In all the excitment before the election, I forgot to mention this article from the Guardian. They asked a number of psychics and clairvoyants what they thought the result would be. Most of them got something pretty close to the correct result, which wasn’t exactly difficult, but I’d seriously recommend that anyone planning to get help from spiritual medium Camilla Ventham Fraser should think again. This is what she said.
I asked the spirit guides and then used automatic writing. The polls are flawed. Blair will be voted out. The Labour party will lose and a May miracle will occur. The Conservatives will return a government with a three-seat majority. Howard is our next prime minister. He will team up with Ukip and the Ulster Unionists. The smaller parties will become important. Kilroy-Silk will win a seat. Ukip and other independents will do well, but I don’t see any Greens.
Which is about as far from accurate as you can get. She needs better spirit guides.
I didn’t think you could have a government with a 3 seat majority? Isn’t that what a hung parliment is? When it’s just too close to call?
No, a hung parliament is one where no one party has more than half of the seats. The largest party would form a government, but they would be in danger of being defeated if the other parties all voted against them.Ms Fraser is suggesting a situation where the largest party (the Tories in her fantasy world) would have half of the seats in parliament (343) plus three more. That would mean that they could force anything they wanted through parliament but they’d be extremely vunerable to backbench rebellion and losing seats in byelections. This is pretty much what happened to John Majors government just before the 1997 election. The majority they had won in 1992 has slowly whittled away as they lost a number of byelections.
Just re-read the article while sat on the bog at work – the paper’s been in the office since election time. What a bloody clown!