Anyone over the age of 40 can scarcely help comparing this election, or the state of our two main parties, with those of the past. Though in 2024 it seems a choice between dumb and dumber (or grey and greyer), this wasn’t always the case.

The government of Blair, Brown, Prescott and Cook seem like a supergroup compared to the current front bench

The first election I could vote in was in 1992, and back then there was a clear difference. Yes, Labour, under Neil Kinnock, had kicked out many of the hard left and moved to the centre-ground, but it was more a question of style. The Tories wore velvet-collared covert coats and Turnbull and Asser ties, got caught in massage parlours, and closed hospitals. They often had, after 13 years in government, a grotesque air of droit de seigneur about them (think David Mellor or Michael Portillo at his worst).

Labour sported ill-fitting light grey suits, looked as if they stank of Embassy cigarettes and Draught Bass, banged on a lot about ‘caring’ (often in Celtic accents) and were supported by people like Stephen Fry and that nice Prunella Scales and Tim West. They seemed almost the political wing of Art and Literature, and crucially, they’d been so long out of power that people my age (I was 22) hadn’t clocked that money was finite, a politician was a politician and that all parties, once in power, were usually a flop to their supporters.

I was then an Eng. Lit. student, grinding my way through the major works of post-war left-wing drama. In his play Chicken Soup with Barley, Arnold Wesker had written shamelessly that ‘Socialism isn’t talking all the time, it’s living, it’s singing, it’s dancing, it’s being interested in what goes on around you, it’s being concerned about people and the world,’ and as he was older than me and world-famous, I believed him. It took a two-year spell in the former Soviet Union, where........

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