Students at My Big Fat (Mini) Election. Cabinet Office / Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Bookmakers regarded the result in Oxford West and Abingdon as a near-certainty. The ten thousand vote Conservative majority from 2015 seemed impregnable. But an almost unequalled 15% swing on the day saw Liberal Democrat Layla Moran beat the incumbent Tory by a few hundred votes. This was one of the most extraordinary results in an extraordinary election.
What happened here to push out the Conservatives? Simply put, tactical voting on an industrial scale. Large numbers of people were persuaded to ‘lend their vote' to the Liberal Democrats, in the language of the many garden placards that dotted the constituency.
