The winner is...Nobody

In what is shaping up to be an eventful week for other more tragic reasons, I'm getting around to typing out my thoughts on the General Bore of 2017 and  where that leaves us which isn't exactly being helped by the time taken by those directly involved to actually forge agreements to settle it.
There are as I think I mentioned last time 650 divisions known as constituencies and for any one party to gain a majority in the House of Commons you need 326 or more and the problem with the outcome is...no one party has it!
Take Theresa May's Conservative and Unionist Party for instance and you'll see they got just 318 which make them the largest single party and yet they cannot do it by themselves.
Then there is Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party which did better in a late surge with 262 votes and the Liberal Democrats with 12 which in both parties is an improvement on the 2015 result.
Scotland's Scottish standing only Scottish National Party won 35 out of 57 Scottish constituencies which was a 21 seat drop on 2015 and Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party got 10
Let's quickly do some math here as Labour saying they were ready to form an alternative 'progressive' government and add 262 labour votes to 12 liberal democrats we have 274 seats plus the SNP's 35 we get 309 plus 4 Plaid Cymru votes equals...313.
Thus put plainly the math doesn't stack up for that argument.
To me in truth nobody won this election.
The two main Great Britain wide parties did not carry the trust needed by the electorate even if Ruth Davison run a really successful campaign for the Scottish Conservatives and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour  team did connect to a lot of young voters who amongst a good number of people are fed up with 'austerity', funding crisis in health, social care, education, declining 'working class' pay relative to expenditure and issues of both housing supply and unaffordable mortgages and rents.
In Scotland it was clear many Scottish voters were more concerned about similar issues such as educational standards that they wanted their representatives to be more engaged with than the second referendum on independence the SNP were pushing since last Junes Brexit result (Indyref2).
Brexit is in a way few of us on the leave side anticipated at the core of this problem with Labour and Conservative remainers voting for remain candidates in constituencies such as Warwick and mainly Labour leave people voting Conservative as in Walsall North and Stoke on Trent South.
It was also an election where rather than in that referendum we voted for parties despite concerns, I know I voted for who I did with concerns over social welfare issues and others voted the way they did even if financial literacy and clear signs of exactly where the money was to be found were lacking.
And that Brexit clock as we were reminded over the weekend last is ticking.
Other consequences included the standing down of Ukip leader Paul Nuttall and Wednesday decision for Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats who cited the constant attention on his own personal religious beliefs by some lesbian and gay activists even though his voting record clearly supported their rights. I have some sympathy for this as some liberals seem to be...ill-liberal both in terms of denying the space for opposing views and even accepting of while disagreeing personally, the need to allow others the space to be themselves and so backing legislation.
At the moment there is an attempt to put together an agreement by the Conservatives and the DUP so a Queen's speech (a summary of the parliamentary program put forward by Her Majesties Government) can be passed and major legislation not least relating to Brexit can be passed without a formal coalition which we had for the 2010-15 Parliament.
This is possible but has its own risks not least in resolving the deadlock at the Northern Irish Assembly a part of the devolution outside of England enacted from 1995 onward in our system of Government between the DUP and   Sinn Féin, the Nationalist, Republican party whose links to terrorism at the highest levels are hotly contested.
Neither side trust each other much and in trying to resolve this, any UK Government as former prime minister Major said on Monday risks  being seen more as a Unionist stitch up than an impartial advisor with thepossibility if it fails of Northern Ireland being run directly from London, something that would have a major impact on cross-community and Irish and UK Government relations.