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The reshuffle might be over, but the government is still changing shape. It has emerged that George Bridges has quit as a Brexit minister. He was highly rated by David Davis, his erstwhile boss, and had established himself as one of the most able ministers in the government – precisely the sort of person they can’t really afford to lose at this time. So why has he walked out now? We are only given a diplomatic answer: he’d been contemplating moving on for some time, and it seemed like a good time. If this rationale sounds familiar it’s precisely the formula that Katie Perrior deployed when she quit as Theresa May’s communications chief after just nine months in the job.

We don’t yet have an age breakdown of who voted on Thursday, but from the rise in turnout it seems that it was yoof wot swung it and robbed the Tories of their majority. British general elections have often evolved from contests between parties into battles between two opposing themes or ideas. That of 1964 became modernity versus the grouse moors, 1979 trade unionism versus individualism, 1983 Cold war strength versus unilateral nuclear disarmament. This year was supposed to be the Brexit election yet instead developed into something loosely associated with that but at the same time quite different: 2017 became the inter-generational election.   Corbyn was never supposed to have had a shout.

How thin-skinned and pompous the British media class is. On the airwaves, Twitter, and elsewhere, the reaction to Donald Trump's tweet about London Mayor Sadiq Khan has been apoplexy bordering on hysteria. Trump has deeply insulted our nation, it is said, and harmed the Special Relationship. Susan Minton Beddoes, the editor of the Economist, told American TV Trump's tweet was 'really damaging'. Countless others are now calling on Theresa May to give Trump a piece of their minds. I can't help thinking May's time could be better spent -- addressing the terror problem, say -- than getting into a war of words with the President of the United States. Besides, what do we want May to do? Hop on Twitter and 'own' him with some keep-calm-carry-on zinger about how allies ought to behave?

On the eve of the US presidential election, experts at Princeton university decided that Donald Trump had a 1 per cent chance of being elected. Before the last general election, Populus, the opinion poll firm, gave David Cameron a 0.5 per cent chance of winning a majority. Much is made of the need to look at ‘the data’ when considering political arguments, but so often it is a wildly inaccurate guess with a decimal point at the end to give an aura of scientific specificity. So when we read that Jeremy Corbyn has just a 17 per cent chance of becoming prime minister, this does not mean that the election is in the bag. The Tories are still quite capable of blowing it. It’s understandable that voters have misgivings about Theresa May.

I suppose that if you are under thirty, Northern Ireland seems a place far away and it must be difficult to imagine a time when news from the province was a regular feature of the BBC and ITV nightly news bulletins. The Good Friday Agreement, for all its imperfections and awkward compromises, settled something that now belongs to something close to ancient history. A YouGov poll last month suggested only one in five voters thought they knew even a fair amount about Jeremy Corbyn’s history with Sinn Fein, the IRA, and the wider republican movement. The young can be forgiven their ignorance. But there are many people old enough to remember what really happened in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s who seem determined to ignore historical record.

The most memorable poster of the 2015 general election campaign was an image of Alex Salmond with Ed Miliband snug in his top pocket. As Adam Boulton points out today, the Tories haven’t tried to revisit that image, but Nicola Sturgeon might have helped them along. She expects Theresa May to win a majority, she said. But if it’s a hung parliament, asked Andrew Neil, would she work with Mr Corbyn on his tax and spend? Her answer:- ‘We’ll work for progressive policies and we’ll work for the policies we put forward in our Manifesto. If there was to be a hung parliament of course we would look to be part of a progressive alliance that pursued progressive policies.

After the agony of the recent ITV opposition leaders’ debate, the Scottish leaders’ debate felt like a much-needed upgrade – in terms of leaders, and debate. Both Ruth Davidson and Nicola Sturgeon are better speakers than most MPs, and Kezia Dugdale (Labour leader in Scotland) makes more sense than anyone on Labour’s front bench. In the UK we get ‘strong and stable’ clichés from the Tories, a tragicomedy from Labour and either sex or marijuana from the Liberal Democrats. The BBC Scotland debate, deftly compered by Sarah Smith, felt like proper politics. The debate we should have had in the rest of the UK, but haven't. It was rowdy. Scots often are.