Margo Margo Margo Kingston … what are we going to do with you? Throughout the election we watched Kingston’s blizzard of tweets and “Tweeted Times”, with the mounting anxiety one feels as a drunk father loses his way through his daughter’s wedding speech. For the first four weeks, Kingston urged us to believe believe believe in the deathful carousel as an expression of living politics. Then even she couldn’t keep it up and began an open reflection on the death of public engagement. Ruh-roh. We had seen this before. Kingston is a first-rate forensic journalist, who has a deep need for politics to be more than it is, an urge that can get her into trouble — as her book Off The Rails documents, simultaneously the story of Pauline Hanson’s 1990s rise and fall by a journalist following her around, and an account of Stockholm Syndrome from the inside. As the demand for big P Politics got greater and P-P-P-Pauline rose afresh, things did not look good. But disaster averted — Margo has fallen for Theresa May. Say whut?

Yes, according to Margo:

God, Theresa May? A shires Tory, with an appetite for mass surveillance? Really Margo?

Apparently so. There’s more like that, a stream of enthusiasm not interrupted by May’s appointment of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary BORIS JOHNSON! No matter. We could with some of that here:

The comments are not kind: “This is like when you voted for Howard in ’96.” “You’ve really lost it,” etc etc.

Well, it was a long eight weeks for all of us. But, hell. If you look for big Meaning in mainstream politics, you’re bound to end up treating political professionals as some combination of Tom Jefferson and Boudicca. Take a break, Margo. In the desert of the real, the mirages will always still be there when you get back.