The party political season is now over, thank God. Each year I dread its onset almost as much as I dread the onset of winter and the return of Strictly Come Dancing. To be sure, you can occasionally get some satisfaction from the spectacle of politicians being publicly humiliated, but most decent people react to these things by following the example of the late John Junor and pulling their duvets over their heads and turning their faces to the wall.
Maybe this year the conferences have been especially boring, as Nick Thomas suggested last week. That's certainly my impression, though, to be fair, the Tories have this week had the edge on Labour and the Lib Dems. David Cameron's speech is still to come as I write, and it might provide us with a bit of a lift. There is something in the air. With the Sun on his side, who can now beat Mr Cameron?
In the days when I was an aggressive Thatcherite I might have been rather excited by all this, instead of depressed as I am now. I was easily excited in those days. In fact, the only time I ever developed a nervous tick was when, at a social gathering in Fulham in the early 1980s, I got into an argument about the miners' strike with a very calm, very focused, very reasonable Ulster socialist, and became so excited - or angry - that I completely lost control of my upper lip. It started to curl and jump all over the place. I was like Martyn Lewis on speed.
Spending cuts are of course the political fashion right now, and the Tories are doing quite well, but although there is plenty of room for anger about the economy, I can't get myself worked up. Perhaps that's because I can't take the so-called recession terribly seriously. Nor, by the way, can my accountant. Even though many people are suffering, most people have never had it so good. Public debt is more than £800 billion, and I suppose that is what one should call real money, but it's not like owing a pal £100 in the good old days. It's not as serious as that. It may, of course, be infinitely more more serious, indeed, calamitous, and we may all be doomed, but to most of us 800 billion is a meaningless figure.
