Major Basks in Glow of British Mandate

Prime Minister John Major on Friday hailed the final results of the British election, which gave his Conservative Party a much-reduced but still comfortable majority in Parliament and a mandate to govern for the next five years.

According to the official count of the votes cast Thursday, the Conservatives wound up with 336 seats in the 651-member House of Commons, 10 seats more than needed to win outright and 21 more than the combined opposition total. The Labor Party won 271 seats, and the centrist Liberal Democrats gained 20. The remaining 24 seats went to seven regional parties.

Major greeted friends and colleagues at 10 Downing St. the prime minister’s residence, with hugs and kisses, declaring with a wide smile: “I have only one thing to say: It’s nice to be back.”

He basked in messages from world leaders, including President Bush, congratulating him on his victory.

“I have a clear majority,” said Major. “I am prime minister of all this country, for everyone, whether they voted for me or not, and that is something I shall never forget.”

His return to 10 Downing was accompanied by good news from the financial center, where investors went on a nearly $40-billion share-buying spree, pushing the pound sterling up against other currencies.

It was the first time since the early 19th Century that any British political party had won four consecutive elections, and it continued the Tories’ rule begun in 1979.

Major, 49, now an elected prime minister in his own right for the first time since succeeding Margaret Thatcher when she was ousted by a party coup 17 months ago, came by his good humor legitimately Friday.

For in the days leading up to the election, almost every public opinion poll and political pundit had maintained that the Tories were trailing the opposition Labor Party under Neil Kinnock by a significant margin--and no survey suggested that the Conservatives would win an outright majority.

Kinnock, 50, crushed by his second national electoral defeat, said he will announce on Monday whether he plans to remain Labor’s leader or step down in favor of a successor.

One of the most persistent morning-after questions heard Friday was: Why had Labor fared so poorly?

On the eve of the election, Labor appeared to be running ahead of the Conservatives, and observers were commenting on the effectiveness of Kinnock’s campaign.

But in the end, political analysts were saying Friday, the voters’ decision seemed to rest on the crucial issue of the faltering British economy, and the public seemed to agree that the Tories were better able to effect a recovery than the left-leaning Laborites.

Even though the Conservatives had come under criticism for Britain’s recession, many voters feared that Labor would do even worse with the economy. “It seems to me the undecided voters went for the known Tory record rather than for an unknown Labor government,” an American economist put it.

Labor’s poor showing has prompted a serious post-mortem within the party about whether it should consider itself a moderate party fighting for the center, as Kinnock wishes, or a more radical party insisting on a return to its socialist roots.

And with the votes in, Labor’s future as a potential governing force is in doubt.

“Every aspect of the campaign and policies needs to be re-examined,” Labor member of Parliament Robert Cryer declared. “It is clear that ‘designer socialism’ packaged by the yuppie tendency in the Labor Party is not a formula for success.”

The Liberal Democrats were also searching their souls Friday, for despite leader Paddy Ashdown’s energetic campaign, the third party did not gain strength, and Ashdown is no closer than before to his longtime goal of electoral reform based on proportional representation.

In opting for the ruling Conservatives, the British electorate ran counter to voting trends elsewhere in Western Europe. In recent balloting in France, Italy and Germany, incumbent governments have suffered.

The British election was closely watched in Washington, where parallels were clear: Both countries have had conservative governments for about a dozen years and are faced with a troublesome economic recession.

The balloting cast doubt on the opinion polls and the conventional political wisdom based on those surveys.

During the campaign, almost every opinion poll showed Labor ahead, and on voting night, the two national television networks took exit polls around Britain showing that Labor, although falling short of a clear majority, would outpoll the Tories and be in the best position to form the next government.

The pollsters began a shamefaced inquest Friday into what one polling executive called the profession’s worst performance ever in Britain.

“It’s a very big embarrassment, no doubt about that,” said Nick Moon, political research director of the NOP polling service.

The Vote in Britain

Following are results of the British national election, based on tallies from all 651 constituencies. Figures in parentheses are party strength at dissolution of the last Parliament, which had 650 members:

Standing Outgoing After Vote Seats Conservative 336 (368) Labor 271 (229) Liberal Dem. 20 (22) Ulster Unionists 9 (9) Scottish National 3 (5) Social Democratic and Labor Party 4 (3) Social Democratic 0 (3) Democratic Unionist 3 (3) Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist) 4 (3) Others 1 (4, plus Speaker)