Till death do us part

First up we had the frankly risible sight of Cameron and Clegg renewing their "marriage vows" and re-plighting their troth.

It was like an embittered married couple for whom the love has long gone to be replaced by seething resentment and who only remain together because they know that even though it's killing each of them it's worse for the other. And anyway, no-one else would have them.

It was rather different to the Downing Street love-in of two years ago when they gazed gooey-eyed at each other in the Number 10 rose garden.

This time it was a tractor factory in Essex.

There were similarities however. They hadn't been elected last time either.

For a coalition which has seen the wheels come off its project in spectacular fashion in recent months, Kwik-fit might have been more appropriate.

It would have been a tragic sight if it hadn't been so funny, two public schoolboys attempting to be "down with the workers."

I'm surprised they didn't turn up in shell-suits.

You could be cynical and suggest that the factory in question had been selected for its blue and yellow motif -and you'd probably be right. That's what passes for radical thinking with this shower.

Clegg even attempted a quip regarding the appropriateness of the workers' livery, which went down about as well as Cardinal Brady turning up at a Dublin family fun day.

There was faux-matey shoulder-slapping and attempts at blokey bonhomie aplenty from Cameron, much in the awkward manner of two homophobic men who find themselves hugging in a moment of jubilation and then desperately try to show how heterosexual they are by talking about the match and getting each other in headlocks.

You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife if it hadn't been sticking out of Clegg's back at the time.

For a pair who were spectacularly handed their arses by the electorate last week across the country they could have picked pretty much anywhere for their less-than-convincing reconciliation.

That their aides decided on a county now synonymous with vapid, avaricious reality-show contestants who will do anything in a bid for ill-deserved fame and power was wonderfully appropriate, if ludicrously ill-advised.

In fact Ed Miliband turned up there as well. The last time that many people descended on Essex it was the Norman conquest.

Then of course we were treated to that regular surfeit of pomp and pointless pageantry that is the state opening of Parliament and the usual nauseating toadying and kow-towing to the Windsor clan.

The speech itself was pathetic in its banality, unless you count the irony of an unelected, geriatric monarch who's been sponging off the taxpayer for 60 years announcing reforms to the anachronistic and undemocratic House of Lords and telling the rest of us we'll have to work until we die.

That's up there with Francis Maude - the Tory equivalent of Corporal Jones from Dad's Army - a man who single-handedly manufactured a fuel crisis out of nothing and triggered the biggest public-sector strikes in living memory, who this week called for "under-performing civil servants" to be "weeded out."

As is often the case these days the main, and in fact only, source of entertainment during the turgid ceremony came from Ken Clarke.

Wearing his Lord Chancellor hat, or more accurately wig, he wandered into Parliament like a truculent toddler forced to wear his Sunday best before grabbing the proffered sacred velvet sack containing the speech like an Oddbins carry-out and bumbling off again.

Say what you like about Clarke, there's not many people can carry off that kind of bored indifference while dressed like Widow Twanky.