What a drab, joyless, uninspiring spectacle it turned out to be. Australians are a great people and I can’t help feeling that they deserve better than most of the politics and some of the politicians who were on offer last week.

Back in 1981 I received a call from an old friend predicting the imminent demise of my party and urging me to throw in my lot with the recently formed SDP. “Labour is finished,” this excitable schoolteacher proclaimed, and what’s more, “the SDP are about to break the mould of British politics.”

Life at the moment can’t be easy for the 200 or so newbies who woke up on May 7 to find themselves Members of Parliament for the first time. In contrast to the 1997 Labour landslide that catapulted so many of us into the Commons in what already seems like another lifetime, this time it’s really not clear who’s in charge.

Now that Graham Brady has won chairman of the 1922 Committee by a landslide, the Tory leadership will be desperately smoothing the ruffled feathers of their own troops. Not only are many unhappy over the debacle of the botched changes to the 1922, but an even larger number are appalled at the bureaucratic madness that passes for the new, improved expenses regime.

Back in February I wrote of the determination of a small bunch Right-wing Tories to oust John Bercow as Speaker of the House of Commons. Their ringleader is the strange and ever so slightly scary Mid-Bedfordshire MP, Nadine Dorries

The horrific stabbing of Stephen Timms as he held a constituency surgery in East Ham has, we are told, reopened the debate on MPs’ safety.

So Nick Clegg, the leader of the party that lost in more constituencies than any other, is now set to be our Deputy Prime Minister. That’s not very proportional, is it?

The Guardian really has had a bad election. First, it ditches Labour for the Lib Dems, only to see its former party do much better than expected without their support and its new stablemate perform poorly. Then it works itself up into a lather of excitement over the prospect of a “progressive coalition” which will be lucky to last out the month, never mind an entire Parliament. In a breathless editorial this morning we were told of historic possibilities

It is difficult not to be a little impressed by the dignity and seriousness shown by the three main party leaders and their chief negotiators as they seek to respond to an inconclusive general election result. Nick Clegg has honoured his promise to give the party with the largest number of seats the first opportunity to demonstrate that it can produce a programme for effective governance that can command a sustainable majority in the Commons.

With the exception of a few deluded Lib Dems, a hung Parliament is everyone’s idea of a political nightmare. The prospect of getting jiggy-jiggy with the Yellow Peril is turning the stomachs of the tribalists of both the nation’s great parties.
For the negotiations to succeed, much will depend on the strength of character of the [...]