Vindictive, vicious, destructive and hypocritical press harlotry

The Telegraph's inglorious war with Murdoch brought down David Laws. For its own venal reasons which have fuck all to do with public probity the former 'newspaper' determined on the demise of an excellent and honourable politician whose country, it knows, needs him badly and whose family is now being made to suffer despite the man's own years of discretion out of affection for them.

There’s something sick about this country. We’ve spent a weekend arguing about whether David Laws should go when we should have been trying desperately to persuade him to stay.

[...]

David Laws could have arranged things likewise, and claimed as much or more. I find it shocking that commentators slavering for a story that fits the headline “fleecing the taxpayer” have entirely glossed over that central fact.

Matthew Parris has it right, yet again. So has David Blackburn.

The Telegraph crew are a bunch of unutterable bastards with regard and respect for nothing and no-one. Not even for the welfare of this country, numbers of whose citizens keep them employed - for now - by buying their rotten rag, presumably in the hope that it may revert to what it once was, a paper of record written by people of integrity and honour for people of integrity and honour. Those were the days.

Next time the Telegraph's political journalists are spotted with perfumed kerchiefs and pomanders held to their noses, perhaps at a Westminster soirée, because they are obliged to inhale the foetid exhalations of people who write for the Sport and the Express, I hope someone shies a few stinking fish-heads at them. No, not at the people from the Sport and the Express. At the people from the Telegraph. And save a few for that pointless personification of perambulating vanity, the hoity-toity hypocrite and bitch par excellence, Bradshaw. If I ever meet him, he is at risk of getting my entire compost heap, fish-heads, maggots and all, all over his beautiful suit.

Leave David Laws and his partner alone

If Laws had declared his relationship he could have charged the taxpayer for the whole mortgage. - Jerry Hayes

What he said. All of it.

Oo Matron!

Can you really see hard-hatted Mandy bestriding a pipeline with a big spanner in his hand?

Martin Vander Weyer.

English devolution

What she said. Almost all of it.

So, farewell then (for now), Andrew Neil

Hazel Blears on This Week? No. No. NO! Not at any price.

The smug, prissy, know-all, patronising, pinch-mouthed little trougher just lost you a regular member of your audience, Neil, but I'm sure you'll do just fine without me. As soon as the vain, rat-faced, arrogant socialist midget has gone I will start watching again. Probably. It will be a relief to have the utterly repellent Diane Abbott back and there's a phrase I never thought I would type.

So, Clegg, then. Seriously?

I can take a joke, sure, but chairing 5 of 9 Cabinet Committees? 'More influence than Mandelson had'? Does the country repose that much confidence in Mr Clegg? Really? Nuclear secrets and all? How do we know?

This stranger-than-fiction government had bloody well better deliver. Seriously.

Talent will out

ConHome lists the Tory talent formerly on the Shadow front bench but now on the backbenches having made room for some LibDems in government jobs.

While they have my sympathy - up to a point - I'm not in mourning. They can make their mark and serve Parliamentary democracy on these beefed-up HoC committees we have been promised.

This Great Reform theme was Cameron's before it was Clegg's

David Cameron's LibDem deputy echoes Prodicus in recalling the 1832 Reform Act in response to David Cameron's 'Great Reform' speech of 26th May 2009.

I hope the media will remember that it was David Cameron's Conservative Party which promised these reforms if it came to government, and which Party and which Party leader is the junior partner in this reforming coalition government.

There is a small, monitory voice at the back my the mind as I consider the blessings of coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The activists behind Clegg have a well-deserved reputation for skulduggery. Their party leaders do nothing whatsoever to rein them in from even their worst excesses. Almost daily during the election, as during every one of the many elections I remember, there was irrefutable evidence up and down the country that LibDems include some of the most mendacious and vicious of all the parties' campaigners, for whom no dirty trick is too low, no smear of an opponent unspreadable, none of their opponents' political clothes safe from theft by opportunist LibDems.

No-one in the MSM ever mentions this. It's infra dig to bring it up now in the 2010 summer of political love.

