British Vote Proves People Did Love Thatcher : Election: The polls all predicted a Labor victory, but the Conservatives took it because the public did not really want change.

It was not meant to be like this. Until the eve of the vote in the British election, polls consistently predicted that the Labor Party would have a greater share of the popular vote than the ruling Conservatives, and, at the very least, would be the largest single party in Parliament. What actually happened--that the Conservatives won an overall majority--had been predicted by very few. But when the final results from the outlying regions came in on Friday, there they were, back again in government, with a majority of 21.

The very latest polls had picked up a swing back to the Conservatives, but none had anticipated that the Tories would have a 7-point lead over Labor in the popular vote. Even the exit polls, which got the share of the popular vote broadly right, failed to predict the eventual distribution of seats in the House of Commons. It was not until the small hours that it became clear--and admitted--that John Major, the prime minister, was back in No. 10 Downing Street.

How did he do it? Though the pundits will pour over the results of this classic election for years, there were enough straws in the wind from the first few dozen seats to declare their results to work out what had happened.

In Britain, every general election is the agglomeration of 651 mini-elections--the number of seats in the House of Commons. Pundits spend hours with their computers working out the “swing”--the percentage by which the party’s share of the vote has changed since the last election. But the national swing tells only so much. The reason for failing to predict what happened, and the reason Major is still prime minister, is that the swing was regionally variegated.

In the first returns, it was clear that Labor was racking up substantial swings in the northwest of England and, to some extent, in the industrial west-midlands. But quite early in the evening, the vote in the Basildon constituency was announced. Basildon is a New Town in Essex, to the east of London; ranked nationally, it was the 30th Conservative-held seat most vulnerable to Labor (Labor needed to win 97 seats for an overall majority). It stayed solidly Tory, and (am I allowed to brag?) I told the PBS audience that I could sniff a Conservative overall majority was in the air. The reason was simple. London and the southeast of England had a disproportionate number of Tory-held marginal seats. If Labor could not win Basildon, it would not win enough of those marginals to win the election. And so it proved.

Labor’s failure in London and the southeast needs to be put into perspective. Until the 1970s, Labor was as strong in London as the Conservatives were--and not just in the inner city. A horde of seats, both in the suburbs and farther out, in the Home Counties were solidly Labor. Things started to change in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher took office. She persuaded the skilled workers--the famous “C2s” of the British marketing typology that assigns everyone a specific social class--that their future lay with her brand of unbridled capitalism. They backed her to the hilt in the elections of 1983 and 1987.

On Thursday, these C2s were voting during the worst British recession since the 1930s. They had seen their adjustable-rate mortgages go through the roof--typically, they would have been the first in their family ever to own a house. They had seen the value of the stocks and bonds go down--and they would have been the first in their family to own those, too. If they had been encouraged by the Thatcherite revolution to go into business on their own account, there was a decent chance that they were now bankrupt.

Yet, they still voted Tory; they still refused, in numbers large enough to make a difference, to return to the Labor Party. By staying loyal, they exposed one of the Big Lies about modern Britain.

Among the bien pensants , it has long been an article of faith that Thatcher was admired but not loved. But all that belief ever showed was how seldom the intelligentsia went to towns like Basildon in Essex, or to Harlow in Sussex; to the public-housing estates where, in the go-go 1980s, everyone had bought their own homes and now dreamed of a condo in Orlando, Fla. or Spain; to the towns where bookshops had closed and video stores opened; to the pubs that had turned into cocktail bars; to the houses with satellite TV dishes and Jacuzzis in the bathtub. It was--and is--in such places that Thatcher, the first politician in modern British not to patronize material acquisitiveness, was genuinely loved; and it was in those places that last week’s election was won and lost.

Of course, the vote in London and the southeast is not the whole story. Indeed, as similar constituencies to Basildon in the north of the country went Labor, it was possible to see, more clearly then ever, that a dangerous fault line, as much psychological as geographical, now divides Britain from the Wash on the east coast to the Bristol Channel on the west.

But south of that line, in the richest part of Britain, where the population is growing fastest, the legacy of the much-reviled Thatcher is alive and well. As she got off the Concorde in London on Thursday night, returning from an America to which, it is said, she had been packed-off lest her supposed unpopularity frighten the voters, the old girl looked as pleased as punch. No wonder.