Either I'm mad, or all this political manoeuvering over who forms a government in the hung parliament in a load of hogwash.
Nick Clegg holds the balance of power, but if the Lib/Dems entered a coalition with the Conservatives, he would surely be writing the party's death warrant for the next election, which may not be too far off.
Imagine the Labour slogans, next time round: "Vote Lib/Dem get the Tories" which seems more potent to me than the Conservative version: "Vot Lib/Dem get Labour".
It would appear that on most national policy issues the Lib/Dems are actually to the left of Labour. This was a "luxury" they could afford, when they were formulating these policies, because they never dreamed they would actually have to implement them.
Some of them are real vote-losers if they were put into place.
I mean, nationwide road charging? Do the floating voters who plumped for "change" actually want to be faced with a £10 bill for every hundred miles of motorway they travel? I doubt it, yet this is on area in which they have some agreement with the Tories and so it would be likely to happen under a Tory-Lib/Dem Pact.
Responding to public anxiety over global warming has created some strange bedfellows, so I guess it could happen.
But in this parley with the party that won the most votes" Clegg is ignoring the fact tha,t between them the two centre-left parties - Labour and Lib/Dem - polled more than 15 million votes compared to the Tories megre 10 million.
It seems to me that the result gave a clear mandate to those two like-minded parties, to form a coalition, over-riding the minority of votes attracted by the right of centre Conservatives.
Surely a deal with the Tories is unpalatable for Clegg, and in turn voting reform and PR is a deal-breaker for the Tories. It will be an uneasy marriage if these two opposing views are hitched together.
In the background David Mandleson must have been working-up a recipe for a dish that Mr Clegg would find far more palatable: a power-sharing coalition with Labour that would see Gordon Brown dropped early next year with another general election to be held in next May.
Otherwise it will be a minority Tory government daring the other two major parties to bring them down so they can be blamed for sending the country to the polls again.
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A tale of two museums
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Rosie Cooper - we need more politicians like her
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