Mr Clegg has comported himself pretty well since choosing between his two suitors, one of whom he found had nothing to offer and in fact looked like a potential wife-beater. Let's hope that his party follows him in the ways of peace, and that the quiet murmuring behind him is the sound of axes being buried, not sharpened.

Vindictive? Moi?

I shall savour this toothsome, mouthwatering little thought for the rest of my days.

Gordon Brown lost the only general election he ever fought because the people rejected him and for the rest of his days a small voice deep inside will be telling him that he failed.

And now for that Great Repeal Act.

Potting the red

Mary Riddell, in the Telegraph, castigates her Labour friends for wanking instead of working.

She loftily tut-tuts at their desertion of their constituency when in government and for wasting time pleasuring themselves in a testosterone-fest of party political warfare, Labour's genetically-programmed default activity.

Indeed. How many times did Gordon Brown and the comrades promise to 'fight' for... well, absolutely everything? Wearying, passé, irrelevant tribal ritual. Riddell has plainly spied the glimmer of political fact beneath the mountain of indisputable evidence following the election, although of course, being a Leftie, she cannot identify it. She does not grasp the scale of public outrage not at Labour's politicking but at the offensive damage her party has done to the country. She therefore restrains herself in censuring her fallen hero.

Mr Brown, for all his great qualities [such as?], only knew the politics and precepts of conflict. There was no compromise, no truck with dissenters, no quarter given. [Just McBrides, Drapers, Whelans and the Forces of Hell. Lovely. Such a credit to the nation.]

That inflexibility explains, in part, the erosion of civil liberties [she noticed?] and the haemorrhage of public hope [obit. c.1999]. It explains, too, why people turned away from a party that offered battle cries when the country craved a vision. [Tsk - see this rampaging herd of elephants, Mary?]

Well, all right, I suppose that's the most we can expect of Grub Street's Left although the words analysis and flawed spring unbidden.

On the other hand, those of us who understand Labour's 'vision' only too well are happy for Milibrothers, Ballses and Burnhams to devote their time exclusively to pocket billiards.

I usually don't bother reading Riddell but, grinning at the prospect of hilarity as Labour goes about its tent-pitching in the wilderness, today I did. And guess what? She annoyed me. So I wrote this:

After your own years of fighting talk in this column, I detect no sign that you, personally, are intoning the 'mea culpa' which you commend in your friends, but only the usual Grub Street de haut en bas hypocrisy. Motes, beams, casting first stones, etc. Contemptible.

With her self-righteous finger-wagging, Riddell is either making some sort of Labour in-joke or she's after her own memorial column in the Eye to lighten her declining years. Must try harder.

The language of politics

How refreshing to hear David Cameron and other ministers talking about 'quietly going about the business of government' and 'not chasing the 24 hour news cycle'.

What a pleasant contrast to Brown Labour's constant talk of 'fighting'.

I am battle-weary. It is a relief to have a government concerned simply with how to govern well, after years of Labour's unconvincing and pointless, non-stop political propaganda about its class war fantasy while they let the actual business of government run to chaos.

They still don't get it. Maybe they never will.

Thus James Purnell:

The coalition will want to say that this new politics shows that it is a progressive Government. [...]

What does “progressive” mean?

It means whatever the speaker says it means. To a Socialist, it means socialism and everything its equality-obsessed totalitarian world-view brings with it. It means taking power and then meddling in everything because only your divine insight can improve people's lives and anyone who disputes that is actually evil and must be fought by all possible means. Killed, preferably. No wonder Labour couldn't make a coalition.

To a Conservative, 'progressive' means helping people to make progress - towards something better, without destroying the good they and others have already achieved. It means building on what is, rather than tearing it all down in the name of a Brave New World of your own making. It means going with the grain of human nature, not fantasising that Men can be transformed into Supermen. It means learning from experience rather than from a textbook.

And does Britain want to be a progressive country?

In the Conservative definition, of course. What's not to want? In the Labour definition, no.

The Government [...] will say that it is progressive because it is doing things that are not traditionally right-wing: caring about civil liberties, the free schools policy, greenery.

