The trouble with parties in government is that the electoral process, unlike many shops and practically every online seller, has a no-returns policy. And to compound the situation, modern consumer protection laws do not apply.

The operating maxim is, instead, the ancient one of caveat emptor – let the buyer beware. This means that you’ve got to check the product carefully before you buy it, because after you hand over your money and the deal is done, you’re stuck with what you’ve got and the law is not on your side. The responsibility is on you to check what you’re buying and not on the seller to make sure that the product actually is and does what it says on the tin. Political parties can say and do what suits them to get our vote and into power, and if, after that, they’re waving contemptuously at us from the palace windows and jeering ‘Yah-booh, suckers’, it’s our problem and not theirs. We can’t get them out until an election is held, and if they choose to cancel a round of minor elections which won’t allow us to get them out but will allow us to show our disapproval at least, well then, too bad for us.

The fact is that in March last year the Labour Party was given the keys to the sweet shop and was fully aware that no matter what it did or didn’t do, it had the run of that sweet shop (and full access to the till inside it and to the shop’s bank accounts) for a full five years, come hell or high water, whether it did the right thing or the wrong thing, whether it acted for the good of the country or for the good of its own people. Whatever it did wouldn’t make a difference to its tenure, or bring about loss of that tenure, and past history has shown the Labour Party (and everyone else) that good performance in government is no guarantee of an electoral vote of confidence, just as abysmal performance in government does not mean that the electorate will drum you out.

So clearly, the current government has decided that it majtezwel do as it pleases in favour of its cronies while fudging the rest, because people are not necessarily going to vote for you if you behave responsibly (and are even likely to punish you for it) while they actually seem to enjoy the sight of a government handing out snacks from its high table because that holds out the potential that they might get a snack too.

In the present scenario, newspaper columnists and others who, 18 months ago, were confidently telling the country and its dog that it was time for a change to Labour, and who are now bemoaning and bewailing the dismaying decisions that their choice of government is busy making, are nothings short of insufferable. And to make matters worse, while they moan and complain about the government’s behaviour, the one thing they seem incapable of doing is admitting they were wrong. It is as though they have convinced themselves that they voted in a perfect government – a lovely and reliable bunch of serious people who suddenly and unaccountably began behaving erratically and oddly– and they can’t understand how it happened. These individuals who hectored the rest of us to vote Labour and who felt so daringly different for doing so (when in reality, the truly daringly different were those who stuck to their guns about voting Nationalist instead of allowing themselves to be herded with the rest of the sheep) still can’t, or simply and ruddy-mindedly won’t understand that the politicians behaving so badly now are exactly what they were when they voted them into power, and all this could have been foreseen.

The government has not been infiltrated by aliens and its members have not suffered a massive personality change, the result of something put in their drinking-water. And let’s get one thing straight at least: they are not making mistakes, either. Everything they are doing is deliberate, the result of decisions and planning that have been a long time in the making, even predating the election itself. Bad or corrupt decisions and irresponsible planning are not mistakes. They are conscious choices.

The litany of wrongs now listed by cross columnists and others who voted Labour and feel let down could have been foreseen – caveat emptor – but they instead chose to be blind, deluded and, let’s face it, spiteful. They are also at a loss because, now, they have only themselves to blame and can’t fall back on their pre-March 2013 habit of sneering at others for continuing to support the Nationalist Party and feeling good about having joined the rest of the sheep in Labour’s pen.