All over bar the shouting!

Looking back on this election, it's certainly been eventful. We've now got "three main UK parties", as the BBC insists on calling them. I really do think the BBC has no right to try to influence public opinion with these "slipped in" changes to the venacular. If it wasn't for them we'd still be saying Bombay, sex and all the King's horses. As it is we've been fobbed off with Mumbai, gender and all of this and all of that. Let's hope a Conservative government will give the corporation some corrective treatment.

Anyway, I digress! This election is, according to David Dimbleby, the closest in a generation. I'd go further and say it was the most different EVER. And that goes back to Simon de Montford's days. Never have so many parties been scrapping for votes in a system laid down for the followers of the Royalist/Cavalier/Tory/Conservative tradition or the Republican/Parliamentarian/Whig/Liberal tradition. These two main groupings have been splintered into a myriad shards. We've got more candidates than ever before, more parties with a serious chance of saving deposits than ever before. Voters are no longer blue or red or maybe orange. They are now green, pink, purple, violet, turquoise, brown, black or even rainbow coloured in political opinion as well.

Some MPs, I well expect, will be elected tonight on less that 33% of the constituency vote. Whoever becomes prime minister will probably not be the first choice of a vast majority of the country. I hope that whatever the result, we don't rush like demented lemmings into some so-called constitutional reform and destroy our centuries old representative democracy. A period of calm reflection will be needed. Forget those who say that a hung parliament will destabilise the markets. They destabilise themselves by themselves. Democracy will overcome the threats, bribes and backchat of those whose days are spent moving funny money around. If it is to be a hung parliament, or "balanced" as the BBC says, so what. We will either have a formal coalition or a minority government. Neither will bring down the country in a frenzied collapse of moral fibre.

Whoever goes to see the Queen needs only to command a majority of his peers in the House of Commons. I'm sure the new MPs will do their duty and decide whether to be on the Government benches or the Opposition benches. If the Opposition turns out larger than those on the other side, it's up to them to decide whether to vote down the Queen's Speech or not. I suspect it will all turn out fine.