Since we woke up to a Conservative government on Friday 8th May, it seems everyone but the Conservatives have been trying to accept defeat with good grace, while also intimating that the system that gave us this new government is somehow illegitimate – an interesting and awkward juggling act.

Claims that our current First Past the Post system leaves people entirely without representation are hyperbolic. An MP’s foremost responsibility – political affiliations aside – remains to represent their constituency, whichever party their constituents voted for. Oversight of this fact is not so much a problem with our electoral system as it is a problem with our engagement with politics.

The fact remains, however, that, in a constituency like Gower, for example – newly Conservative, with the slimmest majority in the land – of the over 40,000 that voted, fewer than 16,000 voted for the Tory candidate, Byron Davies. This surely indicates a huge proportion of public opinion in Gower going unrepresented.

In essence, while First Past the Post is, I believe, a fundamentally fair system for electing a parliament, an electoral system should also work effectively as a political thermometer, taking the temperature of public political opinion as accurately as is sensible to do so.

When parliament reconvened following the Election, David Cameron nodded in stern assent when acting Labour leader Harriet Harman underlined the importance of her party’s role as the Opposition. Given this then, should our electoral system privilege not only the pre-eminent voice in every constituency, but also the eminent opposing voice?

Just how this could be achieved is a difficult issue, likely only solved by a number of committees and reports – and that’s if the current, or any future, government decides to take on this issue of electoral reform. There is no shortage of new-fangled suggestions for a new system, with some kind of proportional representation being the favourite among those who care to discuss such matters at any great length.

The much-publicised downside of this idea, however, is that it removes the geographical ties of First Past the Post: under PR, an MP wouldn’t represent an area. While having your values accurately represented at Westminster is important, having MPs grounded in the communities they serve is equally critical.

So what if, instead of First Past the Post, we enacted a kind of First-and-Second Past the Post? Assuming the provision was made that each party could only field one candidate, and each constituency elected two members, the Conservative ranks would have been swelled in this latest election by around 176, Labour’s by 255, Ukip’s by 125, the Lib Dem’s by 66, the Greens’ by 5 and the SNP’s by 3.

Under First Past the Post, the Conservatives – the largest party in parliament – won around 51 per cent of the seats, with around 37 per cent of the vote, making a vote-to-seat disparity of around 14 per cent. In the hypothetical situation presented here, with that same share of the vote, they would have won around 41 per cent of the seats, a disparity of around 4 per cent.

Of course, I do not purport to have diagnosed what ails the British electoral system and prescribed a failsafe cure. There are obviously problems here. Besides creating a far bigger parliament (which would inevitably have to be rehoused), the hypothetical system I have suggested would also run the risk of vastly over-representing opposing political voices in parts of the country where the pre-eminent political persuasion is nearly all-compassing. Take Knowsley and its Labour majority of over 34,000, for example. While Ukip came second in the seat, does such a distant runner-up really warrant recognition as an opposing voice, worthy of parliamentary representation?

In light of such shortcomings, you may ask what the point of such a suggestion is. Essentially, it is to illustrate that, while we take the importance of the Opposition in the House of Commons, and the importance of opposing and alternative voices in our national political discourse as a whole, as given, our electoral system is perhaps not as dyed-in-the-wool with this principle as it could be – or as we would like it to be.

Ed Miliband was, at times, chastised for leading a weak opposition during his leadership of the Labour Party, and yet our electoral system ignores thousands of dissident voices in every constituency. As the debate over electoral reform rumbles on, this is a consideration that cannot be ignored.

@harryjcurtis