In many ways My Mistress wasted her time staying up to watch the results. Firstly there were a lot of results that were declared much later than expected and secondly even by the time she did go to bed nothing had been decided. I was more concerned when she told me about the people who arrived at polling stations and weren’t allowed to vote because they hadn’t got everyone through by 10pm. Now when things like this happen in ‘third world’ countries, we are the ones who are outraged and who offer to send people to help them with elections. We don’t have a leg to stand on. What is going to happen next time? Are some of the poor countries of Africa, struggling to find their feet in democracy, going to send people to help us run our elections to make sure they are fair? When there were problems in the American elections we stood tall and said it couldn’t happen here. Well it could and it did. If the people left standing in those queues were as passionate about their right to vote as my Mistress then I am surprised there weren’t more demonstrations and sit-ins taking place.
My Master is now expecting visits from all the party leaders to our constituency in preparation for the election in three weeks time. However, I suspect they are going to be a little bit busy trying to form a government. We can recommend a very good pub they can visit in our village. One of our friends said we should let out our rooms as a B&B, but I don’t think that’s very likely, although if either Peter Allen from Radio 5 or Nick Clegg would like to stay they we would be only too happy to put them up.