THE sweeping Conservative victory in the East of England has left the media with a major headache - how to achieve political balance.

In the EADT circulation area, we have 15 MPs - 14 Tories and one Liberal Democrat, all of whom are wedded to the coalition.

The nearest Labour MPs are the Luton duo, who are the only two Labour representatives across the six counties of the region. With the best of intentions, they are uninterested in East Anglia, and we’re not interested in what they have to say.

Which seems to leave us with three alternatives, none of which is satisfactory. Defeated MPs are still pondering their own futures and are unlikely to want to be relegated to regional Labour spokesmen.

Parliamentary candidates who never stood a chance in the swing from Labour will have returned to their day jobs, eager to earn a living in the knowledge that the next General Election will be in 2015 and that activists in constituencies need time to assess what went wrong.

Which leaves council leaders - sorry, Labour opposition leaders because the party is not in power in any of the 15 principal authorities in the EADT area, except in one instance of coalition.

So before all the outraged angst of Labour supporters in Essex and Suffolk is poured over the media because their party is not quoted, let them remember just why we are not getting minority points of view.

NOT ME GUV! Labour leadership contenders are now distancing themselves from Tony Blair’s war in the dessert and busily indicating that it had nothing to do with them.

Do Ed Balls, Andy Burnham, and Ed Miliband think we’re all thick? Where were their voices when we embarked on regime change in a sovereign nation recognised by the United Nations?

Much as I’d like to see Diane Abbott win, David Miliband is favourite, although the vagaries of the electoral system used to choose a leader may mean that the person with the most second preference votes triumphs, which is what Balls is counting on, although I gather he’s not as popular as he thinks he is and is finding it difficult to attracted the requisite number of MPs needed to nominate him.

GOING DUTCH: Travelling back from Rotterdam to Harwich on Sunday aboard the new Stena Line super ferry was an expensive affair. The currency used on board was the euro, which made the cost of meals and shopping far higher than other routes whose ferries use sterling.

The pound’s decline against the euro is just one of the consequences of the financial crisis the new coalition government has inherited, but with the euro in jeopardy because of the spending crisis sweeping through the European Union’s Mediterranean nations, the outlook remains bleak for British holidaymakers.