Lord Strathclyde and the party treasurer, Jonathan Marland, took Crosby to Brooks's Club so that he could see something quintessentially English before returning to Australia.

Never forget that Michael Howard is a product of student politics - the early 1960s student politics of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, when he vied with John Selwyn Gummer, Leon Brittan, Norman Lamont, Kenneth Clarke and Norman Fowler for the paper hats of undergraduate office. This coup that he has committed against himself is a classic CUCA manoeuvre - secretive, conspiratorial, overcomplicated, probably calculated to benefit some chum or other, so clever that it is stupid.

If a producer can give us a new insight into a work of art, or make it come alive or a modern audience, that is ok by me. But this wasn’t anything like that. It was gratuitous and exploitative. (This was signalled before the performance even started by the programme, which contained photographs of the Twin Towers burning, a severed hand amidst post-Tsunami debris, and cows being burnt in Britain’s last episode of foot-and-mouth disease.) The culmination of this urge to grab hold of any random news image or bit of popular culture for shock value was the portrayal of Brunnhilde as a suicide bomber in Act 3. In between we were treated to Siegfried as rhinestone cowboy and Brunnhilde as Judy Garland (opening of Act 1) and Hagen as game-show host (wedding in Act 2). Why does Judy Garland metamorphose into a Palestinian suicide bomber?! I have absolutely no idea.

Utter crap.

It is a myth that Howard relaunched the Tories with new policies that were attractive to the electorate. What he did was to strip out any policies that might have appealed to the kind of liberal middle class voters who defected to Tony Blair in 1997....Duncan Smith had intended to emphasize the contrast between Tory and Labour economic and social policies, but also bury the negative image of the Tories as the “nasty party”. He wanted a combination of big tax cuts to appeal to self-interest, plus “compassionate conservative” self-help policies for “the vulnerable” to appeal to middle-class altruism...

I have a suspicion that this election restores business as usual. If Brown moves Labour to the Left, centrists will return to the Tories.

Emily Bell, in the Guardian’s election blog:

When I wake up in the morning I still think I'm in Beirut and that these are some of the things I'll have to contend with during my day. Then I open my eyes and am first disoriented then shocked that I'm so far away from where I thought I was. I look at the newspaper and think: Iraq looks like a country that has some serious problems. But America is fat, content, and happy. Life in this country is experienced the way a cat experiences a nap in the sun compared to the way Middle Easterners live. I'll forget this in a week or so, but for now that's how it looks.

I just couldn’t imagine it happening in Britain. America, the country we’ve spent so long mocking as a load of xenophobic, uncultured, obese simpletons, has turned out to possess in spades the one quality that has been missing at every level from our election campaign: good manners.

It is time to revisit several large issues. The issue of tenure, for example. An arrangement that was intended to protect academic freedom and intellectual diversity has mutated into a means of enforcing conformity and excluding the heterodox. For those few conservatives who have managed to obtain tenure, it doubtless functions to protect them. But for the faculty in general it seems to have become a prescription for political correctness and lassitude.

So the cast—Reilly, Zeta-Jones, Zellweger, Gere—assembled for a run-through in some performance space or other, and took seats onstage, with the producers down below. Reilly noticed that Zellweger was REALLY scared; he leaned over and said, soothingly, "Don't worry, Renee, it's just like a play...we're onstage and they're the audience."

Zellweger looked at him, and said, quivering, "But I've never been in a play!"

There is another more odious species of elitism, one that Dyson's tract embodies from start to finish. That is the elitism that celebrates not the petty-bourgeois but rather the enlightened clerisy. It is the elitism that has only scorn and derision for the contemptuous working poor folk we've discussed, but that very nearly celebrates the dysfunctional poor as rebels against a deeply corrupt social order.