Orange or Yellow?

Sinn Féin manages to be in coalition with the DUP, so a Labour confidence and supply arrangement with it would be a doddle.

The DUP's views on abortion and homosexuality are held by more Labour MPs than there are MPs from Northern Ireland. John Smith was strongly opposed to abortion. It was the Scottish Labour Party that blocked the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts for decades after England and Wales.

In any case, the DUP detests the Conservatives, and it supplanted the only Northern Irish party ever to have had any time for them, today giving that party scraps so pitiful that they are worse than nothing would have been.

The DUP has voted with Labour more than 70 per cent of the time during this Parliament. It is strongly critical of neoliberal capitalism. It voted against military intervention in Syria.

And it has used The Guardian to set out its three red lines: the existing Labour policy of controlling immigration more tightly, the existing Labour policy of increasing defence spending (although tellingly without mentioning Trident), and the existing Labour policy of abolishing the Bedroom Tax.

The Bedroom Tax does not exist in Northern Ireland, but the DUP finds it so objectionable that it would only support a Government that promised to abolish it everywhere.

By contrast, the SNP passed four Holyrood Budgets on the votes of the Conservatives against Labour.

The SNP was until very recently engaged in a race to the bottom on corporation tax, something of which we have by no means necessarily heard the last.

The SNP was elected on an ultra-Thatcherite policy of a centrally imposed freeze on Council Tax, which is only one step away from nationalising the setting of Council Tax as Thatcher nationalised the setting of Business Rates.

At £144,687, Nicola Sturgeon is now Britain's best-paid politician.

In 1979, after the SNP had brought down a Labour Government, Thatcher's majority of 44 was provided by Scotland, where her party won 22 seats.

But there is not going to be a hung Parliament.