So that’s it!

We wondered what that ballerina was all about in Labour’s campaign. Now we know, because the ‘why we lost’ report has told us. The Labour campaign was built around the symbolic imagery of a girl blossoming into a young woman who ‘looks in a fresh direction….a new beginning.’ The message wasn’t understood, the report notes. Well, that’s the understatement of the year.

And let’s be honest about it. What young woman would look with anything other than apprehension at a new direction in which a 60-year-old man in a wig loomed leeringly? Whoever came up with that one deserves to be stood against a wall and shot.

Perhaps I can say at this point just how much hilarity was provoked in the Nationalist Party campaign HQ by the various ballerinas, couples bent around upended containers, and Wella-girl shampoo models with come-and-shag-me expressions. Every time a new one went up, there were jokes and snorts of laughter and people driving round to take a look at the way the various parts of the models’ bodies were draped around the right angles of the containers. It afforded a bit of distraction from all the tension.