WELL, that didn't go as expected. A stalemate squabble of an election had been predicted by almost everyone. No one party was going to win, according to anyone who could be bothered to offer an opinion (including this columnist). And in the end everyone was wrong.

Perhaps the biggest lesson is not believing the polls. The pollsters will no doubt be locked already in a darkened room with the corpse of their mistake, scalpels in hand for the postmortem.

So what else can we draw from David Cameron's "sweet victory"? He now has a slim but respectable majority. This will make life both easier and harder than it was in the coalition: easier because he will no longer have to consider Lib-Dems demands, and harder for the same reason. Now his own right-wingers will be less restrained, especially with the red meat of a referendum on Europe due to be tossed into the cage within two years.

In a similar scenario, John Major had a surprise victory in 1992. And from his sweet success there eventually flowed a sour tide of internal discontent, thanks to Europe. No one today would bet against the same fate befalling the unexpectedly re-hired Mr Cameron.

Julia Unwin, chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, was right to hope this week that David Cameron would use his majority to rediscover the "compassionate Conservatism" he long ago stopped mentioning. She wrote that the test of Cameron's premiership "will be whether he can unite all of us to improve social justice through social and economic reform".

This is true. The trouble is, you never know which David Cameron is speaking. Is it thoughtful and compassionate Dave or sneering and divisive Dave (the one who won the election)? As for his revival of the "One Nation" rhetoric, that's all well and good. Yet every time I encounter him using that phrase, I mischievously mishear it as "one's nation", suggesting as it does entitlement and ownership.

What do we now understand about coalition governments? Mostly that the minor party feels the pain later on. It is easy now to see Nick Clegg and his now almost vanquished crew as having been a human shield deployed to protect the Tories. Mr Clegg kept his seat, but stepped down as party leader – not that there is much left to lead.

Turning to Labour, what can be gleaned from that defeat snatched from the clenched jaws of a dead heat? Ed Miliband ran a good campaign in that he came across better than expected, but it wasn't enough. The departed Labour leader was good at pointing out the problems with Britain, including squeezed pay, casual employment and zero-hours contracts, alongside security for some and raging insecurity for others.

He spotted the problems, but his solutions weren't delivered in human-speak. In the end he was too much of a political wonk. Sadly, it was all too easy for his opponents, and their raucous cheerleaders in the more right-wing papers, to ridicule him without mercy.

Also, Labour never dealt with the economy problem, failing to speak up for their tenure during a global banking crisis and the subsequent recession. This left the door open for endless Tory warnings about the economy, for which Ed Miliband could summon up no convincing soundbite in retaliation.

This election also tells us a thing or two about our decrepit voting system. Just look at it this way: the SNP won 56 seats with 1.5 million votes; the Greens retained one seat after accruing 1.1 million votes, and Ukip gained one seat after attracting 3.9 million votes and coming second in 120 constituencies.

Now it is true that a cheer went up in many quarters when Nigel Farage failed to win. That result perked me up no end, but Mr Farage is right to point out that there is a need for "real, genuine, radical reform" of the voting system.

Now which party was it that never used to shut up about voting reform? The Lib-Dems, of course. It turns out they were right. So if the party's eight remaining MPs would like to start making a fuss, they should hire a small room and get ready to grumble.

The rest of us can just wonder what delights five more years of Cameron and Osborne will bring.