Just when you think life can’t get any worse, it suddenly does.
There we all were, public and politicos alike, positively howling for the cessation of the madness on 6th May, only to return a hung Parliament. Now we learn that the result not only means that the news media are promising to camp outside an empty House of Commons indefinitely, speculating on what Vince Cable’s tie indicates about the willingness of Tories and Liberals to co-operate on fisheries policy, but worse: that we might be re-running the electoral fun in about 18 months time. Or less.
The papers this Sunday are a pale reflection the kind of limbo-induced ennui that teenagers in Broken Britain must feel whilst whiling away the dead hours before they can get to the park bench and the Diamond White, as they attempt to fill the empty pages between now and, you know, something actually happening. For the sanity of the nation, we can only hope that Cameron and Clegg get their shit on, PDQ.
Putting a brave face on it is Observer commentator Nick Cohen who argues that all this could have a beneficial effect on the political landscape. In the less sanguine manner for which we all love him, the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens calls Cameron’s Conservatives a “cynical fake” and calls for a split between them and “traditional” Tories. The Sunday Times front page has a useful “… as established earlier in the plot” piece with the new information that chief whip, or former chief whip as we now must call him, Nick Brown has informed the Gord that the Parliamentary Labour Party will not wear a deal with the Liberal Democrats.
As various MPs call for Brown to quit, the News of the World has the gen on the leadership bids that are being planned by David Miliboy and Ed Balls, as soon as the PM decides to shuffle off this political coil. And, of course, now we know who both the candidates are, we’re expecting nothing less than a good, clean fight.
Meanwhile, both the Sunday Mirror and the Observer are reporting trouble up t’mill, as they almost certainly don’t say in the Conservative Party. Lord Ashcroft has apparently been complaining that Cameron’s decision to win the Murdoch endorsement by getting behind the Sky campaign for leaders’ debates, in his view, cost the Tories an overall majority. Other offenders fingered for the Conservatives not ruling Britannia as nature intended are Michael Gove, Oliver Letwin and, inevitably, groovy guru Steve Hilton.
Finally, the first potential expenses scandal of the new Parliament is revealed by the Sunday Times. Go on, you’ll never guess …
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19 Responses to “What we’ve learned from the Sundays”
John Shields
If you think the Tories are in-fighting, just imagine what’s happening in the Lib Dem camp! I think the Lib Dem position is very week currently – not much worse than the other two parties, of course, but very weak still. They can’t seek to join a government with Labour: Gordon Brown is obviously a non-starter, as over 70% of the population clearly don’t want him as PM; and would people put up with another ‘unelected’ Labour PM? I doubt it. To do this would be electoral suicide for the Lib Dems: in fact, I would go further – for the good of UK parliamentary democracy, they mustn’t do it. There would be riots. A Lib-Con alliance recognises the only absolutely certain result of this election, namely that Labour lost.
Which means, they’ve got to reach a deal with the Tories. This is obviously not going to please anyone – Tory voters will be annoyed at any compromise on First Past the Post; Lib Dem voters will be annoyed at anything short of full PR. And both camps probably hate each other anyway. Well, here’s news for the lot of them: neither full PR nor full FPTP are going to result from the Lib-Con (perhaps it should be called ‘Whig’?!) deal. And that’s something everyone’s just got to accept. But, on the positive side, we’ll end up with a Cabinet and government that has been at least partly endorsed by 60% of the population – that’s got to be a victory for democracy, no? I mean, let’s not be children about this: we’re at least getting SOME of our sweeties, even if it’s not the full sweet shop.
Marcus Cotswell
In the Conservative Party, we’d say “trouble *at* t’mill” if we said anything ayt all, but mostly we wouldn’t say it at all because we’re not left-wing pseudo-intellectuals who think they understand the working classes but secretly despise them.
Robert
Maybe one of Lord Ashcroft’s sub-sub-subsidiary shell companies is going to arrange to sell contolling shares in one of the sub-sub-sub-subsidiary shell companies to Rupert Murdoch to pay for the Conservative party’s next campaign?
Mary Newsham
Well Marcus, neither are we. Not those of us who are left-wing and intelligent rather than pseudo-intellectual.We are not people who despise the working classes, largely because we are proud to be part of that demographic ourselves. People who work and who contribute to the country’s coffers through our taxes.People whose work is renumerated at a significantly lower rate than those who have advantage heaped on advantage and believe themselves entitled to limitless privelege.
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