Not traditionally right-wing? Only to a Left-winger whose allies claim all the virtues and - insultingly - attribute none to those who refute their dogma. Not traditionally right-wing to defend the liberty of the individual from over-mighty governments? Have you read The Gulag Archipelago? Name of Edmund Burke ring a bell? Thomas Jefferson?

But its policies will not transform society. Mr Clegg revealed this subconsciously when he said last week that “education is everything in the creation of a truly mobile society”.

Yes, let us reflect on the function of education in the process of liberating a society, and more importantly the individuals who comprise that society, so that they may make progress towards a better life.

The educational methods which Labour governments have advocated since Anthony Crosland, their sell-out of education to the raw power of the teacher unions, and the Gramscian philosophy underlying so much of Labour's Fabian mendacity over many generations, have resulted in a semi-literate Labour-voting or non-voting but politically-passive underclass. This is wholly to the political advantage of the Labour Party who thereby harvest what amounts to an automatic vote in the UK regions with the lowest education attainment, from people wholly dependent on the state for their livelihood because they are prevented, by Labour's 'education' system, from earning their living in the wealth-producing world.

And Labour tells them this is all right, that there is no need to work or to worry, that Labour will take care of all their needs and that any who say this is not good are wicked, their enemies, and that Labour will fight these wicked enemies on their behalf. Vote Labour.

Irony of ironies: V I Lenin's motto was 'education, education, education'. The difference between Lenin and our late Labour Party masters was that Lenin meant it. Lenin was no Fabian. He was more honest than that.

That “everything” underlines the Government’s progressive shortfall: it underestimates the conditions that need to be met to make people powerful.

Excuse me while I choke back this bitter laughter, Mr Purnell. Remind me precisely how, after thirteen years of Labour in office, with (just for starters)

• your multifarious insecure databases threatening my identity
• your ubiquitous CCTV watching my every move
• your 4,000 new criminal offences
• your ID cards
• your fingerprinting of my children against my will
• your detention without trial for longer and longer periods
• your criminal record checks on people taking care of friends' children
• your making my children go to a school in which you make the the staff accept violent disruptive children in class so that my children are not educated but bullied
• your suppression of my right to speak freely, to smoke, to drink alcohol
• your forbidding me to take photographs in my street
• your rebukes about my eating and exercise habits
• your legislation against my (and incidentally the nation's established) religion in favour of the religion of hostile refusenik foreigners, right down to your prohibitions on my wearing a cross in the office
• your new army of jobsworths who may enter my home against my will
• your laying out the welcome mat for nobody-knows-how-many millions of immigrants who have changed the face of my country for ever and openly state their intent first to challenge, then to break and finally to abolish its laws and customs
• your signing away our nation's sovereignty against the known majority will of your countrymen
• your hospitality to foreign murderers in the name of their (but not my) 'human rights'
• your record numbers of adults and young people who have never worked and are never likely to
• your ossification of social mobility (sacrificing educational excellence on the altar of your Equality Gods) so that poor, uneducated children are more likely than ever to remain poor and uneducated
• your abdication of control of our banks and consequently the increased likelihood of my losing my savings
• my reduced pension thanks to your increasing (against Treasury advice) taxes on pension funds
• your historically colossal debts around my neck and those of my children and grandchildren

... you have made me 'more powerful'? In any way? As a citizen, socially or economically? At all?

I'm listening.

Actually - I'm not. Save your breath. You had your chance. Never again.

Brown's and Balls's traitorous golden legacy

It’s a fitting epitaph to Gordon Brown’s career in government. He started with a piece of dishonest incompetence when he dumped 400 metric tonnes of our national wealth for £175 per ounce and concealed the true reasons for doing so. And he ended with a piece of dishonest incompetence at a time when gold is making new all-time highs at £830 per ounce.

400 metric tonnes is 13,342,500 troy ounces, multiplied by 655 equals a current loss of £8.7 billion. Since gold is conservatively expected to quintuple from here when it takes full account of the deficit spending and hyperinflationary policies of political leaders led by Gordon Brown, we can expect an eventual gross loss of at least £45 billion, ameliorated by several years worth of derisory 1% interest on the sale proceeds of £2.3 billion.

