Cavity Search

The narrow and misshapen emptiness which passes for the soul of the Conservative Party will doubtless be the subject of a long and arduous search in the wake of the Eastleigh fiasco, in which the hard-right vote was split between UKIP and a UKIP-manqué Conservative candidate whose handlers were, for the most part, afraid to let her out in case she went and said something. The achievement of second place by UKIP, the stupid party for the Stupid Party and the Nasty Party's nasty party, has caused such consternation that Eleanor Laing, an ally of the late Foreign Secretary Adam Werritty, is worried that Daveybloke's ever-more-decrepit moderniser's mask is starting to hurt people's feelings. "Social change should come about by evolution, not by diktat from the top of government," whined Laing on BBC Radio, barely a breath after gushing over such painlessly gradual social changes as the Bullingdon Club's unilateral abolition of Europe, their assault on immigrants and the poor, and the continuing project to kick education back into the 1950s. Meanwhile, Daniel Hannan noted that "the two right-of-centre parties between them got more than half the vote but the Lib Dems won the seat with less than a third of the vote". The problem is that "an essentially Eurosceptic electorate keeps returning essentially Europhile majorities to parliament", which may one day lead to a terrible irony and a terrible situation whereby the coveted referendum on seceding from the Euro-wogs fails to take place. It is unclear whether Hannan, the MEP who referred to the National Health Service as a sixty-year mistake, is equally concerned that an essentially pro-NHS electorate keeps returning essentially privatising majorities to parliament; but his new-found enthusiasm for coalition and proportional representation is intriguing.