Realist Politics

Delegation being the art of leadership, Daveybloke has dispatched headmaster Rupert's favourite swot to administer a ticking-off to the Home Secretary. Theresa May, who likes to deport people on the grounds of fictitious feline ownership, presented herself as a "realist" in a barnstorming blather on Saturday; and Daveybloke, despite his famous way with the ladies, has apparently not yet plucked up the courage to calm down the old dear's frustrations in person. By today's Buñuelian standards, May could indeed be counted a sort of realist: she wagged a finger at the Nasty Party in opposition before government metamorphosed her into one of the Nasty Party's most swivel-eyed embodiments. Nevertheless, it remains an open question whether Gove, the one-time Murdoch hack who lectured the Leveson inquiry on freedom of the press and who thinks British schoolchildren in the twenty-first century should be given an Empire Youth education, is more of a realist than she.

Anyway, now that Gove has exerted his gravitas, and presumably ordered May to mend her ways lest a couple of tame cyber-bullies start stalking her on Twitter, Daveybloke and his new best chum Lynton Crosby have started working up a list of Conservative achievements on which the party will be campaigning for the next two years, in case there aren't any more. Unsurprisingly, pulling Nick Clegg's arse out of the fire at Eastleigh is not prominent among them; although they do include such master-strokes of statesmanship as isolating the Continent from Britain by wielding a veto, and giving UKIP a veneer of near non-idiocy with the promise of a referendum.