That £45 billion (a conservative estimate; veterans such as Jim Rickards and Jim Sinclair forecast an ultimate gold price of up to 4 times higher) may end up being the least of our problems. The peak price will arise by gold’s reinstitution as a cover clause for the dollar to restore USD creditworthiness; there simply won’t be any gold to be had to shore up sterling at that point. It is the terminal collapse of sterling rather than the loss of £45 billion upwards that will be the true legacy of Brown’s selling off of our national inheritance to bolster the dollar/ bail out bullion banks/ support the new European currency.

It’s easy to become sentimental when seeing Mr Brown and his young family depart Downing Street. But he has laid a mine in our economy that will not fully detonate for months if not years after his departure; and when it goes off our standard of living will be catastrophically and permanently debilitated. Unless David Cameron can now embark on a covert program of re-acquisition.

Gordon Brown’s signature throughout his term in office was dishonesty and incompetence. Let us now see whether the Labour Party elect his henchman in the gold sales (Balls) as the successor.

Telegraph commenter InstantSaver on May 13th, 2010 at 6:26 am

Roundup

Rounding up the liberals (lower case, British English definition) and getting them all into a government with an agreed five-year programme is a truly Conservative idea. The annoying fringe weeds of the two coalition parties will fulminate but find that they are irrelevant.

Conservatism's great strength, in evolutionary terms, is non-dogmatic pragmatism. The talent for adapting to changed circumstances and the knack of seizing the potential benefits of change in the national interest are the lifeblood of the Tory Party and the secret of its survival and resilience over many generations.

David Cameron has proved himself a true and potentially great Conservative Prime Minister by immediately recognising the truth of the outcome of the election and turning it to the nation's advantage. It redounds to his credit and shows that he is the best man for the arduous role of Prime Minister.

Cameron's decisive and imaginative invitation to the Liberal Democrats to take part in government demonstrated his own courage and wisdom and demanded the same on the part of both parties. Both parties will have to weather the opprobrium of those in their membership who put dogmatism before the opportunity to govern and would prefer to pontificate from the sidelines instead of taking responsibility.

The genuinely liberal (Orange Book) tradition in the Liberal Democrat Party sits well alongside the One Nation Conservatism of David Cameron and will drag the more mature soft left LibDems with them leaving the loonies on the sidelines.

The Social Democrat refugees from the Labour Party who later joined the Liberals because, frankly, they had nowhere else to go, may have to choose among supporting this government in the national interest, remaining inside it with seditious intent - which would indicate a naive political death-wish on their part - and going home to Labour, assuming the Labour Party survives its forthcoming philosophical convulsions to become a social democratic party and does not morph into a ranting hard left dinosaur.

Congratulations to David Cameron for being a true Conservative, for forming and leading a government intent on personal liberty, national security, independence and national advancement, sound money, compassionate social policy and pragmatic foreign policy in Britain's interest.

.

Joke of the day

The Green Party’s one MP, Caroline Lucas, has also suggested she would be inclined to support a Left-leaning coalition

That statement in full

And now for a song

Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday dear blo-og, Happy birthday to you.

Four years. Who'da thort it? Four years of railing at horrible Labour in government, and today we have a Tory government in the making.

And the sun is shining.

Denis, old chap...

Hilarious, watching Denis McShane stamping his little Labour foot and ranting about 'Labour people' being excluded from the Conservative/Liberal Democrat discussions!

"Cameron and Clegg - how very dare they?! They're... they're... they're not Labour people! Don't you know I used to be somebody?!"

Den, old chap. Come on. Time to focus. Get yourself into the present tense. OK? Ready for this?

Nobody cares what you think any more. We threw you out. Remember? No, it's not a dream. It happened.

Read my lips. You. Lost. Get over it.

Mwahahahahahahahahaha...

Labour's betrayal: UK forced to borrow billions to pay off Euro nations' debts

Labour's Gordon Brown signed the Lisbon Treaty in contemptuous defiance of the known will of the British people.

Remember the Labour government and their international socialist EU friends assuring us that Lisbon meant 'no fundamental changes'?

Lies. Lisbon makes compulsory what used to be illegal.

