Deal or no deal?

Told ya so. (There, we got that out of the way.)

Never mind the impossibility of anyone ever managing to dodge the flying staplers for long enough to work with him, Brown's Labour Party (258 - including 41 Scottish MPs) and the Libdems (57) simply do not command a viable majority and will be hostage to nationalists. The Conservatives (307) plus the cabals of nationalists could also do it - but the obvious and preferred solution (for the English!) is that the Conservatives find some way to work with the Libdems. TMP suspects that a poll of the voters offered the various combo and "bogof" offers, will agree that this is the best compromise.

There is every possibility that the true financial situation we face is far, far worse than we had been lead to believe. There is every possibility that once Brown is surgically removed from office, examination of the Treasury books will reveal that he has behaved like the secretive bank clerk that has never been properly audited, where he has been embezzling funds for years to support an expensive wife: Labour's voters - the infamous but very real "client state".  Like that dodgy bank manager, 13 years has provided Brown with a lot of scope to devise clever ways of hiding the losses, and Brown will have kidded himself that he was going to be able to turn it all round, and replace the cash in the till before it was counted by external auditors.

The result of the election has produced the most exquisite set of circumstances designed to torture our politicians for their manifest misdemeanours. But however you try and spin it, Labour lost hugely; the Libdems lost embarrassingly - but in terms of their cruelly inflated expectations, they lost huge and comprehensively - with no sign of an improved mandate for their traditionally bonkers manifesto strategies.

So there was no mandate for big change in the electoral system, just a further example of a "curse on all your houses". In all the vox-pop interviews, what the people want is honest politicians, a sane electoral process - whatever that might be - and above all else, sound government that sorts out the financial mess of Brown's 13 spendthrift years. The people still want the opportunity to vote for strong government - and one that can be turfed out in its entity when it screws up.

Moreover, we are currently witnessing exactly the typical and unedifying consequences of PR - hung elections with factions of  losers frantically trying to stitch dodgy deals together. Can 5 losers make a winner? It's shambolic.

As a result, if this is handled adroitly, there should be less appetite for changing the system to make this the default process for every national election henceforth.  This crisis seems to arise from the people witnessing what can happen when one party is given too much power for too long, and wanting to spank the increasingly detached political class en masse. TMP suspects that what the people actually want is something like the US system where it is possible to balance the excesses of an over-powerful government by voting for a different flavoured Senate and House of Representatives - and indeed, President.

Gordon Brown has given every indication that he is a self-obsessed sociopath (long before the unguarded bigot comment proved the point beyond all doubt)  and seems incapable of accepting anything less than that he has a divine right to remain as PM. He will undoubtedly try every trick to try and scare Clegg that he will be tainted forever by a Tory deal, where the reality is that all Gordon cares about is that he remains in Number 10.

Of course a LibLab pact might work without the bombastic and messianic Brown as leader; but the idea that the Labour Party could then dump another leader and impose a "PM" on the UK once again is high farce, and the stuff of insurrection. Nevertheless, Labour apparatchiks like Harriet Harman, Ben Bradshaw and the perma-tanned and perma-absurd Peter Hain have suddenly seen the PR light and are rushing in that direction with embarrassing haste. The fact that Harman, Hain and Bradshaw are prime examples of career MPs who could not earn a living in the real world, needs to be kept in mind.

With this complex background, the only possible solution for Cameron was to make a generous offer to the libdems and put the onus on Clegg to be the disruptive one. Which is exactly what he did.

