Get Over It

Some politicians – notably Tories – and their soulmates in the press are becoming increasingly exercised over the possibility of a so-called hung parliament. And, as they do so, the language becomes ever more strident, and the rhetoric equally ridiculous.

In today’s vanguard has been the Rt Hon Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the Seventeenth Baronet, who has launched the fictitious Hung Parliament Party. The “spoof” broadcast for this party features someone promising “indecision and weak Government”, which sounds awfully like the last Tory Government we had, and that had a majority.

But, as the Lib Dems have countered, Osborne is effectively campaigning against an adversary that does not exist. He is getting obsessed by the hypothetical. And he isn’t the only Tory spokesman railing against the thought that all those jolly good chaps might not now get their well manicured fingers around the levers of power come next month.

Joining the Heir to the Seventeenth Baronet was shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, the one who was going to tear up the BBC’s charter, but maybe isn’t. Hunt says that a hung parliament means deals being done “behind closed doors”, which happens as part of cabinet Government anyway. He warned that this might lead to a fall in share prices, as if we weren’t used to that after the near collapse of the banking system, which his party called wrongly.

Then Hunt started warning that other countries that had coalition Governments suffered “instability”. Yes, Jezza, like Germany, the country that has outperformed the supposedly strongly governed UK for the past 65 years. But, reasoned Hunt, the Government in Belgium had just collapsed. Big deal. The electorate there will just have to elect another, if of course an election is needed. The Belgians will get over the problem, just as politicians across Europe do on a regular basis.

If the electorate in the UK wants to vote in a particular fashion on May 6, then they are entitled so to do. Young Dave and his chaps should quit messing about and accept the will of the people. Get over it.