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I’ve been feeling rather nostalgic this week. I had a lovely holiday last week, thanks for asking, and part of it was remembering that distant, strange thing of not working like a whipped cur from dawn to midnight every single fucking day, which reminded me of being young. And listening to the news, I was reminded that back in the 80s and 90s, when young, I used to derive a strange enjoyment from that period a few months after a Conservative election victory when the populace wakes up to the enormity of what has happened.

Now, as then, most of the 24% of the population who voted for the party won’t care a hoot, of course, because if they worried about children going hungry, or hospital queues, or the nation’s assets being sold on the cheap to dodgy hedge fund managers who happen to be chums of George and Dave, or the country’s resources being placed in the hands of foreign states, or British manufacturers being made jobless in the interests of the unregulated free market, they wouldn’t have voted Conservative.

But the rest of that 24%, the hard of thinking, the dolts who placed their vote based on a photo of a bacon sandwich: Oh, the priceless look on their faces now.

‘You know when you said you were going to make £12 billion of cuts to the welfare system? Well, what precisely did you mean by that, only I work 40 hours a week and now apparently there are going to be £12 billion of cuts to the welfare system and even though I work bloody hard I’m going to be worse off…?

‘Oh. I see. When you said you were going to make £12 billion of cuts to the welfare system you meant you were going to make £12 billion cuts to the welfare system… I thought you were just going to make cuts that affected other people, like foreigners and northerners and skivers and immigrants. Oh. I see. No. The cuts affect everybody. Especially people on low wages in full-time work. Right. I see.’

People look like Bishop Brennan when Father Ted kicked him up the arse: the enormity of what Ted had done was so unlikely it could not possibly have happened. Yet a tiny corner of Bishop Brennan’s brain was telling him it had…

Did George Osborne really sell off a bank at a loss of £1.1billion to the taxpayer, losing for the nation the enormous profits the bank was about to pay back? Did David Cameron really lie through his teeth about tax credits? Is Britain really refusing to help sick people fleeing war?  Are disabled people really suffering because the odious lying liar Iain Duncan Smith is doing everything he can to take help away from them?

Just as Bishop Brennan finally allowed the truth to penetrate his synapses, so are those members of the electorate who are waking up to the biggest mistake of their lives: Yes, they did kick me up the arse!

People now look very much like people looked then, when Nigel Lawson plunged them into negative equity on their mortgages, or Norman Lamont presided over the ERM calamity, or Thatcher introduced the poll tax, or when recession after recession struck: ‘But… but… but…. You told us the right wing way was the way of economic competence…’

Somewhere in their tiny minds English voters have a dim awareness that a managed economy, state intervention, workplace representation – all those things so demonised by the right – were part of this country’s extraordinary economic success story in the years after World War Two. But facts like those are as airbrushed out of history as any of Stalin’s opponents. For now.

So now, as then, Tories with a Parliamentary majority barely bother to hide their contempt for the electorate as they set about enriching themselves and their friends, pursuing right-wing ideology in the face of the evidence. Tax credits, for example. Cameron’s unequivocal pre-election promise that tax credits would not be cut would come back to haunt real politicians; Tories just laugh at getting away with it. Again. They get bankers – bankers! – to advise on privatisation… which is like getting an alcoholic to vote on pub opening hours. Nobody does sneering at the electorate better than a Tory.

Back then, there was a Spitting Image sketch in which Thatcher had a voter in a dungeon; she was trying to see how much torture she would need to inflict to stop the man voting for her; she couldn’t hurt him enough.

Yes, it hurts people and yes, I wish it didn’t. But I can’t help the devil in me that says anybody who voted Tory and then got hurt because the Tories are a venal, selfish, greedy, lying, incompetent bunch bloody well deserves it everything they get.