Rules are useful: without them we’d have chaos.

Except of course when they’re not.  When they become the enemy of commonsense or progress; the crutch of the jobsworth.

Sixtus Beckmesser is the narrow-minded, pettifogging town clerk: mediocrity incarnate.  When he encounters Walther’s true talent he is lost, and falls flat on his face.  Fortunately in their world all turns out well, as the sage Sachs, the voice of reason, is able to reconcile the old and the new, the rules and the constructive rulebreaker.

The story of our new government’s first public trouble – the circumstances of David Laws’s resignation – shows Beckmesser’s heirs in the ascendant in our time.

Laws is MP for Yeovil in Somerset, a constituency from which he couldn’t possibly be expected to commute to Westminster, so he was entitled to claim expenses for living in London.  The rules would’ve permitted him to claim over £20000 a year of taxpayers money, as most of his fellow MPs (including some who could easily commute) have done.  For that, he could have paid either rent or mortgage on a pretty nice place, and one big enough to house an MP’s family.  Or spouse, or any other kind of partner.

But instead of that, Laws rented a room in a shared house, at a much lower cost to the taxpayer (AIUI something in the ballpark of half what most of his colleagues claim).  Sounds like a Good Thing™ to me.  But it turns out that his landlord is also his partner, and that’s against the rules.  So he had to go.  He “should” have claimed twice as much and bought a new home, thus – if money is the object – freeing up his partner’s home to be sold or let at a big profit.

This is verily Beckmesser’s world.  It has cost us a minister who, in his very short time in office, had started to make a Very Good impression – more indeed than any of his colleagues (though I still have hopes of good things from one or two of them).  I don’t think the country can afford to lose him.

Meanwhile, his colleague and successor has apparently not merely claimed his full allowance (which is fair), but “flipped” to avoid paying CGT (which isn’t).

So, not a minority government with passive self-interest support, but a full coalition!

I can’t see inside the politicians’ motivations, but I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt.  They’ve done a courageous and responsible thing for the benefit of a country in crisis.  Let me wish them, and us, all the best.

Naturally, I reserve the right to revise the above views in the light of events as they happen 😉

Well fancy that!  Both Labour and Tories offering a possibility of AV voting!

I could support AV as preferable to the present system.  Whereas our present system is commonly described as first past the post, that’s a misnomer, because there’s no post to pass.  AV is a true first-past-the-post system with a post at 50% of the total vote.  Most importantly, it rids us of the motivation for the fundamentally antidemocratic abomination of tactical voting.

And it deflects the libdems campaign for proportional representation.  Easy for them to campaign against a system that’s obviously wrong; less easy when a defensible system is on offer.  No wonder they’re whoring and playing hard to get – though that could also be down to some of the dumber members falling for Labour’s honeytrap!

Of course, a change to AV does nothing with the regular problems of our system: gerrymandering, rotten boroughs, electoral fraud, and above all the Westlothian question (which suddenly becomes an acute constitutional crisis if the Nationalists were to abandon their moral high ground and enter a “rainbow coalition”).  But neither does it make anything worse: it’s orthogonal to these problems.

One new argument the libdems might put in favour of PR: a regional list offers a defensible mechanism for social goals, like getting more women into parliament.  Just put quotas on how the lists are constituted, and you have more balance without the blatent discrimination of barring men altogether from standing for some constituencies, as Labour has done.  Can’t see the tories giving it a hearing given their strong attachment to the fiction of the constituency link, but some in Labour might bite.

OK, let’s try a bit of amateur punditry.

The election results seem to put the tories ahead but short of a majority.  What should and will each party do for its own interests, and for the country’s interests (for that is surely the order of priorities).

Labour seems to think it has nothing to lose, and wants an all-but-tory coalition.  Nick Clegg has rightly told them where to go: who would want to get the blame for keeping Lab in office, no matter what the reward?  I expect Lab’s attitude may change quite quickly, especially if they remove Brown (though that’ll be a tortuous process if he doesn’t go voluntarily, and it might be in their interests to keep him and blame the tories for the demise of “the recovery”).

That leaves options of a tory minority government or a tory-led coalition.  The latter would almost certainly have to include labour and/or libdems for the numbers to work.  I’m predicting they’ll try a minority government.  And it’ll work, for a while.

In particular, I wouldn’t foresee a tory-libdem coalition.  The issue of electoral reform looks like a showstopper for that.  But it could suit the libdems to let the tories govern and take the blame for economic chaos to come.  That means they’ll want to avoid anything that would give them cause for an early election, 1974-style.  A “gentlemens agreement” at daggers drawn.

On that premise, the way could be pretty-much clear for a stable minority government for some time.  That leaves the question, will the Tories try it?  They’ve hinted that they will, and if they judge they can get away with it, it seems likely.

Another possibility could be a “government of national unity”.  Unlikely, but if the markets pull the plug quickly enough then all bets could be off.  Markets that have been giving us benefit of the doubt in anticipation of a new government.