Tories Nose Past Labor in Tight British Election : Balloting: Conservatives appear headed for majority in Parliament. Opposition’s Kinnock concedes.

The governing Conservative Party maintained a slender lead early today over its Labor Party opponents in Britain’s national election, and projections indicated that it would win an overall majority in Parliament.

So close was the race that the final, official results will not be known until later today. But it appeared that the Conservatives, under Prime Minister John Major, would remain in power with a thin but unassailable majority of between 15 and 20 seats in the House of Commons.

“We’ve won tonight a magnificent victory, a victory that many people thought was beyond our grasp,” Major, 49, told cheering supporters at party headquarters early today.

Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock conceded that the Conservatives had won the election.

A computer analysis by the British Broadcasting Corp. predicted that the Conservatives would win an overall majority by taking 334 seats in the House of Commons. Labor was projected to win 273 seats, with the rest divided among the third-party Liberal Democrats and the minor parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. A party must get 326 of the 651 House seats to hold an absolute majority.

Actual returns from 613 districts showed that the Conservatives had won 321 seats--five short of absolute victory--compared to 269 for Labor and 16 for the Liberal Democrats.

The results represented the first time that a British political party has won four successive elections since the early 19th Century.

The Reuters news agency projected that the British stock market’s key index could jump 150 to 200 points today, from Thursday’s close of 2,436.4, in an expression of investors’ relief over the apparent Tory victory.

The results were a bitter disappointment for Kinnock’s Labor Party, which had been riding a groundswell of favorable public opinion. For the past several weeks, polls had shown his party in the lead.

The Labor Party campaign started out strong--with the Tories criticized for a lackluster performance.

But with the final results showing a Labor defeat, it was unknown whether Kinnock, 50, would remain leader of the Labor Party, since he also led it in a landslide loss to the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher in 1987.

Political experts said the results reflected a late switch to the Tory side by many undecided voters, despite the Tories’ failure to end Britain’s deep economic recession.

The returns also suggested that many voters who were leaning toward the Liberal Democrats in the end decided to cast their votes with the two major parties--and most chose the Conservatives.

The Liberal Democrats, despite an exciting campaign under leader Paddy Ashdown, won less than two dozen seats in the Commons. A poor showing at the polls is a political fact of life that afflicts third parties in Britain.

Like the American electoral system, the British use the winner-take-all formula, instead of proportional representation, which generally leaves a third party well underrepresented in parliamentary seats, compared to its national vote.

“I am positive the party has strengthened its position,” Ashdown said.

The election was the closest in many years in Britain, with the Conservatives’ majority of 101 seats in the last national election in 1987 drastically reduced, political analysts said, because of dissatisfaction with the economy.

On a day that was sunny throughout most of the British Isles, early results showed about 76% of the 43.6 million voters in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland cast ballots.

Major, who was chosen prime minister by his party after it deposed Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in November, 1990, won his parliamentary constituency by 36,000 votes, the largest victory of the night.

Before the late returns came in, he said he believed the Tories would have an overall majority. “Once the campaign centered on the issues, it began to move in our direction,” he said.

Thatcher said she is “very pleased” with the results. “Everything we have done in the last 13 years will now be conserved and built on in the future,” she said.

The hard-fought election had been depicted as a neck-and-neck race by the public opinion polls and political observers, with Labor generally leading during the sometimes-bitter campaign.

The major issue was the sickness of the British economy and the question of which major party could best manage a turnaround in the recession. The state of the nation’s welfare and health services also was a prime subject of debate.

The Tory campaign line was that Labor’s profligate spending for social welfare services would lead to increased taxes and interest rates that would damage any expected economic recovery.

Kinnock, who easily won his Wales district seat, had spent the years since the unsuccessful 1983 elections, when he assumed the leadership, in ridding the Labor Party of its radical image and building up an image of a party that had the senior members capable of governing.

“The reluctance of the people to see a Labor government actually take over was the decisive factor in this election,” commented Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, who handily retained his Tory seat.

The result, said Hurd, “was a nation at ease with itself.”

As it became clear in the early hours that the Tories had won, Roy Hattersley, a deputy to Kinnock, appeared frustrated by the results. “I simply don’t know how the British mind and the British psyche works to produce these results,” he said.

One serious Tory casualty of the election was party Chairman Chris Patten, who lost his seat in the Bath constituency. He had spent mornings trying to mastermind the Conservative campaign and his afternoons in his constituency.

Up until midnight in Britain, results were indicating that the race could end in a “hung Parliament,” with no major party gaining an overall majority in the Commons and with the composition of a government in doubt. In the event of a hung Parliament, Major, as the incumbent, would have been given the first chance to form a new government.

“A hung Parliament,” said one senior politician, “is like a poker game--with the queen as the dealer.”

Under the unwritten British constitution, Queen Elizabeth II, as head of state, asks the leader of the front-running party to form a government. If that person’s party has no clear majority, he or she can attempt to form a minority government with the single party, or in coalition with smaller parties.