What actually is the government’s majority?

Working out a governing party’s majority is simple – on paper.

In May the Conservatives won 330 seats. There are 650 MPs.

650 minus 330 equals 320. Therefore the Conservative government has a majority in the House of Commons of 10.

But as with most things at Westminster, it’s not actually as simple as that.

Let’s take a closer look at those 320 non-Tory MPs.

For a start, Mr Speaker. He was elected in 2015 by his Buckingham constituents as ‘Speaker seeking re-election’ and he never votes, except when there is a tie.

Then there are his three Deputy Speakers. Lindsay Hoyle and Natascha Engel are counted among the 232 Labour MPs elected on May 7th, and while they still are members of the Labour party they do not vote, just like the Speaker.

It’s the same for Eleanor Laing, re-elected in Epping Forest as a Conservative.

She remains a member of the party as Deputy Speaker but never takes part in votes, unless she, like Lindsay or Natascha, happens to be in the chair when there is a tied vote.

The four Sinn Fein MPs refuse to take their seats, and even if they suddenly decided they wanted to vote, they would first have to take the oath of allegiance. Any such move is extremely unlikely, given the party’s long history of abstentionism. So there are another four votes gone.

These factors are taken into account when calculating what is known at the government’s ‘working majority’, which in this case is actually better for David Cameron and his ministers that the raw numbers would suggest.

The working majority is 16. But again, it’s not as simple as saying ‘if just eight of Cameron’s MPs vote against the government it will be defeated’.

There 329 Tory and 313 non-Tory MPs who are eligible to vote.

However, they do not all turn up to vote. For example, the vote on the Queen’s Speech, the key moment when the government’s legislative programme was approved, passed in June.

There were 326 Ayes and 279 Noes.

That means just 605 out of 642 ‘eligible’ MPs voted. What happened to the other 37?

Four of those MPs were present and were in the voting lobbies but are not recorded in the Ayes/Noes.

They are the tellers – usually whips, two from each side of the House – who help record the vote but are not counted themselves. It is the tellers who, after some bowing, announce the result of the vote at the Table of the House.

There were therefore 33 MPs who apparently didn’t turn up for the most important vote of the parliament so far. We have no way of knowing how many – if any – were present but chose to abstain.

There are many reasons they may not have been there – at least one MP was on maternity leave, and no doubt the party whips will know why the others were not there to vote.

Then there is the complication of MPs being able to vote in both lobbies – sometimes used to mark an ‘abstention’. That particular move can confuse the hell out of everyone, particularly journalists searching for lists of rebels.

Talk of a majority or even a working majority is pretty much meaningless. It all comes down to how many MPs are present, and that will never be 650.

As an historic example, the last time a government fell on a vote of confidence was on 28th March 1979.

The Labour government led by James Callaghan was defeated by 311 to 310.

That is 621 MPs who voted, plus four tellers, plus the Speaker and his deputies, bringing the total up to 629.

There were 635 MPs elected to the 74–79 parliament.

So even at that moment of national importance, some MPs did not vote and Hansard cannot record how many abstained.

Even on a vote of confidence at least one MP won’t be able to be present in the chamber.

A government’s majority is dependant on circumstances, no matter what the numbers say on paper.