Let's All Go On A Donkey Ride

If Tony Blair and George Osborne did succeed in getting their new party started, then we should all join it.

Not for any higher political purpose. Just for a laugh.

All right, they would probably never let me in. They would certainly never let in, say, Rod Liddle, or George Galloway.

But plenty of you are sufficiently under the radar to have plenty of fun with this.

They have forgotten, if they ever knew, that "the Democrats" was a short-lived name for what are now the Lib Dems, at the insistence of former SDP members.

And they choose not to notice that it is the name of what is not currently a very successful party in the United States.

Still, they have decided to take that party's name.

And under that name used to congregate everyone who was not part of, or in some way connected to, what is now the unimaginable WASP elite centred on the American Northeast.

Thus, at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, names placed in nomination for President, and for which votes were cast from the floor, included, to give only the four highest scorers, George McGovern, Scoop Jackson, George Wallace and Shirley Chisholm.

George McGovern and Scoop Jackson were the two biggest names in the same party. George Wallace and Shirley Chisholm were the next two biggest names in that same party.

And that is before beginning to look at the mind-blowing contest for the Vice-Presidential nomination.

Blair and Osborne as very much in the mould of what is now the unimaginable WASP elite centred on the American Northeast.

For one thing, Blair is an arriviste while Osborne is the heir to an Anglo-Irish baronetcy, so neither of them is quite what that elite sought to emulate in this country.

But, like the characters in that vanished world of F. Scott Fitzgerald, each of them is trying desperately hard to be so.

Yet the American party of yesteryear that they wish to re-create over here is apparently not the Republicans, but the Democrats.

We should all join it. Not for any higher political purpose. Just for a laugh.