Pundits and punters

Today is the day when huge amounts of brain & computer power will be expended on trying to predict the outcome of the election during the hours when we are voting and then during the further hours when our votes are being counted and the results are starting to come in. All that expense and bother, rather than just going to the pub, going to bed and then taking a look at the papers in the morning.

I suppose it is best thought of as a transitional from the stage when politicians peer at polls with great care and anxiety, trying to extract wisdom from them about what the voters want to hear, an activity which I for one do not rate as a leadership activity. Leaders are supposed to lead from the front rather than the back. Potential leaders ought to have something to tell us, beyond just parroting back to us what they think we are telling them, in one way or another. Listening is one thing, but it does not replace leading.

So from that stage, we move through the election itself, onto the stage where a government is formed. In the olden days of two party rule, huge amounts of brain if not computer power were expended on trying to predict who was going to be in the Cabinet. Now we will have the much more interesting, engrossing and squalid spectacle of our leaders scrambling about trying to do deals with each other, deals which, in the way of all deals, involve telling one side one story and the other side some quite different story, honesty being neither attainable nor realistic. However, a necessary, if not very edifying business.

Light relief being provided by one pundit explaining at great length why some other pundit got his or her predictions all wrong. How the voters in Tower Hamlets VII had been moved by the outrageous price of turmeric while the voters in Epsom IX had made a protest vote about the complete lack of care for the afterlife of newly planted municipal trees.

But all the expense I mentioned when I started goes to keep us all excited. We all get terribly excited about the whole business for a day or so and then sink back into our sofas with a contented sigh and go back to sleep. To wake up to the much more important business of the arrangements for the Royal Christening. Or was it the name of the Beckham's new dog, recently purchased to replace the one that was kidnapped by ISIS.