Robin May wrote
[...]
You are wrong. It's incredibly rare for a Government in the UK to
have
been voted for by the majority of the population. I'm not actually
sure
if it's ever happened. The current labour government has the support
of
about 40% of those who voted, which means less than 40% of those
eligible to vote.

Comparing the votes with the whole population rather than the voting
age population is unreasonable, since the 22 % of the population that
is below voting age are unable to express their support or non-support.

But yes, in 1979 the figures were : a population of 56.2 million of
whom 44 million were of voting age and 41 million registered.
Total votes cast 31 million Tory 13.7 million (note that there were no
Tory or Labour votes from Northern Ireland).

There are also cases where a government can
have a
smaller percentage of the vote than the opposition, but because of
the
way the first past the post system works they still have more MPs. I
know that this has happened, and I think even to the extreme of the
opposition having a majority of votes cast (although I'd have to
check). And of course there's the very well known case of America,
where Bush got fewer votes than Gore and still won.

fewer votes counted rather than fewer votes cast.

It is common practice in the US not to bother to count postal votes if
they can't make any difference to the result (normal votes by voting
machine, postal votes have to be expensively counted by hand) and the
Presidential electoral college is designed to ignore the size of the
majority in each US state so the horrors of a nationwide recount are
avoided.

--
Mike D