How have I failed all this time to post a good rant about the election and its participants?  A plague on all their houses, including the media reporting them and staging silly events.

Well, I have to report, our beloved Prime Minister and his colleagues have accomplished something quite stupendous with their headless chicken act forever aping whatever party is flavour-of-the-month, and their pork-barrelwarehouse blank cheques[1].  They’ve convinced me Miliband is the lesser of two evils!  And that’s despite some of the horrors that surround him (Balls and Harman spring to mind, though they have strong competition from the likes of Pickles, Shapps and Osborne).

Looking to the future, whoever loses will probably have a change of leadership.  Since the worst imaginable outcome is Balls as PM in five years, there’s another reason to consider Miliband now.   Ugh.

As against that, Cameron has one thing going for him.  He’s no leader[2], but his record of holding an uneasy coalition more-or-less together speaks well of his managerial skills.  And his announcement that he won’t serve more than two terms speaks of unusual commonsense.  Blair/Brown, and previously the thoroughly-nasties who undermined Major, might prove mere foreshadowings of how bad things could get within a governing group.

So who can I support?  Well, amongst the parties it’s a clear None of the Above.  They all have some good things to say, but on the overwhelming balance I can only wish a plague on all their houses – including the aspiring minor parties (Green and UKIP) as well as the more established ones.  However, I can look at my local candidates and decide who appears least objectionable.  I’ve done that, and decided my vote is going to a man with a decent background of hard work in a real job, including starting his own company.  But since this is a marginal constituency, and my candidate doesn’t belong to either of the parties with a hope of winning it, he’ll be squeezed and my vote wasted.

[1] Dammit, when the NHS asks for an extra £8billion, that’s supposed to be a bloomin’ negotiating position to start from.  And that’s not even the worst of the wildly reckless pledges: it’s looking increasingly like I’ll reach retirement age with my taxes paying ever more to price me out of housing!  And look at the number of things I didn’t have to mention!
[2] Boris (or Other) might just be.  That remains to be seen.