IT is at least a theoretical possibility that if Theresa May had not done a deal with the DUP, HM the Queen would ultimately have been forced to summons Mr Corbyn to ask if he felt he was able to form a minority Government. The only other possibility would have been a second General Election, with the likelihood of a serious Labour challenge, if not guaranteed victory.

So it may be that some of us dislike some aspects of DUP social policy (yet most are matters of personal conscience and a free vote in the House of Commons).

It may be that we jealously eye the £1.5 billion investment in Northern Ireland and imagine what that would have done to the potholes in Northern Wiltshire (ignoring the much higher unemployment and other legacies of the Troubles which the Province is struggling to put right.)

It may be that we are uneasy about some aspects of the read-across to the Ulster peace process (although in the event I think the deal is likely to hasten the return to devolved government in Stormont, with a view to their controlling that extra spending.) So of course there are plenty of people who are critical of the deal in one way or another, some with greater reason than others.

But if their views on any of these matters were to have prevailed, then there would have been a very real possibility of a hard left Corbyn-led Labour Government within, perhaps, 12 months of now.

So we may be uneasy about one or other aspect of the DUP deal, but let us be careful about what we wish for. Those concerns would pale into insignificance by comparison with the Socialist chaos and national bankruptcy which would assuredly follow.

Mr Corbyn has promised billions of pounds in hand-outs, blithely ignoring the money-tree reality; he has promised untold billions to nationalise various industries (water and railways), and in the past he and his left-wing colleagues have openly espoused the State ownership of large parts of the economy; he has sympathised with all sorts of terrorist groups, including the IRA, and would apparently be unwilling to use our nuclear deterrent no matter what the aggressor may be doing.

In these and a thousand other ways, Mr Corbyn’s Government would soon return us to the economic chaos and national ridicule which we oldies can remember from the 1960s and 1970s. (Perhaps hardly surprising that most of the surge in his Glastonbury-type support comes from those who cannot remember Tony Blair’s Government, far less Harold Wilson’s.)

So leaving aside Labour supporters, who might well want to shoot down the DUP deal as a step towards their Socialist dreamland, others of a more normal and sensible outlook on life need to realise that only through the deal signed this week, no matter what you may think of its detail, can we hope for some kind of normalcy, some kind of steadiness. Unless you actually want a Corbyn Government (9,000 people did in the election in North Wiltshire, by comparison with the 33,000 Tory voters who did not), you need to realise that not everything in political life is comfortable. Not every aspect is how we would ideally like it to be.

But the alternative, in this case a Corbyn-led Socialist catastrophe, would be one heck of a lot worse. Sometimes politics is about the least bad of the options available. This may be one of those occasions.