Proportional Representation and Nick (Tory Boy) Clegg.

Well that's what my daughter calls him with a few expletives; Nick (Tory Boy) Clegg; and I can see what she means on this very sunny Los Angeles afternoon.

It's not too hot and rather pleasant but my daughter is getting very hot under the collar. She didn't want the Conservatives to get in at all and as she votes in Bury St Edmunds she felt her vote would be a waste of time so she tactically voted for the Liberal Democrats; with Clegg talking to Cameron, the Conservative leader, she feels she has been betrayed.

A lot of voters voted tactically and they feel betrayed too.

I was having lunch the other day at Porto's, a great Cuban place in Glendale, and as I munched on my Cubana I told me friend Ron about the tactical voting; he had never heard of it.

It's simply this: if there are 3 people on the ballot one Labour, one Conservative and one Liberal Democrat, and you know from previous elections, opinion polls or just by tradition that the Conservative is going to win it by a bunch of votes and your party stands no chance at all, you vote for the party that can or may stop the Conservative candidate getting in.

So my daughter voted for the Liberal Democrat; she said her hand trembled, her stomach churned and she could hardly bring herself to make the cross – but she did.

Now as I write this Clegg is or has been talking to Cameron so Nick (Tory Boy) Clegg, she feels, is stabbing her in the back.

Of course by the time you read this it might be all over so you are laughing at me because I got it wrong or he might have called Gordon.

What Tory Boy Clegg really wants is Proportional Representation and I have no qualifications to give anybody advice on what to vote on this, should it come to the vote, but as I have asked before where are all the new MPs voted under the new system going to sit? There are only 650 seats!

Let's just take the constituency where my daughter lives: the Conservative won with 47.5% of the vote; straight away you see that the winner has less than a majority as more people voted against him than voted for him. That's nothing new but I point it out in any case.

This means that in the House of Commons, for the constituency of Bury St Edmunds, more people will be representing the minor parties than the person who won the election if they had already adopted PR.

That's the way I see it.

The other kind of PR is that out of the 5 people that stand for parliament you will put them in the order of preference giving 5 points for your favourite and so on down to 1 point; this means that the person with the most votes as favourite won't automatically win if nearly everybody likes one of the people as a second choice to their own particular favourite – now who would that be? Yes you are right! The Liberal Democrat – Nick (Tory Boy) Clegg; no wonder he wants Proportional Representation.

Would he want PR if he was a member of the Labour or Conservative Party? Ask yourself that one.

For anybody reading this from America the liberals in the UK are not the same as the liberals in the USA where liberal is a dirty word.

The liberals in Britain – or the Liberal Party – were formally the Whigs and they ran the country; this is going back to the 19th Century.

When the Labour Party was formed (and this is off the top of my head so don't write and tell me I'm wrong – ok write if you want) when it was formed it eventually won one seat in the commons and the MP was Keir Hardie.

So the Labour Party only had one seat. And the over the years they won more seats till by the 1930s they actually won an election; the Prime Minister, the first Labour PM was Ramsay MacDonald but it didn't last very long. I believe he was an ancestor of Angela Lansbury the actress famous for Murder She Wrote or, in my book, The Manchurian Candidate – and Elvis's mother in Blue Hawaii.

The Labour Party took a lot of votes from the Liberal Party, over the years, to rise to such a position and a lot from the Conservatives and in 1945 with a huge majority they oversaw the nationalisation of basic industries such as coal mining and the steel industry, the creation of the state-owned British Railways and the establishment of the National Health Service; can you believe that America a free health service paid out of taxes.

So whilst the Labour Party grew the Liberals shrank.

In the 1980s the so called Gang of Four – a bunch of opportunists, Michael Foot called them – split from the Labour Party and together with David Steele formed the Social Democratic Party which became the Liberal Democrats in 1988 – 22 years ago.

It took the Labour Party about 60 years from formation to Government so the Lib/Dems have 38 years to go unless Nick (Tory Boy) Clegg has his way.

So whilst the world looks towards the oil leak and the incoming oil slicks off the south coasts of the United States and my son's team Chelsea takes the premiership the Tories are filing in to see Tory Boy Clegg, who has only been an MP for 5 years, for a different kind of premiership – the job of Prime Minister.

Below are the 3 wise men; the contenders for a job which will be the finish of whichever one of them takes it.

Proportional Representation.

So what is all this new system the Liberal Democrats want for British Politics – Proportional Representation – and how would it work?

Well I'm sorry if it looks as if I have a clue on this and that I might write something here that is enlightening but I can't because I don't have one - a clue that is; but when did that stop me from having an opinion?

One thing I do know is that there were so many people turned away from polling stations yesterday who stood in queues for hours and still couldn't get to vote with the simple system that they have now; so how would it be with complicated papers containing Proportional Representation?

At 9:30 pm yesterday, half an hour before the 10:00pm deadline, council workers at a Hackney polling station, were telling people in the queue that they would not get to vote; this was met with cries of 'Over my dead body' and similar comments but it wasn't to be; they were sent away voteless.

What's going to happen about this is anybody's guess but it seems to me that if you see queues all day you would bring in extra staff – one polling station actually ran out of voting papers.

But getting back to Proportional Representation (PR) and how it might work: proportional means relative so it would mean the percentage of votes you get in the country, or in the constituencies, would correspond with the amount of seats you get in the house of commons.

So how many MPs would each constituency have representing them and when they get to Westminster where would you put them?

Would each MP still have an office? Would there be secondary MPs? Senior MPs?

What about The Monster Raving Looney Party? They had candidates in many constituencies; this year they were actually backed by Britain's second biggest bookie; William Hill so they were called The Monster Raving Looney Party; William Hill.

For those not familiar The Monster Raving Looney Party was taken from a Monty Python sketch and just above is the late Screaming Lord Such who founded the party.

How many seats in the house percentage wise would go to them? One percent? That would be 6 MPs. 6 and a half MPs to be more precise wasting everybody's time with their antics.

At the moment I don't know how many votes, percentage wise, the parties in Britain have received. I could be wrong but I think it was something like 36% to the Conservatives, 28% to Labour and 22% to The Liberal Democrats; translating that to the House of Commons who have 649 seats to fill – the other one going to the Speaker of the House – not to be confused with Nancy Pelosi's job, by the way, as the Speaker is just that – he or she controls the house and calls upon members to speak amongst other things.

36% of the seats to the Conservatives = 234
28% of the seats to Labour = 182
22% to the Liberal Democrats = 143

That comes to 559 leaving 91 seats to share amongst the rest; there will be the Ulster Unionists, the Green Party, the Scottish Nationalists and the British National Party sharing the remaining percentage of the 16%.

Would we really like to give a voice to the fascists or the Nazis – or whatever they want to call themselves this year? Would we really want to throw the commons into a state of chassis?

Isn't it bad enough that they are represented in Europe?

As Captain Boyle said in Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock – 'The whole world is in a terrible state of chassis.'

Let's leave it alone and it will get better.