Farage narrowly missed beating Tories into third by few hundred thousand votes
The Independent|July 07, 2024
Nigel Farage's Reform UK would have needed to win over just 364,474 more voters to gain more seats than the Conservatives in Thursday's election, shock analysis reveals.
ARCHIE MITCHELL
Farage narrowly missed beating Tories into third by few hundred thousand votes

The insurgent right-wing party won 14 per cent of the votes but gained just five MPs, due to the even spread of its support.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives won just 19 per cent but gained 121 seats under the first-past-the-post voting system. While Labour's average votes per seat won was 23,600, Reform's average was 820,745 per seat, the number-crunching shows.

And Reform was second in 98 constituencies, meaning that if enough voters had switched from the winning party, it could have leapfrogged the Tories to become the official opposition based on Thursday's results.

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