gone

One Friday evening thirteen years ago, I danced in the streets of Soho with my friends, such was the sense of elation when Labour won power. (My flatmate at the time worked for, and closely with, Sarah Brown, then Macaulay, who ran a PR company called Hobsbaum Macaulay, so I subsequently had a ringside seat on the media unveiling of her relationship with Gordon Brown; Sarah even came to a party that we threw in the Alphabet bar, the place to drink at the time.)

As I watched Mr Brown resigning this evening, I felt the same sense of elation. For a man who talks so much about 'doing the right thing' and 'making the right decisions' his judgment has been spectacularly off kilter in the past few days. His threat yesterday to hang on until September by desperately trying to forming a coalition with the Lib-Dems was an unedifying and depressing spectacle. Even former Labour ministers such as John Reid could see it was morally wrong.

But finally, democracy has triumphed - for a moment yesterday, it looked like it wouldn't - and Mr Cameron will be allowed to form a government. Meanwhile, I have one question: how on earth did two unelected individuals such as Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell come to wield such influence on the future of the country? Mandelson, by his own admission, led the negotiations with the Lib Dems. But on what authority? No-one voted for him, ergo he had no right to try to manipulate the outcome of the election in such a cynical way.

As for Mr Cameron, he has been handed a poisoned chalice, or as one political commentator puts it 'the toughest hand that any prime minister has been dealt in decades.' I wish him and Mr Clegg bon courage in dealing with it.