It’s good form, when the evidence goes your way, to be the bigger person. To Told-You-So, if you must, with calm restraint. Perhaps even, if your interlocutor has been punished as you predicted, to show melancholy, to shake the head more in sorrow than in anger, &c. We who predicted that their complicity with the wholly unnecessary mendacious disaster-celebrating malevolent economic barbarity against the embattled ramparts of the welfare state would result in ‘Liberal’ ‘Democrat’ electoral annihilation might thus take a dignified tone today, as those dust-flecked LibDem troops emerge blinking into the light after a night of heavy vote-shelling. 

In fact we greet this dawn in a different spirit. With champagne. We pray for more. We hope for worse for them. We whoop & party.

We raise cheers. Hip-hip Hate-ray! 

We celebrate this rare moment of delight in the current slough of British mainstream politics. We dance as close as possibly we can to the grave these Tory-enablers are desultorily digging for themselves. Eager to get down on it, the moment they’re finished. Hurry up with those shovels! Put your backs into it! We pull party-poppers that spray streamers onto them as they collapse into their pit &, with a fascinating dogged grimness, begin to claw the earth over their own treacherous lying bodies.

We are fucking delighted. 

To be clear, there are LibDem activists, mostly grassroots, genuinely horrified by the choices their leaders are making. Some breaking, some refusing (yet? please?) to break from those leaders out of a loyalty considerably more self-hating, more genuinely painful to watch, than admirable. For them we feel - sincerely - some sympathy, concern, exasperation yes but remnants (if depleting) of empathy. We urge their apostasy, their defection from evil.

But for those leaders who, combining class brutality with political suicide, are explicit, clear, unembarrassed about their unflinching fidelity to Thatcherite rampage, we feel rage, utter enmity & spite, & their degradation last night brings us a little much-needed joy.