UK General Election Results The UK Public Probably Regretted

[You kip if you want to...]

1992 has to be up there. The Tories won the election in the April and the government hit the skids in the September... and the party's still not fully recovered from that.

[You kip if you want to...]

On what timescale are you talking? About 30 months after any General Election, 'the public' (insofar as 'an opinion poll lead of 5%' can be taken as 'the public mood') generally wants any Government but the one that's in.

Admittedly the public mood managed to swing quite quickly against Heath; to take an example of real votes in real ballot boxes, rather than polls, the London local results of 1971, for example, would not have in ordinary 21st century circumstances have unwound the 1968 results quite so easily. 2011 was nothing like that.

I think the public will have made their judgement on a government by the time of the next election (usually 4 or 5 years).

The Tory's support dropped from 46.4% in 1970 to 37.9% in 1974. That's a big drop from one election to the next and a telling verdict of what the British people thought of the Heath government.

You can sort of feel if a government has generally been considered acceptable by the people or not. At least I think I can

The present lot will probably just about get away with it in terms of winning the popular vote although who will end up with the most seats is anyone's guess.

I see what you're saying about the current lot, but I don't think the public will ever see the LibDem's role in the government as at all acceptable, even if the Tories get in again.

[You kip if you want to...]

They regretted electing a parliament where no one party had a majority and wished that they had given a party a majority instead

Yeah, the regret in 2010 wasn't necessarily electing Cameron, but being fooled by Clegg during the campaign and letting him into government.