I can't remember if I've told you about the Kinnock Test. I don't think I have. It's my party piece. Perhaps that's why I don't get invited to very many parties.

The Kinnock Test is this - do you, on reflection, think it would have been a good idea for the country if Neil Kinnock had been elected Prime Minister in 1992?

Naturally I don't bother asking Tories this question, since, on the whole, their answers wouldn't be interesting. But I find the responses I get from Labour people endlessly fascinating. Particularly the replies I get from Blairites.

You see, for all that the Conservatives fell apart in the 1992 parliament, I still think it was clear that a Kinnock government would have been worse. No one needs to tell me how bad things got by 1997, because I was there (I always insist on the retention of that comma). But still I assert with confidence that the voters did the right thing putting the Conservatives back in power.

Neil Kinnock was entirely unsuited to being Prime Minister. His endless whirling speeches showed that. As John Major pricelessly commented, as Kinnock didn't know what he was saying, he never knew when he had finished saying it. And alongside this unsuitability was Labour's programme, still only partly modernised and containing a ragtag of unfunded spending promises and threats of greater regulation.

Some Blairites understand this. They would, as I would cheekily put it, pass the Kinnock Test. Party unity might make public confession difficult but I reckon Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers would both pass the Kinnock Test. I would think Blair's old pollster Philip Gould would pass it too, for all that he worked incredibly hard to get Kinnock elected. And Blair himself? That's a no brainer.

On the other hand I am sure that Charles Clarke thinks Kinnock as premier would have been a capital idea. And Blair advisers Alastair Campbell and Peter Hyman would fail the test too. James Purnell? Pass. David Miliband? Fail.

The Kinnock Test is thus an important way of classifying Blairites. A Blairite who thinks Kinnock would have been a good prime minister must believe that Blair's changes were mainly necessary in order to get elected. A Blairite who passes the Kinnock Test accepts that Blair's changes were required in order for Labour to be fit to govern. There is quite a big difference between those two positions.

As I pestered my centre left friends, one of them provided a striking response. Not only, he said, did the electorate get it right in 1992, he couldn't think of a single election since universal suffrage in 1928 where the voters had got the election wrong. And you know what? I think my friend has got a point.

The proposition is that in every contest in these last 80 years the party that was more fit to govern has been victorious. Sometimes both of the main offerings were weak and unappealing, often the winner wasn't much good, but always the winner was better able to conduct the business of government than was the loser.

There are a number of elections for which this proposition is, if hardly uncontroversial, still clearly correct. I thinks this holds for 1931 (where the National Government swept home, Labour having collapsed in disarray), 1935 (another National victory); 1945 (Labour's landslide); 1955 and 1959 (Tories defeating a divided and incoherent Labour opposition); 1964 and 1966 (Wilson's triumphs over the tired and outdated Tories); and for 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 (the market revolution having to be drummed into Labour's head until they at least partly got the point).

My contribution is to admit that even though I voted Conservative in 1997, 2001 and 2005 and wanted to see the party advance, it wasn't ready to govern.

This leaves a few contests to argue over. In 1929 Stanley Baldwin probably deserved to lose, having run on the slogan “Safety First” - an unbelievably complacent thing to do with unemployment running at 10 per cent. And Labour probably deserved its first proper chance to govern, even though it made a mess of it fairly rapidly. But the question of who was the better isn't clear cut. Then again, neither was the election result - the Tories had more votes, Labour more seats and no one had a majority. Right, in the circumstances.

Some might wonder about Labour being overhauled by the Conservatives over the two elections of 1950 and 1951. Yet this is because, since its passing, the Attlee Government has been canonised. At the time it was exhausted (in some cases literally dying), weak, out of ideas and incapable of responding to the aspirations of consumers. It needed to be replaced - right again.

When I have tried this out with colleagues, it is the elections of 1970 and 1974 that lead to the most debate. Those on the Left give 1970 as the big error by voters, while those on the Right think that in 1974 voters gave the wrong answer to Heath's question: “Who governs Britain?” In effect, the electorate answered: “The unions.”

What made it hard for voters to get it right in those elections, of course, was that no right answer was available (and don't say the Liberals, who were led by a man about to be charged with conspiracy to murder). Both Heath and Wilson were on the wrong track entirely. But I think it was, on balance, the best of a bad job to put Heath in and then to boot him out. In 1974 Wilson's crew weren't fit to govern but Heath's management of the economy had been so spectacularly, bewilderingly bad that turning to almost any alternative might be excused.

Do the victors just feel like the right answer because they won? Probably, a little bit. But I think that there is more to it than that. I think the history of the past 80 years shows that for all its terrible flaws, there is still something rather wondrous about British democracy.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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