It’s the hope that kills you – that’s how I have felt about every election for the past 14 years. That small swell of optimism almost instantly gives way to the embittered feeling that you have been a dreamer, a prize fool. So habitual has that emotion become that I’m not sure I, or many of my contemporaries, really know how to feel positive about politics any more. Tory governments comprising bigots, landlords and shysters have dominated most of my 20s and all of my 30s. Like cats that have been mistreated by their owners, we shrink from any kind entreaties with fear and suspicion. We have forgotten what it is like to be cared for.
I don’t want to be that way. So I have been thinking a lot about 1997: that bright May morning when I was nine years old. How happy my parents were. That’s all any child wants, really: smiling parents. (Last week, I saw a clip of a toddler who had been asked to video her parents dancing with each other. She had accidentally filmed it in selfie mode, so instead of seeing them dance, we see her big, beatific grin, her happiness at their happiness.) The feeling of jubilation in our house: I have never forgotten it, nor the sunny walk to school, the sense that something better was on its way.
