The UK general election has delivered a majority in the House of Commons for the Conservative Party on its own. This was a big surprise, probably, to every person who followed the contest.
The reason it came as a shock is that opinion polls didn't anticipate it. If the final-week surveys had put the Tories on around 38 per cent support and Labour on 31 (as seems to be the outcome), then that's what we would have expected and all those jaws would not now require retrieval from the floor.
Instead the polls almost uniformly had the major parties roughly neck-and-neck, usually at about or 34 per cent each, give or take.
So what happened?
Surveys don't really claim (or shouldn't) to "predict" election outcomes. Instead they are estimating how the total population would answer voting-intentions questions.
In most countries, unlike Australia, there is the added variable of turnout. People might tell the pollster they will cast a vote but, come election day, they might decide they couldn't be bothered. Or vice versa.
(This factor, and the mistaken belief that one is on the electoral roll, is not totally absent in Australia, but its effect is very small.)
But was there a "late swing" or did the polls get it "wrong"?
It will not ever be possible to know for sure. Some pollsters will go back and reinterview final-week respondents and, almost inevitably, will report that, yes, some of their subjects changed their minds at the last minute and swung to the Tories.
Unfortunately, there is a tendency for respondents to claim this anyway. That is, surveys after elections asking who people voted for usually find greater support for the winner than was actually received. Some people, a tiny few, wrongly convince themselves they backed the winning horse.
Bragging rights
An element of revisionism seems to be creeping in about general expectations of this result. David Cameron's survival as Prime Minister is not, in itself, the shock-horror outcome. How well the Conservatives did is.
The betting markets are not, contrary to widespread belief, great predictors of election results (see Straw men and sleights of hand), but they do efficiently distil general expectations.
In the dying hours of the campaign I visited one of the big outfits and their implied odds greatly favoured Labour winning more seats than the Conservatives. However, on which leader, Cameron or Ed Milliband, would be prime minister, expectations split down the middle, as they have for most of the campaign.
In fact, the snapshot I observed had Cameron favoured slightly ahead of Milliband.
Yesterday, ABC journalist Chris Uhlmann tweeted: "One who did see this coming was Liberal federal director Brian Loughnane who told me this week ‘it could break for the Conservatives'.''
Settle down Chris. As one Tweep put it, Brian wasn't exactly going out on a limb.
In fact, the wording of Loughnane's assessment - the "could" - actually implies a Labour victory was the likelier outcome. Sorry, no bragging rights for the federal Liberal director this time.
I declare the bragging rights rules for the UK election outcome are as follows:
Anyone who publicly declared that a Tory absolute majority in the House of Commons was more likely than not earns full bragging credits. These they are entitled to spend with great flourish and exuberance. But it's doubtful anyone on the planet actually did express this anticipation (except for Conservative politicians, who didn't really believe it).
If, against the tide of expectations, you predicted, or assessed as more likely than not, a Conservative plurality - more seats than Labour or any other party - you get high marks. Well done you.
But if you mumbled that the Tories "could" win, this generates zero bragging rights. It's like saying Hillary Clinton "might" become president of the US: it asserts nothing.
Lessons back home
Does the UK result hold any lessons for Australian politics? The obvious parallels for the federal Coalition are: first-term conservative government breaks election promises, administers unpleasant medicine, blames it on the fiscal profligacy of the predecessor and trails, often badly, in the opinion polls most of the time.
In Britain, voting intentions narrowed in the months approaching polling day and then, in the "only poll that counts" - well you've seen the ending.
Some will dismiss any comparison as fanciful, but that bow might not be as long as it seems. At the very least we can say that Thursday's election shows that polling can be unreliable and, with ever-declining rusted-on support for major parties, surprises can happen.
A difference is that Britain's House of Lords is an appointed body that can only delay legislation and so their governments have an easier time putting their policies in place. Over here the Senate has blocked most of the Abbott government's controversial measures.
As well, Cameron's government could point, after five years, to a clear improvement in the government's fiscal position; they could boast gain from the pain.
The Abbott government inherited much smaller deficit upon coming to power, but it's only grown under their watch, partly because of the Senate, spending initiatives put in place by the previous Labor government, and new ones under the current ones, but mostly due to falling commodity prices and the public coffers' reliance on mineral exports.
But the larger lesson for Abbott from Thursday's vote is one that he could already have learnt from a place closer to home. Conservatives in New Zealand and the UK have successfully governed, pardon the cliché, from the centre. They indulge in no crusades against carbon pricing; they say they believe the science of climate change and - no winking and nudging to the "party base"- people believe them.
In Australia, by contrast, high-profile conservative commentators such as Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones publicly bark orders at the Prime Minister and senior ministers and, more importantly, those on the receiving end respond with obsequiousness.
That "base" here, spoilt by five years of Abbott's leadership, insists the problem is Tony is not right-wing and ideological enough.
Who do you think has it right, Abbott or Cameron and John Key?