Well, now their 'mere tidying-up measure' is about to send Britain an invoice for £8 billion (and rising) which, because of Labour's profligacy, we will be forced to borrow, just when we are about to make unprecedented sacrifices in our own own country in order to cut our debt.

Thus we see the poisonous consequences Labour's economic incontinence and treacherous foreign policy.

British exposure to liabilities created by a bail-out under the scheme would amount to around 10 per cent of the total loan. If a country failed to repay, the cost to Britain would be €10  billion (£8.6 billion) for every €100  billion on which it defaulted. The scheme will present an immediate dilemma for an incoming Conservative government. A bail-out would increase British liabilities and debt at a time when Mr Cameron would be seeking to restrain spending. [...] Mats Persson, the director of Open Europe, said that while euro zone stability was in Britain’s interests, the bailout deal was not.

"This latest move could make British taxpayers liable for the debts of governments over which they have no democratic control - to the tune of billions of pounds," he said.

"A British government, of whatever persuasion, must really consider whether it should take part in centralised EU borrowing on this scale, not least since such facilities were always considered illegal under the EU treaties and wholly undemocratic." - Telegraph

The head of the Labour fish is completely rotten

Harriet Harman is not an unpleasant Brownite bullying thug like Balls.

So thinks Guido.

Well, of course not. The Duchess of Peckham can afford to keep her delicate hands clean with a husband like Dromey who will do her killing for her - for their cause - without batting an eyelid.

Did you see the look of cold, fanatical hatred in his eyes on election night? The threatening stare? Spine-chilling.

Lovely party, Labour. Dromeys, Whelans, Balls, McBrides... lovely. Even without Brown and the now utterly discredited Con-Mandelson

The head of the Labour fish is completely rotten. And pure poison.

Mud-wrestling for beginners

Fraser Nelson's response on election night at the very the moment cooperation with the LDs to ensure the end of the Labour government was raised was, 'It is unacceptable. I shall oppose it.'

This was the tenor of his Spectator editorial just before the election. Mr Nelson is a principled man which is wholly admirable but thank God he is not involved in setting up this country's next government. The practice of politics is about government. All else is commentary. In a moment like this, with unprecedented enemies marching towards us in the shape of the international money-lenders and with Whelan/Dromey/Balls/Harman openly threateing to 'unleash hell' on a democratically elected government because they are not it, the only objective is to despatch the enemy before he has time to regain consciousness and strike you down with a fatal blow, and to wrest the keys to the kingdom from his cold dead hands. All other considerations must wait.

High-minded Whigs and Tories, their delicate hands thrown up in horror at the noisome vapours which have suddenly polluted their rose-scented salons, must disregard their delicate sensibilities. The inconsequential luxury of theoretical debate and the civilised editorial conference must now wait upon the mud-wrestler and the bloodstained gladiator.

Nothing must prevent the dismissal from government of the Labour Party and the formation of a government which agrees on how it will deal with the nations's enemies.

This is the clear will of the people. The only question now is how. While those in a position to do so work that out, the rest of us must bite our lips and wish them luck.

Once Labour is mortally wounded and banished we can get back to drinking tea out of our porcelain cups and rowing about wallpaper. At least, in the interludes between bouts of street mayhem which our political enemies have promised us.

Meanwhile, crocodiles like Balls, Mandelson and Brown are watching proceedings and hoping the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats will tear each other apart so that they can devour the remains and take power in the ensuing vacuum. That must not - must not - happen.

Remember writing this, @Frasernels ?

The idea of a Lib-Con alliance may dismay many Coffee Housers. But there is a limit to how many opinion polls you can ignore. With the TV debates and what bookmakers say is the likelihood of a hung parliament, I fear we’d all better get used to taking Clegg – and the LibDems – a lot more seriously.

You should. It wasn't very long ago.

Serious times, serious politics

It is all very well for journalists and satirists to sit on the sidelines criticising everyone. But good politicians should not want to be like us. They should want shape their country's future and take the consequences. - Nick Cohen.

See what he did there, Fraser?

