Look, Our Manifesto's in Hardback

Discounting those constituencies which were bought and paid for by Lord Ashcroft, Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives spent twice as much as New New Labour and three times as much as the Liberal Democrats during the general election campaign. Daveybloke's cuddly campaign included some rather effective posters of a grinning Gordon Brown, with captions such as I caused record youth unemployment - let me do it again and I increased the gap between rich and poor - let me do it again, thus subtly implying that Daveybloke and George the Progressively Regressive, of all people, had some thought of doing otherwise. There was also I doubled the national debt - let me do it again, although with hindsight there was remarkably little about war, torture, corruption or New New Labour's assiduous triangulations towards the British National Party - all the sorts of issues which might have persuaded a thrusting young Lib Dem leader that Daveybloke's Cuddlies were cuddly enough to jump into bed with.

There is comfort - small, to be sure, but one must take what one can get - in the fact that Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives paid Saatchi almost forty thousand pounds to propagandise about the horrors of a hung parliament, and ten and a half thousand to have a retoucher on call for two weeks so that Daveybloke's face could be smoothed into a depiction approaching Steve Bell's inflated condom. There is slightly greater comfort in the fact that, having spent more than half the total expenditure by all the forty-three parties in the campaign, and having faced a worn-out and discredited government full of barrel-scrapings and Ed Balls, Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives still didn't win.