Down at the ballot-stuffing club. Photograph: AP
Election season is officially on, which means that the phoney war is over and real battle can be joined - Andrew Rawnsley gave us a nice survey of the field of combat on Sunday. Start saving up your postal votes now, the more the merrier. Send off enough and win a Labour MP. (Time, we think, to revive Nick Cohen's prescient comment on that subject.)
But of course, with everyone in a state of post-papal mourning, there will now be a phoney post-phoney war. Throw in a royal wedding and the national mood as reflected on news pages will start to resemble a volatile drunk, lurching abruptly from bombastic celebration to inconsolable grief and back again. We look forward to Saturday's papers which will have to tread the line very finely between reporting Friday's funeral and previewing the monarchial nuptuals.
Meanwhile, there was thinly veiled glee in Observer news conference today at the wedding postponement. It means that the Sunday papers get the real reporting of the event to themselves. We may not however be reporting the conspiracy theory mooted by one section editor - that stuffing up the royal matrimonial timetable is an act of petty vengeance for the Reformation.
