Listen Very Carefully, I Shall Say This Only Twice

Right, if we're going to speculate about what's going to happen, let's do it properly!

As I largely outlined last week, when Parliament reconvenes there will likely be 644 MPs; the Speaker and the (at this stage 4) Sinn Fein members don't count and Thirsk and Malton won't have polled (which will have an effect for a brief period!) so a majority will be 323. On the current projections, we probably have the following groupings;

Conservative - 306
DUP - 8
Independent Unionist - 1
RIGHT = 315

Labour - 259
SDLP - 3
LEFT = 262

Liberal Democrats - 55
Alliance - 1
CENTRE = 56

SNP - 6
Plaid Cymru - 3
NATS = 9

Caroline Lucas = 1
Sylvia Hermon = 1

So the viable majority scenarios are RIGHT + CENTRE = 371, RIGHT + NATS = 324 and LEFT + CENTRE + NATS = 327 and the RIGHT group can only form a minority government with Lib Dem support (as LEFT + CENTRE = 318 ) So yes, despite my earlier protestations the nationalists do end up with much of the balance of power.

Can we upgrade the metaphor from balanced to knife edge?