Diary – 14 May 2015

For the 2005 general election, I had a party featuring a gigantic cheesecake with differentiated segments by allegiance. It contained no purple, which you could call leftie bias, but it genuinely didn’t seem necessary. It certainly wasn’t because I couldn’t think of a purple fruit. The Lib Dems did badly out of that, but mainly because you should never put banana on a cheesecake; they did fine in 2010, when I represented them with lemon macaroons. No colourful theming for 2015; the stakes were too high, and I decided that it was a waste of soft fruit. Just booze and crisps and, by 10.15, depressed people; exactly like 1992, in fact, before we discovered finger food.

At 1 a.m., I went into Adam Boulton’s programme on Sky News to talk results with Harry Cole. He looked preternaturally young and pretty, and caked in make-up, so that momentarily everything seemed fun and reckless, like in the musical Cabaret. Then the seismic Scottish result came in, Paisley and Renfrewshire South, Douglas Alexander beaten by Mhairi Black. After that, the SNP juggernaut would pause for no one, least of all me and Harry. We went home without appearing, and I found my Mr alone on the sofa, surrounded by Doritos. ‘It’s probably good that you were bumped,’ he said, kindly. ‘You were too drunk to go on telly.’ Thank God for the SNP. Sort of.

I have never seen the school playground as depressed as it looked the next morning. My local primary is also the school nearest the Sun’s political editor, Tom Newton Dunn, who told me that he couldn’t send his children there because, when he’d asked about sports, the head teacher had said, ‘We don’t really do sport, only half an hour of street dance.’ That always seemed hilarious, until it transpired that we had five more years of a culture in which it is totally routine to denigrate state schooling for fabricated reasons.