Why the applause? Goodbye Mr Cameron, and don't come back

Whatever has happened to Britain? It seems as if the whole day has been taken up by the elite congratulating each other. But about what? A Prime Minister who destroyed his own government because he would rather play clever games than develop any principles, but who wasn���t as clever as he thought he was.

Ships��� captains who run their vessels aground in broad daylight are not, in general, piped ashore with much ceremony, let alone surrounded by applauding crewmen and passengers. They slip away out of sight, while others quietly appear on the bridge to see if they can salvage anything from the wreck.

Indeed, Prime Ministers who lose elections or retire have traditionally slipped quietly away, without Huw Edwards on the BBC describing their uninteresting journey down the Mall as if it were  a great state occasion, or BBC helicopters clattering overhead.  

The great thing about this country used to be that a change of government was *not* a great state occasion, but a routine matter, without expensive armoured cars and grandiose police escorts. Real authority resided with and derived from the Monarch, who granted it to those who had been blessed by the electors, for as long as they could keep it.

I loathe this change. We do not have a president. We do not normally permit applause in Parliament, which is supposed never to forget that it contains an opposition, and that many in this country have not given their votes to the government. Why couldn���t he just go?

Mind you, as the man who chivvied his (pathetically pliant) MPs into applauding the Blair creature on his last appearance in the House of Commons he so disliked, he must have hoped to get the same.

The Prime Minister is so only because he or she can command a majority in the Commons (it is by no means sure that Mrs May can count on maintaining such a majority, for various reasons, including known unknowns and unknown unknowns). He or she has no popular mandate (I am glad to say) . We do not have to love or even like him or her. Rather the contrary. 

These sentimental speeches in the Commons and Downing Street (the only street in London which normal human beings are forbidden to enter)  are just not constitutional.

Anyway, why the applause? What is it for? Mr Cameron gave up his job because he realised that he had struck himself such a blow that he could no longer claim to have a mandate, despite his bought-and-paid-for ���victory��� in the 2015 election, perhaps the most cynically-achieved election result in the modern era.

Having gone, he should have made a resignation statement to the House and departed quietly.

What is there to applaud?

A 1.5 Trillion public debt, matched by a private debt nearly as large, and a budget which continues to require heavy new borrowing every minute, to bring it into balance . A debauched currency, now finally showing the effects of years of printing money through ���quantitative easing���. A total failure to control mass immigration. A total failure to achieve significant improvement in state education. A total failure to get a grip on crime and disorder (the prisons are bursting and restive). Two utterly disastrous foreign interventions, in Libya and Syria, with the second one less bad than it could have been only because Parliament for once had the sense not to vote for war. National defences (especially the Army and Navy) in tatters.

And a successor who is personally associated with the government���s greatest failure, and disagrees profoundly with her government���s principal aim, an absurdity which still causes the mind to boggle.

 

Applause? What is it for?