In the run up to this contest one of the Conservative Councillors in Reading, a man called Richard Willis, wrote on his blog of his excitement at the prospect of his party, long in the wilderness returning to ‘power’, “it feels just like 1979″, he gushed.

This begs the question; ‘How exactly would he know that?’ I have never been sure of Councillor Willis’ age, these Tories have a way of looking middle aged before their time and he was never exactly trendy – all dark blue suit and bluster – but I’m pretty sure he must be still under 40. He must have been under 10 in 1979 – not exactly an age when you gauge the feel of electoral events. But we can all pretend, and Councillor Willis, who blogs a lot has always had an over-active imagination.

So it isn’t really his fault that he’s wrong on the 1979 thing. 1979 was a much more polarised affair that today. The Conservatives were offering something altogether more hard line, the economic problems, though equally real, were also very different and the persona of the party leaders was polls apart from today. But you can’t blame Councillor Willis and the like for getting over excited. At the time he wrote it, with Labour seemingly falling apart, David Cameron a shoo in for Number 10 and the Liberals sidelined, it should have felt more like a Tory version of 1997.  Since then it has been variously 1992 and 1974, but after the first two debates it’s been welcome to the 1983 show.

’83 was, I also suspect, somewhat before Councillor Willis time in political life. It was unique in the elections I’ve been involved with because it was the only time the campaigns made a really significant difference to the outcome. The Conservatives were always going to win and win big on that occasion, but in the final two weeks of the campaign Labour suffered catastrophic indiscipline, appalling PR and serial incompetence from their leadership. The ‘Alliance’, an electoral pact between the Liberal and Social Democratic Party, as it was then, built support at Labour’s expense and, with the result a foregone conclusion, was able to eat into Labour’s vote, take second place in a few polls, and almost made it into second place in the popular vote. As it was they didn’t – in fact they lost seats they had taken at by-elections earlier in the Parliament though they gained 12 overall.

While there was movement during the campaign in 1992 it was always small scale and within the margin of error of many polls. In 1983, while the result was never in doubt, the implications for the two party system and for the then opposition, were very serious. When a party, whoever they might be and whatever they might stand for, gets more votes across the land than another yet ends up with many fewer representatives there is something horrendously wrong.

1983 avoided this situation by the narrowest of margins. During that campaign we saw the interesting spectacle of Margaret Thatcher, no less, building up the Labour threat in the days before the poll so to avoid complacency among Conservative voters. Maybe it worked to some extent and 1983 did not produce the outcome some had feared. The Conservatives managed just over 42% of the vote. The left of centre alternatives split almost evenly between Labour and the Alliance – result Tory domination.

2010 is the 1983 show revisited because it is the first genuine threat to the two party system since the Alliance imploded after Neil Kinnock’s heartland strategy saw them off in 1987. There is a real possibility that the anti-politics mood of the electorate and the failure, so far, of David Cameron to convince the electorate of his agenda will lead to an outcome that will genuinely break apart the old order. No quite the outcome that Councillor Willis was anticipating those months ago.

I don’t gamble but, if I had, at every other election in my political lifetime I would have put money on the outcome. Not this time. This an election where nothing can be taken for granted and there may yet be twists that enable someone to establish a clear victory but with non-Conservative forces so manifestly divided it would be premature to write off either David Cameron or the prospects of a working overall majority for the Conservatives.