Square meal

The Portrait Restaurant lives at the top of the National Portrait Gallery, London. It is fiercely modern, but likeable. You ride an escalator into a void, glimpse the raging faces of the Plantagenets and take a lift upwards, away from dead kings and film characters walking the streets. (Downstairs, by the entrance to the National Gallery, two competing Yodas from Star Wars are posing for photographs. One is too tall to be a convincing Yoda. Tourists inhabit a different city.) In this long bright room there is no such anxiety; only clean windows to Trafalgar Square and happy women having lunch in a secret glade of stone and brick. You can see Admiral Nelson’s sub-Poldark bum; the fourth plinth (how I miss the immense blue cockerel, now replaced by a skeletal horse); the Ministry of Defence with its pale green roofs and many flags, flapping for I-don’t-know-what. You can peer down Whitehall, empty of politicians now, like a doctor performing a colonoscopy on a corpse.

I like to stare down Whitehall, and the view from here is good for humans, although pigeons have it better; would Charles I have liked the Portrait Restaurant? (Depends on the table.) I haven’t taken much interest in the election campaign; it is safer that way. After 2010, when I was present at Duffygate and watched Gordon Brown be pecked to death by Sky News and acolytes, I haven’t the stomach for the lies, literally; poised between Quentin Letts and George Osborne, my digestion sulks.

So I have only retweeted a video of Ed Miliband trying to organise his face into a smile, and then closing his eyes, to the soundtrack of George Michael’s ‘Careless Whisper’, and laughed at Grant Shapps generally and long — I am still laughing now — and read a story about a race where the party leaders were represented by small pigs.