THERE'S inevitable jeopardy in writing about the outcome of the general election before a vote has been cast.
Undeterred, let me jump right in and say that Boris Johnson, and not Jeremy Corbyn, will be forming a new government later today.
Since the election was called, the opinion polls have consistently put the Conservatives in first place.
The most comprehensive and detailed of these, YouGov's MRP model, this week predicted a result somewhere between a hung Parliament and a large Tory majority.
Johnson doesn't have much to recommend him. Indeed, Tory grandees including Michael Heseltine and John Major have been queueing up to tell people just that.
Viewed through the prism of today's political shenaniganry, they seem to represent values of integrity and substance, whereas Johnson is a political charlatan and opportunist who will do and say whatever it takes to get him through the next 10 minutes.
Better a chancer than an anti-Semite, however. That a figure as odious as Corbyn was able to be propelled to the Labour leadership from the party's lunatic Marxist fringe by a corybantic cult is every bit as reflective of the flux in British politics as the Tory takeover mounted by Johnson and his sidekick Dominic Cummings.
Jo Swinson's Liberal Democrats had an appalling campaign, imploding in the latter stages under the weight of the party's determination to position itself as a flag-waver for transgender rights.
Going along with this policy means denying that people are either male or female and ignoring what we all know, that there are physical differences between the genders.
Transgenderism argues that anyone with a penis can in fact be a woman by the simple expedient of identifying themselves as a woman.
In her favour, Swinson has at least been adamant that Corbyn is unfit to be prime minister.
It is persuasive to imagine that were Labour led by a more convincing figure - Keir Starmer, for example, who isn't a completely craven Corbyn cultist - then the party would have romped back in to Downing Street today.
A Brexit policy that actually made sense would have been an enormous help for Labour.
Is it a party of remain or leave? It still doesn't know. The convoluted approach stitched together by Corbyn, too late in the day, still raises more questions than answers.
The Lib Dems' ill-considered brainwave of going several steps beyond a 'people's vote' by proposing to revoke Article 50 without a second referendum is the sort of thing that even Corbyn would think twice about. Well, maybe.
In contrast, the Conservatives' message of 'Get Brexit Done' was, at just three words long, a model of clarity.
Agree or disagree, at least you knew where the Tories stood on the issue of our time.
For reasons that have been well rehearsed by now, Johnson's Brexit deal has all the makings of being a calamity for Northern Ireland.
In any normal political environment, voters would have given the DUP a richly deserved drubbing for their part in the fiasco.
They were not only embedded in the Vote Leave campaign masterminded by Cummings and Johnson - those two buttocks of the same Brexit bum, as I like to think of them... - but also regarded Johnson as a fellow-traveller to be trusted.
The DUP's precious influence at Westminster didn't prevent Johnson striking his 'Irish Sea border' deal with the EU, nor did they seek to ensure that abortion legislation remained a devolved matter.
And while putting Arlene Foster in a political witness protection scheme for parts of the campaign, including the lacklustre leaders' debate this week, was probably a good idea, the DUP has been unable to construct a convincing narrative to distance itself from Johnson's Brexit.
But this isn't a normal political environment. It will take more than Brexit to shake-up the tribal, orange and green headcount that dominates our discourse. It may even make it worse.
