The New Party

There was nothing "aspirational" about this General Election. Not unless there are people who aspire to different ancestors. Good luck to them with that.

No, over the last 30 years, the Bullingdon Boys of both sexes have become the vanguard class of a totally unrestrained economic and social liberalism, and have used to that status to cement their age-old claim to a natural right to rule.

On that basis, they contested this Election. And on that basis, they won it. The English, in particular, have voted against aspiration to an extent not seen in living memory. They have submitted to the leadership of the vanguard class nationally and internationally.

No one better embodies both that class and that ideology at large than George Osborne, the publicly anointed successor of a Prime Minister who has confirmed that he will not be seeking re-election.

Same-sex marriage was supposed to destroy the Conservatives' base. But instead, it won them the Election, by giving large number of voters a sense of permission to vote for them.

Any fall in membership will be more than made up. No doubt, it is already being so.

These are people who joined only because of the Cameron Project, and, unlike the people who joined Labour only because of Tony Blair, they are up against almost nobody who is still there from before.

In any case, the federal structure of the Labour Party always made an all-out replacement impossible. No such obstacle presents itself here.

UKIP won four million votes and the Conservatives still took an overall majority, rendering the UKIP electorate irrelevant. Yesterday, that party descended into farce.

Today, its only remaining MP is on the brink of going Independent rather than accept the full Short Money. If he had been refusing any, on a point of libertarian principle, then that would have made some sense. But this is just slapstick.

Longstanding readers will know that some of us have been predicting ever since Douglas Carswell joined UKIP that it would have even more trouble accommodating him than his last party had.

Returning to which, media critics of Cameron from the Right are now being purged, and replaced with his chosen alternatives.

So much for the free press. Even Leveson never proposed that the columnists be appointed by Downing Street and serve at its pleasure, like uncommonly well-remunerated Ministers of the Crown.