Brownian Motion

So: the big result is in.

The charming thing about The Apprentice is that it isn't decided by a public vote. Going back to my earlier comments on elitism, we should celebrate an area of televisual competition in which victory is allocated solely on the basis of the decision of a single judge who (rightly or wrongly) is acknowledged as the expert. Generally unerring though Simon Cowell may be, he is still forced to share power with the two lesser lights on his various panels, and is then forced to submit their collective decision for ratification to the collectively tin ear of Britain. The future Lord Sugar stands alone; it is indeed his way or the highway.

Had the European elections been settled on a similar system, the BNP would probably not have won its first two seats last night. Someone (quite possibly - on the basis of his extensive experience of European voting systems - Graham Norton) would decide for us all, and the inevitable confusion that follows from allowing the Great British Public to settle any question of moment would have been avoided.

The downside of all this, however, would have been that the losers would not have been able to call upon an enormous range of fanciful excuses to explain their failure.

If you listen to the Labour faithful (as we must now describe Lord Mandelson, who has engineered the biggest turnaround since Saul stopped persecuting Christians and changed his initial letter to P) then we all want him and Gordon to get back to the serious business of sorting out the economy. The anti-Labour vote was seemingly a slap on the wrist delivered to all politicians but focused upon the ruling party. The vote for the BNP was cast by people too stupid to be trusted with the vote in the first place, who evidently have no idea that the BNP is a racist party. So, at least, run interpretations repeated last night with such unanimity that any teacher worth his salt would have inferred collusion.

This post hoc gerrymandering, in which the vote is explicated one way or another to suit the standpoints of the politicians, is what happens when the usual excuse for ignoring the British public - "the only poll that counts is the one held this week/next week/sometime/never" - is rendered fatuous by an election actually having taken place.

What we really want is someone with the authority of the soon-no-longer-to-be Surallan to tell us all Why I Fired Them. In the absence of that certainly, the paths of our political masters are as inscrutable as the movement of pollen particles in water.

We can only congratulate ourselves that so many of them have sunk without trace.