labour. Among 24-35 year olds, that first figure rose to only 22 per cent and the second dropped to only 58 per cent.

It was the ethnic minority vote that swung it for David Cameron. Had it voted in line with expert pre-election predictions - which foolishly forecast that the Conservatives would scrape a mere 16 per cent of Britain's non-white English voters - a hung Parliament would have resulted, and he might have been condemned to a fractious coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Instead, marginal seats tumbled into the Tory column: Chris Philp in Hampstead and Kilburn won by a whopping 10,034; Mark Clarke in Tooting by 5,421 (thus unseating Sadiq Khan, that rising Labour star); even Nigel Dawkins in Birmingham Selly Oak scraped home by 599 votes - re-taking a seat for the Conservatives that they last won in 1987, the best part of 25 years before.