Aide memoire for Tim Montgomerie and Fraser Nelson

September 2007 - "Many Conservatives are less than keen on Project Cameron. What we have to remember, however, is that David Cameron is the only man who can stop Brown from winning and gradually undoing the work of Margaret Thatcher. It's always better to be in government than out of office - unable to influence the course of our country. We all need to remember that in these important few weeks. Five more years of Labour - with* Brown in charge and none of Blair's reformism - will create a population that will be so state-dependent that a real Conservative Party will find it very difficult to win a majority again."

How quickly some people forget.

This is a moment in which it is urgently necessary to discard some aspects of doctrinaire Conservatism (an oxymoron if ever there was one) in order to defeat our two greatest national enemies: the Labour Party and economic catastrophe, the harsh reality of which has yet to become apparent to most people but which may yet be ameliorated by swift, pragmatic action.

When those wars are won, we can put down our arms and revisit the beautifully illuminated books of the old faith.

Meanwhile, there is only one prayer: From these our enemies, O Lord deliver us. To which the response is: God helps those who help themselves.

* or without

Britain to feel the smack of firm gummint

As you read this, the unelected Dictator of Britain, Gordon Mugabe, is digging in beneath Number 10 Downing Street, London. His doctors continue to search for signs of his having any contact with reality.

M.I.A.

Where is Michael White? Should we send out search parties?

We have been warned

The stony Stalinist stare of Dromey and the ditto defiance of Whelan is utterly chilling. Their contempt for the democratic will of the electorate is written on their terrible faces. God save us from such bastards who will, of course, now orchestrate street chaos and destruction.

53?

The average retirement age in Greece is 53?

And they're in the Euro? They're in the EU? They're demanding money from the German people?

Well, OK, then. Let the lazy tax-avoiding gravy-train-riding fantasist freeloading fuckers burn their capital down if that's their idea of responsible grown-up economic planning.

Then when no-one will touch them or their toy-town economy with a barge-pole, maybe the light of reality will dawn and they will set to work building a proper economy.

Meanwhile, God help the grandmothers and grandfathers and the children, victims of the criminal loud-mouth rabble-rousing bomb-throwing communist rentamobs and their deluded cannon fodder.

Poor Greece. I lived there, you know, in my previous life. What on earth would Aristotle, Plato and Socrates say?

Defence review

Secretary: ‘Dr Fox, there’s been a massive oil find in the Falklands.’ Liam Fox: ‘Oh, fuck. Somebody up there really really hates me. Call Dannatt.’ General Dannatt: ‘Oh, fuck. Does the Navy know? Call the Admiralty.’ Secretary: ‘General Dannatt, sir, the Admiralty’s got its answering machine on. I gather there is some sort of party going on over there. I’ll send someone round to find out why.’ Dannatt: ‘Stupid boy.’

VOTE CONSERVATIVE. VOTE LABOUR OUT.

This judgement for HMRC absolutely must be challenged

“It looks like HMRC argued that the client made an active choice not to take benefits and that this gives an IHT liability because, first, it reduced the value of her estate and therefore IHT liability; second, it could not be proven that there was no deliberate decision to avoid taking benefits.”

So now a court has found against a party who cannot disprove allegations made against him because he could not disprove them. Guilty as charged on the basis that an allegation is made by a contesting interested party.

Yes, I know the word guilty does not apply in a civil case but the operative principle here is universal and must not be conceded.

This ruling absolutely must be subject of an appeal.

Would you buy a used car from these people?

Get this man off my screen

I am getting f@cking tired of seeing Gordon Brown non-stop all day on both BBC and Sky. Exposure means votes. What happened to impartial coverage?

But why am I worrying? Labour are still going to lose. Badly.

POGWAS.

Psy-ops

Peter Hoskin makes the common mistake of thinking the LibDems are principled when it comes to tactical voting. He fondly imagines that the LibDems will spurn Labour's advance and decline tactical votes which could give them seats.

Failed LibDem leader Paddy Ashdown was waving his Flag of Principle on the electric wireless this morning. That's Paddy Ashdown the former commando, master of feint, subterfuge, espionage, camouflage and dirty warfare.

Hahahahaha.

