Conservative high spirits

On Boris Johnson's mayoral triumph in London, yesterday:

"This is like the March on Rome in 1922," one shadow minister said as Johnson inched towards victory. Johnson will not march into London's City Hall surrounded by blackshirts in the manner of Benito Mussolini's supporters when they staged their coup d'état in 1920s Italy. But the lighthearted reference to 1922 gave a taste of the high Tory spirits.

(H/t Matttbastard)

With Mattt, I'm simply transfixed by that adjective "lighthearted." What's next? Lighthearted references to the fall of Madrid?

Well, why not? The conservatives have been trying to rehabilitate Franco for years:

General Franco is an authentic national hero. It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even Spain's historical identity.

Franco brought Spain back to the realm of the normal by executing 200,000 Spaniards in celebration. ¡Viva la muerte!

More ideological seepage: lighthearted Republicans on the speaker's circuit. Lighthearted alliances against the Muslim Threat.

And, right here at home, the lightheartedness continues.