Palfrey's life

Multiparty? More like a vast multiplicity of parties. Especially when we get to seats like the party leaders, and you've got a half-dozen or so "anyone but blair" candidates who get about 100 votes a piece. Incidentally, on that topic, something that you'd *never* see at an american election happened at the announcement ceremony for Tony Blair's seat. There was another candidate there on a "my son was killed in Iraq, and it's all Blair's fault" platform, who got about 4000 votes, and as he was one of the top 3 most-voted for candidates at that seat, he got to give a speech. Was quite interesting watching this guy talking about how "if this hadn't been an illegal war, if my son hadn't been killed, i wouldn't be here. and it's tony's fault" while Tony Blair is standing about half a metre behind him trying not to squirm.

Major reason behind the student vote mattering: we have smaller constituencies. Average number of electors is probably around 80,000 or so. So, if you've just pissed off a significant block of a 15K+ student population, you're unlikely to get re-elected. Notably, apparently Cambridge (another constituency with heavy uni student population) also went from Labour->Lib Dems.