The lesson of the 2015 election? No good deed goes unpunished

It was Clare Booth Luce, the witty and glamorous wife of the publisher of Time magazine, who coined the phrase that no good deed goes unpunished. It is all you need to know about British politics today.

The UK had the best performing of the G7 economies last year, with a real GDP growth rate of 2.6%. In 2009, the last full year of Labour government, the figure was -4.3%. The coalition formed five years ago by Conservative leader David Cameron and the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg inherited an almighty mess from Gordon Brown, who had presided over feckless public sector expansion and reckless disregard for bank leverage and mismanagement. Five years ago, according to the Bank for International Settlements, the UK’s fiscal and financial trajectories were the worst in Europe.

Since then, confounding the doom-laden prophecies of Paul Krugman, Martin Wolf, Robert Skidelsky and the entire left-wing media, there has been a remarkable turnaround.