I hope you didn’t sign that petition

Did you sign it, then? And if so, what were your expectations? That Sir Keir Starmer would look at the figures and say – perhaps with a tinge of remorse – ‘Yup, that’s it, I’m bang to rights, we’ll have an election?’. Or were you simply hoping to annoy him? If so, I assume you are disappointed, because Sir Keir doesn’t look very annoyed to me.

The petition to demand a general election on the grounds that the people who didn’t vote Labour on 4 July are upset at the result so far has almost 2.7 million signatures. There are many depressing things about this country, including Sir Keir and his inept, flailing, mindless administration and the worst front bench in living memory, but the petition depresses me more than most of them. I had thought we were a little better than that. I had thought that was one of the things – one of the important things – that distinguished us from those insufferable middle-class liberal lefties who cannot believe that other people have views which differ from their own. And if they do have those views then they are not merely wrong, but loathsome. And perhaps reprehensible. And that those views shouldn’t count because they should be illegal. A kind of totalitarian mindset, as well as being the solipsistic disposition of a not terribly bright 13-year-old.

Surely it could not be further from our own state of mind, which allows for the possibility of difference, for a multiplicity of opinion, and does not go off the rails, doolally and shrieking, crying and tearing its hair out, when there is an outcome with which we might disagree. I suppose those rednecks storming the White House on 6 January 2021 should have disabused me of that notion – but I kinda made allowances for them because they were American and, as Tom Petty put it, raised on promises (which can only rarely be kept).