About That Mandate

Well, that was fun, wasn't it? There were a few minor disappointments: the flatulent filibust Philip Davies seemed to be out at one point but wasn't; the Clegg-pledging race-baiter Amber Rudd stayed in, apparently by adopting the EU tactic of ordering recounts until the proper result was reached; the eminently forgettable Tim Farron hung on with his majority reduced to a perfect number; and our own Mike Freer squeaked back in as well. On the other hand, Ben Gummer, the Minister for Being the Son of a Former Minister, had to eat the poisoned hamburger; and Nick Clegg, essentially a dead man walking since Conservative tactical voters graciously kept him at the trough in 2015, was finally consigned to the oblivion he has so diligently earned.

Best of all, Tin-Pot Tessie's contempt for the public has been richly repaid in kind, though not quite richly enough to make her take the hint and clear out. The neoliberal wing of the Labour Party may possibly have grasped that it can sometimes pay to oppose the Conservatives, and occasionally even to outflank them from the left rather than the right; certainly we may hope that the party's rich crop of bland careerists will be re-aligning their self-interest in some interesting new directions.

In the meantime, the dead-eyed warden herself is determined to combine the best of all worlds and build a strong and stable coalition of chaos with the supporters of some Irish terrorists. The Democratic Unionist Party includes uterus-Nazis and climate change deniers; but these will cause no great qualms for the woman who couldn't wait a week before inviting the Trumpster to grab the Queen by the corgis. Like Tin-Pot Tessie, Arlene Foster has experience of paying for a calamitous blunder by simply staying in office and refusing to budge; but the Democratic Unionists are slightly better informed than David Davis about the state of the border with the Irish Republic, and they are a good deal less sanguine than the Conservatives about the prospect of leaving the EU without a deal. Assuming the Government survives at all, it seems a safe bet that austerity is over for at least some of Northern Ireland; everything else, including more than a few bowels, remains in a state of flux.