Rochester and Strood - oh bloody hell

I write a couple of hours after the declaration of the results of the Rochester and Strood byelection and in a negative mood I can't really label.  UKIP have won their second seat in the Commons, Labour managed to snatch outrage from the jaws of being considered the irrelevant third party and I shudder to imagine what new, self-defeating idiocy Cameron will be driven to today.

There will be those spluttering on Twitter that the "natural Labour voters" who supported Mark Reckless "don't know what's good for them," but neither, it seems, do Labour.  The abandonment of working class communities in ex-industrial and seaside areas has not just been a feature of Conservative spells in power.

"We can't out-UKIP UKIP" has been the mantra for both of what will still, precariously, be labelled the two main parties.  Yet both compete to present their own, rather similar versions of UKIP-lite on immigration.  Meanwhile Farage and his cronies still manage, apart from the odd embarrassing slip, to keep control of the battles between UKIP's electables and its headbangers.  Their manifesto for 2015 may not look much like the one from 2010, or even various public pronouncements from as little as a year ago, but it will be "respectable".  And anyway, who reads manifestos?

The vagaries of the British electoral system and the compound incompetencies of the more traditional parties will produce a result in 2015 which will almost certainly make it hard for anyone to construct a convincing or manageable government.  I will not attempt a prediction, but I fully expect Labour and Tories to be battling to draw together DUP, LibDem and SNP groups into some kind of whole.  And UKIP will either be there as a handful, protesting the unfairness of first-past-the-post or tipped over into a fourth significant bloc vying for the big boys' attention.

I'm sure my thoughts will settle rather further from depression later in the day, perhaps after I actually get some sleep, but I'm not looking forward to the next few years.