Emma Thompson's tirade against Britain was both nauseating and quaintly old-fashioned

Britain stinks, apparently

In the early '60s, it was fashionable for our left-dominated cultural elite to portray Britain as a failed, dull, joyless, chilly little craphole whose mean, snobbish, penny-pinching bourgeoisie was clinging pathetically to memories of past greatness and whose downtrodden working classes were too docile and stupid to vote Labour. We had Harold Macmillan, the Americans had JFK. The French treated intellectuals with respect, knew how to drink, dress and cook, were brilliant in bed, and  made great avant-garde films that suburban Brits couldn't understand. In Sweden, everything - absolutely everything - was perfect.  Any two-a-penny satirist appearing on TV or radio could be as rude as they liked about Britain, and the audience whinnied appreciatively. How brave they were, these refreshingly unpatriotic iconoclasts, how free-thinking and unhidebound.

Which bits of the local election results coverage made you laugh the hardest? Here are some of my favourite moments

1. Danny Alexander on the BBC claiming that the Lib Dem vote had held up well in areas where the party has a sitting MP – only to have it demonstrated to him with the aid of graphics that their showing in those places was actually slightly more abysmal than elsewhere.

The main threat to UKIP’s chances in 2015 might be Ed Miliband's astonishing uselessness

Hopeless

Ed Miliband just gave the worst interview by any party leader in the whole of human history. Martha Kearney asked him a series of perfectly reasonable, not particularly difficult questions on Radio Four’s World at One earlier today which reduced the Labour leader to a stuttering, blustering, discombobulated wreck. I could have done better. You would certainly have done better. Practically any other Briton over the age of, say, five would have put in a more convincing performance.

Real Tories – it’s time to abandon your party to all the gutless, scaredy-cat, pantywaist centrists

Another bed-wetting quisling

Poor old Iain Duncan Smith has admitted that the government has given up trying to cut benefits, and is now just trying to manage an inevitable increase in welfare spending: “All those on benefits will still see cash increases in every year of this Parliament.” No matter what the BBC and the Trade Unions and the Guardian and the Labour Party and George Osborne and all the other architects of Britain’s shameful hyper-debt would have us believe, the welfare bill will be £18billion higher in 2015/16 than it was in 2011/12. And this during a period when unemployment – thanks to the private sector – has actually already fallen by 200,000.