Those voters who have backed one of the two strongest candidates in a constituency get no further say in the process, whereas those who have voted for minor parties and crank candidates then get a second vote to determine the outcome between the two leading parties. By the time you read this, we will be getting the early results of the American Congressional elections and debating whether there has been another landslide, which would allow Newt Gingrich's Republicans to continue their reactionary revolution.Yet for all the talk of the so-called Republican landslide in 1994, the reality was that the Republicans gained just 51 per cent of the vote! Roy Jenkins really had to go some to find a system even worse than this and yet as we saw in the recent Australian elections, AV produced a result where Labour won a majority of the votes but the conservatives won a majority of the seats.The problem with AV was summed up perfectly by Winston Churchill when he pointed out that it allows an election to be decided by "the least important votes of the least important candidates". And we can't overlook the fact that here in Britain Labour has more than 60 per cent of the seats in Parliament, based on just 43.5 per cent of the vote.The problem with FPTP is that very small shifts in votes cast can be magnified into a huge landslide in seats won. As speculation mounted that I might lose, Lib Dem voters deserted their candidate for me, to keep the Tory out.At the next election tactical voting will cost the Tories at least 50 seats.

Sadly, however, this will largely be an exercise in voting for a lesser evil.The real disappointment of the Jenkins Commission on changing the voting system is that it will institutionalise a mentality of voting for a lesser evil in every constituency in Britain. By introducing a version of the Australian Alternative Vote (AV) system, rather than going for genuine proportional representation, Roy Jenkins has opened up the real prospect of allowing the supporters of first past the post (FPTP) to win the referendum.This is the great tragedy, because many people like myself who have long fought for a truly representative voting system will be left with no alternative but to support first past the post, because the AV-based alternative is even worse.If anyone needs examples of just how bad FPTP can be, they only have to wait for the result of the forthcoming election in Quebec, which looks like being an almost identical rerun of the 1994 election in which the Parti Quebecois won 44.8 per cent of the vote and got 74 seats, while the Quebec Liberal Party won 44.4 per cent of the votes but got only 45 seats. "When The Female Eunuch was written, our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves. At the previous election I had just managed to squeak in with a 1,600-vote majority, so the Tories made a special target of my seat, assisted by anti-abortionists who moved in activists from all over Britain to throw their weight behind the anti-abortion Tory candidate. It was a case of the anti-Tory vote not knowing which way to jump, and as such was very much the exception of the 1997 election.

Labour and Lib Dem voters often transferred to each other's candidates, depending on who had been the runner-up at the previous election. The consequences for the Tories of the growing tactical vote will be even more devastating at the next general election. No one will have to guess who is best placed to keep the Tories out, and I suspect that the Labour vote will collapse in seats held by Lib Dem MPs, and vice versa in Labour seats. I was one of the early beneficiaries of this trend, back at the 1992 general election. In his constituency of Folkestone and Hythe he was able to cling on with less than 40 per cent of the vote because the Labour and Liberal candidates split the remainder equally.

WHILE THE high point of most people's general election night was the defeat of Portillo, the real disappointment of the evening was the survival of Michael Howard. We are all, in fact, politicians, manoeuvring for support among shifting coalitions of desire every day; and when we get it wrong, and our government is overthrown, we have only ourselves to blame.Andrew Brown's book `The Darwin Wars' is to be published by Simon and Schuster in February. It's no use accusing us of intolerance when he won't even specify what we're supposed to be tolerating.What is horrible about his excuses is that they ignore the degrading truth about all of us. But the real charge against him is not that he tried to blame it on genes. That is less serious, perhaps, than blaming it on his parents, though he tried that a little, too: his father, we learn, was a monster. If this really was the determining factor in his character, perhaps he should have made more of it when he was offering himself to the Welsh people as their representative It is certainly less ridiculous than blaming the media. Hunter Thompson quotes frequently Dr Johnson's remark that "he who makes a beast of himself escapes the pain of being a man" - but the Doctor was wrong.

A man who tries to make a beast of himself simply becomes a divided, anguished beast.Bad news for Ron, then. But if those desires are controlled by genes, so must be the contrasting longings for respectability and lasting monogamy. It is possible to overcome some of our most deeply programmed genetic instincts, such as the fact that fire hurts, and pain is to be avoided - think of Thomas Cranmer holding his hand in the fire until it was completely burnt.But we can do this only by calling other instincts and emotions into play, and they, too, build on genetic foundations.We can to some extent choose which instincts we will gratify. We can make these choices easier by habitually repeating them, until they no longer require choice at all. But the one thing the gods can never offer us is freedom from choice.In England it is widely understood that divinity, like morality, is largely concerned with sex, and that genes are just a respectable word for horniness.