Get a sense of humour: the Tories and coalition

Like so many pundits before me, I had earnestly hoped never to begin a piece on coalitions by quoting Disraeli. But since I was asked by Bright Blue and the Electoral Reform Society to join Mrs Bone’s husband, as well as Ms Hardman and Mr Oborne of this parish, on the Tory fringe in Manchester to discuss whether the country would ever love coalitions, it has sadly proved unavoidable. I can only apologise.

My answer to the question, in case you were interested, was that England might not learn to love coalitions but that, like Scotland and Wales before it, it has very quickly come to accept them and that, rather than being grudging, that acceptance was phlegmatic – ‘it is what it is’, ‘we are where we are’, etc., etc.

Fans of medieval medicine (and who isn’t?) will recognise in that rather distasteful term one of the four humours that our forebears believed determined personality, the others being (needless to say, I’m sure) sanguine, melancholic and choleric.