The End of May

I've been rather enjoying this election campaign - watching the Tories implode under the slightest of pressure, coupled with Theresa May's impression of a broken robot has been great fun. And watching the polls tighten ever further has been great. There's just the tiniest smidgeon of hope...

But not really. Even the most favourable polls have suggested we're heading for a hung parliament with the Tories by far the largest party, and easily able to form a minority government with the help of the Unionists in Northern Ireland (certainly the DUP, and perhaps the UUP)... and if it came to it, the Lib Dems would support them in the interests of allowing the country to have at least some sort of a government.

So I can't see there being anything other than a Tory government after the election.

However, what will be really interesting is that, if there is a hung parliament it will be almost impossible for Theresa May to remain in her position - she'll have been shown to be a liability, and the Tory party is quite ruthless at ditching weak leaders.

The reason that's interesting is that there have been two key threads in the Tory campaign: firstly, the focus on Theresa May asking for a personal mandate to negotiate Brexit (going so far as the Tories campaigning as "Theresa May's team"); and secondly the mantra of it being a "strong and stable" government.

But if the Tories promptly remove Theresa, the most likely candidate to take over is, once again, Boris (yay?). In which case, it's hard to see how they can claim to have any sort of a mandate - they'll no longer be "Theresa May's team", and the notion of such a government being "strong and stable" is laughable.

So does that mean we'll need another election, in order for Boris to get his personal mandate to negotiate Brexit? And what happens if he fails to secure that mandate and has to be replaced.

(And, incidentally, this is why it's a really bad idea to try to turn a parliamentary election into a faux-presidential one. We should be voting for our local candidates, or at the very least for parties, not for individual leaders. Or, if we're going to be forced to vote for leaders, as the nature of television probably requires, maybe we should shift to a formal presidential system, with the Prime Minister being directly elected and then allowed to form the government around them. (In this system we'd still elect MPs. Basically, we'd have two votes - one for a local MP and a separate one for the top job.))

#26: "Pathfinder: Assault on Longshadow", by Benjamin Bruck and Thurston Hillman