Daveybloke Rallies and Waves the Dead Baby Again

Someone - possibly the Conservative Party's de facto chair, Lynton Crosby - has advised Britain's Head Boy that attracting the filly vote will take a bit more than replacing male Cabinet gargoyles with female ones. Daveybloke has therefore ordered Nick Clegg up into the loft to dig out the Head Boy's rather soiled and worm-eaten Cuddly Conservative mask, which has seen very little use since the extent of the Deputy Conservatives' attachment to principle became clear after the last general election. Now that all the dewy-eyed pre-2010 weediness has been buried in the Dark Net and hence forgotten by the voters, Daveybloke's handlers evidently believe that the reek of exhumation can pass for the perfume of novelty.

Accordingly, Daveybloke has had a bit of a burble at the Relationships Alliance, in which he offered single parents admission to the human race, though he does not appear to have specified whether the ticket will expire before or after May 2015. Daveybloke burbled about how jolly families are, and gave due praise to his trophy wife and spawn; one of the latter, it will be remembered, was considerate enough to be sufficiently dead and handicapped for use as an emotional colouriser for some sweet nothings about nurses and the NHS before somebody or other let Twizzler Lansley loose on them. Daveybloke burbled that there is at least one aspect of conjugal relations about which the Victorians did not know best, namely the omission of mothers' details from marriage registers. No doubt the party has a few upstanding members, like Owen Paterson and the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith, who still believe that each spermatozoön is a miniature Conservative and the female merely an incubator; but at least it should be easier now than in 2009 to persuade these intellectual giants that Britain's Head Boy has no intention of following through his pledges.