Cameron knows that Clegg is chronically lumbered by his own party's daft constitution that requires a 75% majority of the MPs for any deal, and that the (many) hotheads who have yet to fully appreciate that they they actually lost the election, will block any deal that does not offer a full route the sort of disastrous proportional representation that the wilder-eyed Libs have always craved. So there will be some form of Conservative government - with or without formal Libdem participation, and the plan must be:

• Restore fiscal confidence

And then, in parallel:

• Undo as much of Labour's endlessly crass legislation as possible
• Tackle the BBC's distorting and stultifying influence on crucial new and old media markets in the UK
• Depart Afghanistan with as much dignity as possible (we may need the soldiers back here to control the food riots)
• Deal with the the electoral shambles 

The electoral commission quango has been exposed as amateur, and is presently on the back foot and thoroughly discredited, so now is a good time to steam in and reform the entire process. In case there is another election forced early, immediately sort out the insanity of boundaries that favour the outrageous Labour hegemony in its various "client zones" and reduce the number Scottish MPs to around 20 to reflect the fact that Scotland and Wales have their own governments - and England does not! Better still, call the tiresome Alex Salmond's bluff and give Scotland its full independence whether it wants it or not, and tell it to get on with developing its economy based on tidal energy, not English taxes.

Reform the House of Lords that has become a pantomime of a farce thanks to Labour's numerous crass appointments, with a senate-like elected body, using a simple form of PR that would be fine for a revising body which is appropriately intended for vacillation and woolly thinking; but with a similar guillotine process that presently exists in extremis when the government feels that it can justify riding roughshod when it is the only option in the interest of strong government.  It would be lovely to imagine that such a body could be non-partisan in the way that the old House of Lords didn't have to toe any lines other than their own honestly held beliefs and consciences. TMP likes the idea that 50% of such an assembly should be elected from candidates selected by real people - not politicians or the establishment's ideas of Great and the Good.


And how about a qualification that is based on proof that anyone voting for this new "senior" house should have voted in at least 5 local and national elections? This should keep out transient celebrity campaigning, and might encourage all those who proudly boast that they cannot be bothered to vote, to think again.

• Hold a referendum on the options (and require a 75% turnout to make it stick, using the LibDems own internal policies)

But above all else, deal with Brown's catastrophic fiscal shambles before it runs out of control and petrol rises to £10 a gallon as the jittery markets (who are required to be onside to fund Brown's deficit, remember?) melt down.

Be careful of what you wish for, eh?

Oh dearie, dearie us.You woz warned.

In the fantasy land of modern British politics, can Gordon the Ghastly and his eager helpers at the BBC  really try and pretend that two abject losers make a winner?

13 Years of Labour Misrule comes to a spluttering halt..?

The floating voters are every bit as fickle and flaky as ever, and guess what, Blair Mk2 is the beneficiary. But not the Blairalike who had imagined for so long that he was going to the main beneficiary of Brown's incredibly badly managed period as PM.

Like Blair, Clegg is no son of a miner or any other person acquainted with the real world. Like Blair, he is married to a staunch Roman Catholic, and is thus in the thrall of religious hocus pocus to some extent. It is ironic that the marvellously cunning but ultimately vacuous Nick Clegg and his missus come from even more privileged euro backgrounds than Cameron - the uber-rich shadowy patrician upper classes of Europe have always been rather better networked than the English nobility, who are generally obliged to spend their time worrying about fixing the roof of the decaying family pile and dealing with Death Duties, rather than hob-nobbing at meetings of the Bildeburger Group.

Labour and Libdems have been told by their spin advisers that floating voters have pretty much declared themselves to be weak minded and easily manipulated types who are likely to be fooled by the biggest lies, repeated frequently. The nature of the scare tactics deployed by Brown and Clegg are pretty scandalous, but it remains to be seen if the Tories rigidly positive campaign does them any favours. We suspect that the floating voters are as a dangerously gullible as the spin doctors believe.

Vince Cable is a quite startling lightweight who has not been properly tested at any depth, and on the odd occasion he is tackled on subjects beyond his apparently wondrous prescience when predicting the most obvious bust ever, he is invariably found wanting. His persistent evasion of the moral issues underlying the fact that the Libdems were wedged up by a convicted fraudster's cash stolen from an identified group of real people, as opposed to the usual funding from companies and unions that milk larger and more anonymous herds, ought to be taken out and explored at every opportunity. But for some reason it is not being given the coverage it deserves. Since the BBC's house journal, The Guardian, has come out in support of the Libdems, there is a growing suspicion that the BBC has been has been doing everything in its power to assist the Clegg bandwagon. The replacement of the compulsory BBC licence fee by something more innovative in recognition of everything that is going on in media, is long overdue.

