I'm very pleased to say, and feel obliged to say (after my spew of vitriol about Brown), a few quick, heart-felt, gushing things about the new PM, Deputy PM – and 'our Liberal Conservative government' (to borrow Cameron's phrase).
Much has already been said about how much had to go right (or wrong, depending on your perspective) for this to occur. But it really does feel like a miraculous event. For me, after all the acrimony of the Bush years, and now Obama vs. The Tea Partiers, and particularly the divisive figure of Brown, it was just so wonderful to see the two new leaders cheerfully standing up there acting like proper adults. Here they are (stick around for the hilarious – and now famous – question about Cameron's "favourite joke"):
Because I'm still a guest here, and my opinions are still slightly suspect, here are two fantastic articles that capture the spirit of the moment – and if you're American, put you pretty well in the picture.
It was like witnessing a coup. Millions of viewers will have shared my impression almost of watching two men staging a putsch against their own parties, against the entire British political system, and against the ingrained assumptions of more than a century of parliamentary government. “Think again,” said the moment.
It borders on the supernatural. No imaginable electoral outcome could have more intelligently designed for the shape and tone of the government these two men already wanted to lead; no outcome could more securely have protected them from enemies within their own ranks.
As they spoke there was, for me, a palpable lifting of the ghastliness of the past few years. Maybe Mr Cameron was right: it doesn't have to be this way.
Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron make a startlingly lovely couple… Both are 43, tallish and, as Martin Amis writes of a certain kind of well-bred Englishman, “pointlessly handsome”.
More important than that overlap, perhaps, both are well-adjusted human beings. You search in vain on both men’s shoulders for the chips that typically burden and motivate politicians.
Mr Clegg has made the Lib Dems more liberal, or at least more realistic, in economic matters. Mr Cameron has striven, if with frequent blips, to make the Tories more socially liberal.
Both give the strong impression of not being in politics merely to survive or slither to the top. Rather, both have always seemed determined to do something big – buoyed by the innate confidence that they can, and also by a sense that they can always bugger off and do something else if they fail.
And they have done something big.
President Obama seemed to have a similar sense of scale of this change: in his reaction to the results, he conspicuously used the "special relationship" phrase, which his administration had previously deprecated.
And a final thought of my own – overwrought and over-optimistic, probably, as usual: Could this signal a resurgence, so late in the day, of classical liberalism?
