By Matt Gillow

Typically, electoral reform is not the prerogative of Conservatives. The mere threat of it was nearly a deal breaker during the 2010 coalition talks with the Liberal Democrats, and Cameron’s crack negotiating team were only leveraged into accepting a referendum on the Alternative Vote by the threat of letting Gordon Brown slink back into Downing Street.

The current First Past the Post system fits in well with the ‘strong and stable’ narrative. It bars smaller parties from power, typically prevents coalition, and is pretty easy to understand. These are all good things, right?

Wrong. And that’s from a Conservative point of view.

It’s not a major revelation that voting reform actually fits in comfortably with Conservative principles, but it’s a notion that is typically whispered. In his fantastic book ‘Coalition’, David Laws notes that neither David Cameron or George Osborne were particularly in favour of First Past the Post. During the 2015 general election campaign, MEP Daniel Hannan came out strongly as an advocate for Proportional Representation. It’s not, even, a recent phenomenon – Winston Churchill noted that ‘the present system has clearly broken down. The results produced are not fair to any Party, nor any section of the community.’ So there we go.