A vote is a vote and the Libdems will stop at nothing to get it. Their shabby history of dishonest electioneering is the evidence. They steal people's policies and presentation and will change everything in their portfolio (except PR - their only hope) for the sake of a few votes.

God alone knows what they believe as a group and what they would do if we were mad enough to put them in office. No-one else knows - not even their leaders, given their infantile constitution.

Clegg is the polish on a very old, confused and ugly turd.

Sarah is Sharona to Gordon's Monk

It's getting really weird now.

Sharona Brown is always within touching distance of Gordon Monk. While walking, her hand is on his back. Every time he addresses a crowd, she is at his shoulder, staring at him stone-faced. On the tv sofa this morning, she almost had him on her lap. I have never seen a couple sit that close to each other. Well, not in public.

Her face is a study. An unblinking stare at his face. A worried frown. Sometimes her neck twists round like an owl's, so determined is she to make sure she never takes her eyes off him, not for a second.

This is not the expression of a woman gazing adoringly at her hero. It's more like the professional solicitousness of a psychiatric nurse watching her patient's every breath, facial tic and tremble of the hand, anticipating the final destructive break-out of suppressed psychosis.

But look! He has been transformed in the last 36 hours. Gone are the grey-faced moroseness and voter-hating depression. Instead, an amazing spurt of energy and animation. I suppose Sharona has upped the happy pills. Maybe her increasingly anxious expression means he's now on the maximum legal dose and there's nothing more she can do short of total sedation.

Hang in there, Sharona. You've only got to keep him going for another 48 hours.

Hitting the pain barrier.

I don't think I can face another news bulletin, and even in normal circs I am a newsaholic.

In the past week I have overdosed on GOTV campaigning, 24-hour political TV and radio, political betting sites and poll-dissection.

I’ve been looking for signs that the British electorate is neither so infantilised nor so brainwashed that it will allow Labour back into office whether by the front door or the back, or though an unlocked window.

I still need that assurance.

With every change in the betting, and every desperate, mendacious and corrupt word out of the mouths of the scum who have ruled us in recent years in their final war of attrition, and from the empty wannabes whose only policy is ‘Let me in!’, I oscillate from confidence that the British electorate is smarter and more principled than these Labour and LibDem bastards (hard to know which of the two parties is more dishonest), and despair that lies, fear-mongering, mischief and caprice will doom this country to the sort of socialist-inspired hell that is Greece today and may tomorrow be Spain and Portugal – two countries still living the backlash from fascist dictatorship. Yes, Labour’s criminal tax-and-borrow economic fantasy has indeed brought us that low.

Surely to God the people of the United Kingdom have not, alone of the sane, hardworking north Europeans, become the first extra-Euro PIIGS? The shame of it would be hard to bear.

Cameron says he will not be dictated to by the disastrously politicised civil service in the matter of hung parliament protocol, and especially not by a chief mandarin who is the most notorious Brown insider in Whitehall. Well, good for Cameron. However, if there is any risk of drawing the Crown into a political fire fight, Cameron may have to back down in that dispute. So the real decision lies, as it must, with the electorate.

Months ago, I put money on a Tory majority. Not a lot. More of a gesture than anything else. Will I win my bet? Like all gamblers, I think I bet with my head while in fact the guts rule for much of the time. I am getting used to these cramps, as doubt gnaws and faith waxes and wanes and waxes again.

But my compatriots are more like me than they are like Brown, Balls and that bastard Hain. Surely?

Maybe I will collect my winnings on Friday. If not, it’s not just my wallet that’s fucked. It’s my country and everyone in it.

The Conservative Party | Policy | Our Contract With You

The Conservative Party | Policy | Our Contract With You

Busy getting the Tories elected

Hence the staccato posting.

Reasons to be cheerful.

Nye Bevan would disown Gordon Brown

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus

- Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear, Heinemann, London, 1952, p. 39.

UPDATE:

For The Economist, the deciding issue is the willingness to confront the "liberty-destroying Leviathan" of public spending. - Indy

Evil house-elf unmasked

The very tiny 'Dobby' was captured on film by Guy News and while only his tiny bald head was visible in shot the producers got the scoop by revealing his true identity.

A bus farts

Image James Forsyth via the Telegraph.