Taking Out the Trash

Well, that was rather fun, not least thanks to an unexpected live-blog which fell in with the topsy-turviness of the times by starting at the top and ending at the bottom. Lots of deserving people lost their seats, including La Truss, Mark "Racist Van Man" Harper and the furuncular fotherington-tomas of the far right, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Unfortunately my own MP, the ever-abject Mike Freer, joined the maritime rodentine evacuation activities some weeks ago and thus escaped the carnage; the new Labour MP mentioned Islamophobia alongside antisemitism in one of her leaflets, almost as if the two were morally equivalent, so may soon be sitting as an independent if she doesn't watch out.

Independent candidates caused a refreshing amount of trouble: Corbyn won, Wideboy Wes Streeting nearly didn't, and an arbitrarily purged Labour candidate took a healthy chunk of the vote in Chingford; for which Team Starmer will no doubt exact reprisals in due course. Several former ministers, many of them Grant Shapps, were humiliated; as were a couple of Starmerites. Thanks to near-American levels of excusable non-participation, the new administration's majority depends to an unusual extent on marginal seats, which may make for further interesting times when the media honeymoon finishes and the tough decisions start. The strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange and three of his rabble finally managed to spend, sucker and sleaze their way into the House of Expenses Claimants, thereby providing a moderate and sensible parliamentary counterweight to the Greens, whose favourable exposure on national television will presumably remain as extensive as ever.

Finally, of course, congratulations are in order for the Conservative Party, which - despite the voter suppression, despite the gerrymandering, despite the lying and cheating, despite near-total ideological domination of the news media and despite, not least, the quality of its main opponents - still managed to achieve so historic a result.