Alan Watkins: How young Mr Cameron would benefit from the support of an older, wiser man

To lose the election, Labour has to lose only 32 constituencies

In his Epistle to the Romans, St Paul tells us (8:6) that to be carnally minded is death. There is no doubt a good deal to be said for this point of view, though I confess I have not always wholly shared it in practice. But to be mathematically - or, rather, arithmetically - minded is even worse.

I once worked for an editor who had an aversion to figures. They put the reader off, he would say. He would seek them out with all the zeal of a 17th- century Puritan detecting a concealed Papist, and demand that they should be placed lower down in the column or even excised completely.

Naturally, I complied. It only goes to show the effect which a sound piece of advice can produce, if it is delivered at the right moment.

With this in mind, I should like to point out that, to lose the election - to hold fewer seats than the 324 required for an absolute majority - Labour has to lose only 32 constituencies. To win the election, the Conservatives must win a minimum of 127. The moral is that, Blair or Brown, it will be easier for Labour to lose in 2009, or whenever it turns out to be, than for the Conservatives to win.

I have written before about how that odious phrase the "hung parliament" entered political discourse. It was in the early 1970s. The Economist was responsible. Since then, the parliament in which no one party holds a clear majority is often written about as if it represents a national disaster.

The reason lies in the preference of textbook writers and practising politicians alike for what is called strong government. This mood was particularly prevalent in the immediate postwar period. Indeed, when Labour won the 1950 election with a perfectly workable majority of five, the end of the world might have been nigh. There was an Establishment conspiracy, in which Buckingham Palace joined, to form a Coalition or a National government of which Lord Salisbury would be the head.

Happily, this came to nothing, but less happily, the Labour prime minister, C R Attlee, was so affected by the prevailing mood - and, it is fair to say, by death and illness among his own ministers - that he went to the country in October 1951 when there was no real need for it. In so doing he inaugurated 13 Tory years.

These were described as "wasted" by the Labour opposition. In fact they saw the greatest social changes of the last century. What the now fashionable Attlee did was wantonly to deprive Labour of the opportunity to exploit the improved economic conditions of the 1950s, a chance that has not been denied to Mr Gordon Brown in a later age.

More recently, there has been a tendency to exalt Margaret Thatcher and (despite the loss of trust in him) Tony Blair as well. Both of them have enjoyed large and, sometimes, enormous majorities. There has been a correlative disposition to depreciate prime ministers who have lost their majority or did not have one in the first place: Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, John Major.

Edward Heath is also commonly added to the list, even though he had a comfortable majority until he went and spoilt it all by calling an unnecessary election, as Attlee had done 23 years previously.

My own theory is that, when we think of governments without a majority, we are thinking principally of the 1970s, a period which currently does not enjoy a good press, despite BBC4's decision to devote a whole week of programmes to the year 1973.

In practice, governments without a majority have not been uncommon by any means. Nor have they usually been attended by disaster. Since 1900, we have had them in 1910-18, in 1924, in 1929-31, in March-October 1974, in November 1976-79 and in February-April 1997.

On most occasions, the largest party formed the government. But in the second election of 1910, Liberal and Conservative had the same number of seats. The Liberals continued in office under H H Asquith until the formation of the first wartime coalition in 1915.

In 1924 the Conservatives had more seats than Labour, the second largest party, but Labour formed the government, which was brought down by the other two parties later in that year. In 1929, however, Labour won the largest number of seats, and had its reign, such as it was, ended not so much because of any treachery by Ramsay MacDonald as because of a Palace coup on the part of George V and his secretary Sir Clive Wigram.

But if minority governments are not uncommon, politicians and commentators are not much good at predicting when they are going to come about. During Mrs Thatcher's first administration, for instance, acres of print were devoted to the prospects for a hung Parliament, because the formation of the SDP and then of the Alliance seemed to have changed everything. She went on to win a majority of 144.

The mistake may have been forgivable. What was more surprising was that the hung Parliament remained a topic for exalted conversation up to and including the election of 1987. David Steel and David Owen could always be relied on to enlarge on the subject and to say slightly different things about their parties' intentions. Dr Owen was, like Mr Michael Foot in other connections, particularly prone to making things up as he went along.

As for Paddy Ashdown, who came later, there was never any great secret about what he wanted to happen. Last week it came out that he had offered a merger with the Labour Party. "Take away your filthy merger," said Mr Blair, or words to this effect. Mr Charles Kennedy deserves the greatest credit for putting the lid on the speculation as successfully and for as long as he did.

Sir Menzies Campbell has promised to follow Mr Kennedy in this respect. But Sir Menzies faces one difficulty which his predecessor did not have to confront. There was never the slightest possibility that the Liberal Democrats would give any aid or comfort to a party led by Mr William Hague, Mr Iain Duncan Smith or Mr Michael Howard. But Mr David Cameron? Ah, that may turn out to be a different matter: all the more so since Mr Blair's government does most of the things which the Lib Dems detest, and Mr Vince Cable is their new deputy leader.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Mr Jeremy Thorpe had joined the Heath government in 1974 as home secretary and then been charged with conspiracy to murder. Now that really is one of the great "what ifs?" of history.