ASTONISHING COALITION!

So - we are all settling down to this dangerous new idea in British politics. What tense negotations brought it about! How loud were the forecasts of disaster! And what an unheard of thing it is!

Why? Even our present mediaeval system of elections brought about a pretty accurate reflection of the will of the electorate. A large proportion of the population is interested only in football. So only a little over half of the electors voted at all. No-one believes that any one party has solutions to all our problems. So voting was pretty evenly divided between Conservative and Labour, with a bit of a tilt to the Tories. A sizeable proportion of the population thought that neither of the main parties knew what was best. So there was a block of votes for the Lib Dems and other minorities.

The country as a whole operates only as a compromise between a great variety of interests. So what more natural than that we should have a government that goes some way at least to representing this kind of mixture? It would be ridiculous to have a government that presented a picture of Britain as a monolithic Tory stronghold, or as exclusively Labour. As it is, some of the dafter policies of the extreme wings of the parties have had to be dropped or modified, and a good thing too.

'But a coalition government won't work!' Then how about all the countries where it works very well, and people have long ago stopped getting all pink and excited about it?

Even the out-dated electoral system we have inherited has presented us with a more rational mix of political opinions in power. The presence of the Lib Dems will ensure that a new electoral system will approach even nearer to ideals of a just representation of a highly diverse population. All that then remains is to get rid of the yah-boo arrangement of seating imposed on the re-built House by Churchill after the war, and there is a real hope that debates may begin to sound like serious discussions of real problems, and less like witty point-scoring in the Oxford Union.

May coalition government have come to stay, is what Tiresias says.