Half Time

I am travelling tomorrow to that great little city, York. Lady Idle and I are off (via landed mates in the Pennines, natch) to play the proud parents at York university, watching the elder Miss Idle star in an Ayckbourn comedy, drinking and eating well, having a shufti at the National Railway Museum (with a friend who just loves his STEAM), and generally chillaxing, if that is a concept known to staid Yorkshire folk.

But it meant that I ran the risk of leaving this now-somewhat-regular blog without a new post for nearly a week. I was stumped, frankly, with no result from Eastleigh to dissect and no other earth shattering stories to comment upon. I thought of giving you a banker's take on the bonus cap, but decided to leave that to the estimable, unbiased Dan Hannan.

Given that we are now in the second half of this government, I went back to May 2010 and re-read a blogpost or two from my splendid and widely-read organ. Remember how long this wretched coalition took to form? It went on for what seemed like weeks. We all had our ha'penny worth on the rights and wrongs of it. I suggested that we would end up with:

"a nice, consensual, liberal/social democrat Europhile Big Government, busying itself with the minutiae of our lives and charging us a hefty fee for doing so. Just like those in Western Europe. You know the ones – that have had very high structural unemployment for decades, sclerotic growth, that have porous borders, that appease rather than confront global miscreants, that dislike and distrust the Great Satan America, that are anti-semitic. Hey, they are so alike, they are pursuing political union, the practice of which is evident – an overbearing and only semi-accountable political elite bullying and cajoling bovine electorates into Big Government, Big Regulation, Big Taxation. The sort of thing a ‘Liberal Democrat’ just loves."

I fear that Idle's ball, made of the finest crystal, was pretty much bang on; perhaps the miscreants have been tackled more robustly, and perhaps our employment numbers held up surprisingly well. As for the rest: bugger.