In Depth: The Conservatives will suffer electorally from the Liberal Democrats’ revenge over failure to support House of Lords reform

Ron Johnston, Charles Pattie and David Rossiter consider the background to and likely electoral consequences of the delay in implementing agreed changes to Parliamentary constituency boundaries. The Conservatives had anticipated their chances of victory in 2015 would be enhanced by the reduction of the number of MPs and the introduction of new rules for defining equal-sized constituencies. Because of a ‘revolt’ by their coalition partners which prevented those changes being implemented they now face a much harder task of winning a majority in the current 650 constituencies