Gordon Brown's exposure as an irascible old boor seems to confirm Cherie Blair's observations of long ago that he simply was not equipped for the PM's job at any level of character. His grotesque stage managed performances in front of carefully picked audiences where he spouts venomous lies in the course of his efforts to terrify the weaker minded of his supporters, are simply amoral.

The UK has suffered horribly over the past 50 years through the over promotion of accountants to run its once-world class businesses. But guess what, they understand the price of everything and the value of nothing - which is why all the best assets in the UK are now owned by foreigners! Gordon is actually one of the few chancellors to make it to the top job, and now we are thoroughly reminded why "those who keep score shall not also bat".

We don't agree with Nick. We think he's a chancer, supreme performer, an opportunist - but mostly just another airhead Blairalike politician with an ambitious and pushy wife who will gladly say and do anything to achieve her ambition, with no thought of the consequences. Clegg is, make no mistake, the 100% heir of Blair.

So what happens with the hung parliament and we witness the efforts of the Irish, Welsh and Scots to call the tune? The English will at last revolt - and about bloody time too. Cameron's efforts to maintain the idea that it's worth trying to keep Scotland's client state and its unremittingly awful MPs (including Broon, Darling etc) in the Union, will have to go. Home rule for England, please.

The most likely consequence of the impending cock-up is that we will be doing all this again in 6 months as the shambles wrought by gullible floaters forces the issue again. Maybe this time honesty will prevail if some form of PR means that no one is ever going to win a genuine majority ever again, and there is consequently less to lose.

Be careful of what you wish for, eh?

Gay wrongs

Efforts by the BBC and its house journal, The Guardian, to whip up a frenzy over eavesdropped comments from the Tory shadow Home Secretary concerning the right of people to decide who should be allowed into their homes, appear to be backfiring in the same way as Labour's poster own-goal.

It is is becoming increasingly apparent that the real choice at the election is between the reintroduction of  common sense conservatism (small "c"), and yet more scope for Labour's cabal of vociferous minorities, with its >3000 petty new laws, introduced over 13 years to pander to its supporting cabals' desires to criminalise normal people and common sense, by manipulating everything from the presumptions around climate change, the overrated threat of terrorism, the (discredited) value of "diversity" and the need for "inclusivity at all costs" that stridently promotes the rights of minorities, whilst defiantly confronting the wishes of the majority.

The libertarian approach that TMP supports would be delighted for any who wanted to offer a "gay only" B&B service, and would not question the right to do so for a moment.

However, the B&B row is actually about religious intolerance; the couple in question hold strong Christian views and were willing to stand by them. And religious intolerance is much older than "gender orientation" discrimination. The gay community's hysterical reaction to this couple's genuinely held Christian beliefs have a lot in common with a bunch of murderous thugs who rode around Judea about this time of year 2010 years ago (give or take), looking  to set examples.

Perhaps the strident secular reaction of the Gay community to the B&B affair is partly designed to deflect attention from what's going on in the Roman Catholic church. For some inexplicable reason most reports seem terrified to mention the "G" word when discussing the assault by male priests on male children.

Well, we've seen some own goals... but...

If anyone still needs confirmation that Labour was woefully out of touch with the people of the UK, this self-inflicted poster campaign must surely be it? Even with the original text from Labour's increasingly desperate spinmeisters, this poster will go down in history as one of the most ill judged ideas of all time. 

TMP suspects it's just about safe for Sam to start measuring up for the curtains, and for Gordon arranging his offshore companies to look after his retirement sinecures.