She beat at least one other potential candidate (I'm not sure how many potentials there were on total but she beat them all) to be selected by the constituency party as their candidate so while there may have been someone local who would have been better you can only pick from the candidates who actually put themselves forward.

Northwest Cambs, where she lives is a pretty safe Tory seat (majority of about 20k iirc) so there was I think a tactical decision to put the best "local" candidate in a seat they might actually win rather than the one they live in. I suspect this isn't the only area where that calculation has been made and not just by Labour (Boris being a case in point). You put your best and/or most electable candidates where they can do you the most good even if it means crossing boundaries on occasion.

C4's election coverage in the hour where they're not actually allowed to talk about the election is quite funny. Possibly unintentionally so.

Exit poll in Scotland suggests SNP might have won every seat in Scotland bar one.

If that turns out to be true I wonder who's the last non-SNP candidate standing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32633099

Tory pricks! Thousands of 'em!

I wanted Labour to do better just to see the resulting 'experiment' alone. The usual caveats about polls apply etc.

So did I in a way, (see previous page) I spoil anyway, but another hung parliment would've steered us a bit further from the 2 party system and first past the post rule.

Everyone bitching about the result. Well it's obviously the people's choice as it was a record turn out so shut up and stop moaning

I'm not trying to get stuck into a political debate; I think they're all corrupt and worthless. I think if people wanted change they should've turned up and voted, but not everyone does and it's not compulsary.

I wasn't directing anything at you. This was just my impression after a quick scan of facebook this morning.

Nah I didn't take it like you did (didn't even realise mine was the post above to be honest)! But you're right, my FB is full of people complaining too, someone must've voted for them or all these people complaining didn't vote at all!

Indeed. We get the government we all vote for together, whether we indivdually like it or not.

There are probably now questions to be asked about the system itself - UKIP and the SNP got roughly the same number of total votes but the SNP got 57 (I think) MPs whereas UKIP got 2. I don't want UKIP to have MPs personally but I think you'd find it pretty hard to argue that's a 'fair' result. However, everyone knew what the system is and they could have figured out how to optimise their result given what they knew.

There's a fair number of embarrassed politicians (Ed Balls, Vince Cable etc) and a LOT of embarrassed pollsters this morning. Interestingly, most of the comment I've heard from Ed Balls' constituency this morning was that people didn't vote for him because he spent sod all time there and all his time in Westminster. Given he only held the seat by 1000-ish votes in 2010, that seems incredibly complacent of him.

Personally, the incumbent got back in in my constituency which is fine given he's apparently a good representative. I've never needed to talk to him myself.

The one thing that I really shake my head at out of the whole thing is this - 'Boris Johnson MP'. I mean, really people?

Additionally I saw a great post on Facebook this morning.

"I love it when my favourite comic gets me back to liking the original bad guy by bringing in an even badder bad guy who really threatens people's lives. Hang on a minute..."

*Picture of Cameron alongside Farage looking evil*

Yes and no. If one looked at the figures for total votes divided by number of seats stood for, I think that would be a more reasonable comparison between those two parties.

Fair enough. Elections are essentially statistical exercises anyway. Which electoral system you use is basically the same as saying 'do you mean mean, median or mode?' when someone asks for 'the average'.

The first question to ask if we are talking about reform is 'do you want to retain a consituency system or go for an actual general election' i.e. seats are portioned out in proportion of national vote totals or area vote totals.

The statistics about this election area bit crazy though - Conservatives raised their votes by about 1% and won more seats, Labour raised their vote by 2% but won less seats. The system is somewhat illogical but does tend to produce decisive results. So I guess practically it depends how much you want to ensure we don't have coalitions very often...

You got your quotes mixed up. I didn't say any of that