Just a week ago, discussions like this one were all the rage. Pundits were speculating about how long May would last; people were saying she was ”a dead politician walking” and that she wouldn’t last ’til the new year. Such talk was everywhere you looked after the election. Now, you barely hear any of it: all the news talks about is the North Kensington catastrophe, as if they have forgotten all about politics. May’s position is secure, it seems, as she recasts herself as a great, decisive leader in a horrific crisis. Sorry to sound cynical, but does not that strike anyone else as odd? As I mused a couple of days ago, people seem to be using this situation for their own ends. Look at the tories and you can’t escape the feeling that something deeply wrong is afoot: they needed a distraction to take our minds of the flimsiness of their government and the dubiousness of the people they were forming a coalition with, and that’s exactly what they got.