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Reasons to be cheerful

One of the main reasons to be cheerful is that this election has made so many people miserable. If you don't like the Tories, you can chuckle at the fact that Lord Ashcroft's millions failed to take them over the finishing line. If you don't like Labour, you can laugh as their seats have evaporated. If you don't like the Lib Dems, you can chortle about how the 'Clegg surge' failed to convert into votes. If you don't like Ukip or the BNP, you can rejoice in their failure to get a seat with first-past-the-post. Pretty much everyone except the Greens did worse than they might have hoped.

And the schadenfreude goes on. Lembit Opik, Philippa Stroud, Jacqui Smith, Peter Robinson, David Heathcote-Amory... we've all got our favourite bits. I've also enjoyed seeing Kelvin Mackenzie and Iain Dale get it spectacularly wrong over the likelihood of a hung parliament... all that 'insider knowledge' and 'expertise' exposed for the cotton wool and gravy it really is. And Bruce Forsyth fans might want to look away around about now...

Ouch. I don't know who's more embarrassed there, him or me. I'll go for me, sinking under the desk as I watch it. Lower, lower! And what do you get for a pair of weaves like Brillo's and Brucie's? Nothing - not in this game. Even Frankie Howerd would have watched that with a sense of mockery.

So, look. It might seem awful at the moment. You might be looking at Nick Robinson on the TV, knowing he hasn't got a flying one about what's going on, or Jeremy Vine's acid trap in the Tron greengrocers or being attacked by giant carpet tiles, and you might be feeling a little bit low. But come on, perk up! Things can only get better. (Hmm. I think I've heard that one before, can anyone help?) It's always darkest before the brightest day (though that's not strictly true). And every cloud has a silv... all right, I'll stop with the empty platitudes now.

Here's the big thing I'm taking out of this campaign: No-one knows anything. You and me, we're in the dark, but it's all right - so is everyone else! And the influence of our beloved media isn't as great as they might have hoped it would be. 70% of national newspapers endorsed David Cameron, with the Sun and Express both laughably claiming that he was OUR ONLY HOPE - but his popular vote was just over 36%. Rupert Murdoch's candidate failed. All hysterical campaigning came to achieve very little. The chosen son, the anointed one, didn't get his coronation. Big Society looked at what he had to offer, and said no thanks.

The Guardian and Independent backed the Lib Dems, but that didn't make much difference at all to their fortunes - in fact they've nudged up the popular vote but fallen back in terms of seats. (Isn't the Mirror sitting pretty, though, backing the only newspaper in the country which backed the choice of 30% of the electorate?) And those much-vaunted TV debates don't seem to have transformed the election in terms of swinging votes - but perhaps in terms of turnout and getting people interested in politics. As for the internet and the blogosphere, it got a look-in on ITN with Will Straw and 'Tory blogger' Paul Staines chirping merrily away in a back room somewhere, and Alistair Stewart and David Dimbleby trying desperately to understand what "The Facebooks" and "The Twitters" were doing, or at least represent that they understood it a little bit. But the web doesn't seem to have had a massive impact either.

It's hard to know why people did or didn't vote, but the scaremongering about a hung parliament doesn't appear to have translated into a panicked rush to vote Conservative - though the scaremongering about a Tory Government may just have met it in the middle and created a hung parliament, who knows. Another reason to be cheerful is that the situation we're now offers a chance - albeit a very slim one, but a chance nevertheless - for there to be movement on electoral reform. Labour rushed to embrace it from 1am onwards today all of a sudden that they saw their majority slipping away. Sure, it's opportunist and it's transparent as anything, but they're there. Perhaps a grassroots campaign for electoral reform, regardless of whether it's achieved by whichever Government gets cobbled together, could be one positive outcome of all of this.

The Tories may be the biggest party, but there are plenty of reasons for hope. So let's be cheerful. And if you start feeling yourself be gloomy, just remember Brucie. Your night could have been a lot worse.

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