I returned to my hotel at half past ten last night, hav­ing drunk just enough Kräuser to make Lab­skaus palat­able, to find a Giant Smug Cameron Face grin­ning at me from a lectern out­side 10 Down­ing Street. “The Queen has asked me to form a new gov­ern­ment,” he began, and I started to won­der if I should have had more beer after all.

So we have a new Tory gov­ern­ment. It plans to fight the deficit, but yet to raise the inher­i­tance tax thresh­old to a mil­lion pounds. It promises an end to the National ID Card scheme and data­base, yet wants to crack down on immi­gra­tion, espe­cially those who have the audac­ity to not speak Eng­lish very well. It promises to make the poor bet­ter off, but it seems to want to achieve this by pay­ing peo­ple 150 quid to get mar­ried while they sell off what pub­lic ser­vices we have left.

It says “Britain is bro­ken” and means, as all par­ties mean when they push that agenda, “Britain is chang­ing, we don’t really under­stand how or why, and we’re a bit scared”.

But this Con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment is a lit­tle spe­cial because, even at its heart, it is also a Lib­eral Demo­c­rat gov­ern­ment. The two are in coali­tion for the first time in 60 years, and no-one’s really sure what will become of that. Do we dare hope for some­thing good?

It’s quite telling that not only do we have a hung par­lia­ment, in which no party has been given an over­all major­ity, but we don’t even have an easy coali­tion either.

Despite 13 years of dubi­ous wars, expenses scan­dals, ero­sion of pri­vacy and our worst reces­sion since the 1930s, Labour still com­mand nearly a third of the vote. Despite wide­spread fear and mis­trust amongst the young, the Con­ser­v­a­tive party com­mand over a third. And the Lib Dems are still a non-entity for a lot of peo­ple — not hav­ing been in power for over 70 years, we have no way of know­ing if we can trust them or even if they’re competent.

Though there were cam­paigns ask­ing peo­ple to vote tac­ti­cally in order to delib­er­ately pro­duce a hung par­lia­ment, no-one seems happy with any of the options it’s pro­duced. A Labour / Lib Dem coali­tion was unpop­u­lar as it could have meant another four years of the same PM, cab­i­net and poli­cies. The Con­ser­v­a­tive / Lib Dem coali­tion that we now have was unpop­u­lar too, with many staunch Tories and Lib Dems accus­ing their party of turn­ing trai­tor or sell­ing out. And the alter­na­tive to these was a minor­ity gov­ern­ment, which would have been no dif­fer­ent at all to a major­ity one except that we’d prob­a­bly all go to the polls again much sooner.

But on the prospect of elec­toral reform, which all three par­ties have talked about and a good pro­por­tion of the elec­torate are in favour of, could we have asked for a bet­ter result? The Lib Dems have been push­ing their agenda strongly, and at least a ref­er­en­dum seems to be on the cards. The Con­ser­v­a­tives also seem to be com­ing around to the Lib Dems’ plan to increase the tax thresh­old to help those on low incomes, so per­haps the poor won’t be shafted after all.

I do worry about the next elec­tion, though. Labour has a tough job to ditch its rep­u­ta­tion and win vot­ers back. Even with Pro­por­tional Rep­re­sen­ta­tion, the Lib Dems don’t have enough sup­port to rule out­right. And Cameron’s mod­ernism and will­ing­ness to dish out cab­i­net seats to the Lib Dems could spark an all-out war in the Tory ranks. If we thought all the par­ties were pretty unap­peal­ing at this elec­tion, it could be a whole lot worse next time around. Who will we elect when we don’t trust anyone?