BRITAIN: The British general election finally ended yesterday with victory for the Conservatives in the last seat to be declared in the 2005 contest.
The original poll in Staffordshire South was postponed following the death of Liberal Democrat candidate Jo Harrison, leaving the re-elected Sir Patrick Cormack a seven-week wait to resume his familiar place in the House of Commons.
On a turnout of 38 per cent Sir Patrick increased his majority on a swing from Labour to the Conservatives (from 2001) of 9.1 per cent. Had the Tories managed the same on May 5th, Michael Howard would today lead the largest single party in a hung-parliament.
As it is, Sir Patrick has to content himself on becoming his party's 198th MP, returning to Westminster to rejoin a parliamentary party still unclear by what rules it will eventually effect the sixth change in the Tory leadership in 15 years.
The long cast of characters hinting that they might eventually declare their candidacy would argue that their sheer numbers demonstrate a certain vitality, if not quite an abundance of talent.
It doesn't look that way from the outside. And the despair of many supporters is that the Conservatives are once again talking to themselves.
Despite last month's defeat, the loss of trust in Tony Blair and his own rash commitment not to seek a fourth term could have contrived to make him a "lame duck" prime minister.
Instead, as things stand, it will be lame-duck Howard who returns to prime minister's questions when parliament resumes in October after the long summer break.
Mr Howard did moderately well in a short time span, recovering 30-odd seats while restoring some sense of purpose and discipline to his party.
However the goodwill surrounding him evaporated swiftly following his morning-after-the-election announcement that he would stand down as soon as the rules were agreed for electing his successor.
The result has been a shambles, with a "beauty parade" of potential candidates now set to continue through the autumn conference season. It is arguable a shambles was inevitable anyway, and that a declaration of Howard's intent to carry on would have resulted in familiar Tory plotting.
In any event, the result is the same.
The Blair government has suffered a number of damaging headlines this past week. Despite all the extra cash pumped in by the Treasury, the NHS in England went into the red last year.
And two reports on Wednesday forced a prime ministerial apology to hundreds of thousands of families who have suffered from chaos in Chancellor Brown's system of tax credits.
Mr Howard had plenty to say about this at prime minister's questions in the Commons.
But the painful reality is that nobody much was listening - and they won't resume until Mr Blair is confronted by a putative alternative prime minister.
Pending that, all sense of competition - and relevance - is gone. Mr Blair, meanwhile, is launched on another foreign policy odyssey promising to recreate Europe after banishing African poverty.
Such is the apparent confidence inside Number 10 that Mr Blair has actually put Britain's EU rebate on the table, while suggesting that if he gets the right kind of budget deal Britain could end up paying more.
As Mr Blair dazzles and blinds over Europe, meanwhile, some left-of-centre Tories may ease the passage of the government's controversial ID cards if only because they are opposed by Tory front-runner David Davis.
It seems improbable that anyone will actually force an early contest under the rules which gave the party Iain Duncan Smith. So it will be months before Mr Davis knows if his principal challenger will be 39-year-old ex-Etonian David Cameron.
Current wisdom suggests Kenneth Clarke may have missed the boat and that, anyway, the Tories could hardly enter an election with a Europhile leader pitted against an ostensibly Eurosceptic prime minister Gordon Brown.
The telling argument for Davis is that he is tough, ruthless and looks like a fully-signed-up member of the human race.