TOM UTLEY: I haven't voted for a winning candidate for 44 years. But I love everything about the polling booth - starting with the pencil stub on the end of a string!
The BBC's Nick Robinson will not thank me for reminding readers that moments before the result of the 2010 Labour leadership election was announced, he confidently asserted on air that David Miliband was about to emerge victorious.
Precisely three minutes later, David's challenger for the post, his younger brother Ed, was officially declared the winner. Whoops!
With Robinson's unhappy gaffe in mind, therefore, I won't risk making a complete fool of myself today by offering any prediction of the overall result of yesterday's election. By the time you read this, after all, you will have a much clearer picture of how the nation voted than I have now, since I'm writing before the polls close.
All I will state with any confidence is that yesterday morning, in my own South London constituency, I placed my cross in the box beside the name of a losing Conservative candidate. Yet again.
I say yet again, because I've always voted Tory — holding my nose ever more tightly since Margaret Thatcher was turfed out by her own party — while I've lived in Labour strongholds ever since I married Mrs U in 1980. Indeed, never once in our 44 years together have I voted for a winning candidate in any election, local or national.
Tom Utley admits he likes the whole business of voting at a polling station - from the quiet dignity and seriousness of the occasion, to the pencil stub on the end of that piece of string in the polling booth
But this has never stopped me from making my way down to the polling station to cast my vote on the morning of every election day, come rain or shine — and yesterday in South London was gloriously sunny — knowing full well that my cross on the ballot paper will be totally futile.
Why, then, do so many of us still bother, when we live in constituencies where we know our votes will have no chance of making the slightest difference to the result?
(In mine, Labour's Helen Hayes is defending a majority of 27,310; I don't think I can claim clairvoyant powers for predicting a Labour hold.)
Well, I make that trip partly because I'm conscious that generations of our forefathers gave their lives for my right to choose who should govern me, and that failing to vote would feel like a betrayal of their sacrifice.
But it's much more than that, too. The truth is that I hugely enjoy the whole business of voting at a polling station — in my case, our local church crypt.
I like everything about it, from the quiet dignity and seriousness of the occasion, to the pencil stub on the end of that piece of string in the polling booth. I like the feeling of community spirit that comes from queuing with neighbours from all walks of life, bound together as we are by a sense of civic duty — even though I know that the great majority of them will vote against my preference.
Then there's the friendly way campaigners for rival parties set their differences aside, after weeks of abusing each other, to share our names when we hand one of them our polling cards, so that they can chase up supporters who have not yet voted.
I like the sense of participating, however hopelessly, in a momentous national event, writes Tom Utley
I'm impressed, too, by the unfailing courtesy and efficiency of the clerks who preside, using rulers to cross off our names on the printed extracts from the electoral register in front of them, without a computer in sight.
Indeed, a general election is the one occasion in every four or five years when I feel that public officials are there to help, rather than obstruct us. For once, we are the bosses, not the bossed.
But above all, I like the sense of participating, however hopelessly, in a momentous national event.
A former editor of mine, Lord Moore of Etchingham, puts it well in the current issue of the Spectator magazine. Saying how much he'll miss voting in elections to the Commons, now he's barred as a member of the Lords, he describes the process as 'democracy's version of Holy Communion'.
But of course his lordship will have been very far from alone in having missed out on yesterday's communal experience. I'm thinking of the huge numbers who opted for postal ballots — almost a fifth of the electorate in 2019, and I suspect even more this time round.
Of these, a great many will have had pressing reasons for being unable to make it to a polling station, such as frailty, disability, absence from home or because they live somewhere remote from the nearest one.
But unless I'm much mistaken, many others choose to vote by post simply because it's less bother than making the (generally short) trip to do it in person. Mind you, they've had a perfect right to make this choice ever since Tony Blair's government introduced the Representation of the People Act 2000, which laid down that those who wish to register as postal voters, either temporarily or permanently, can do so on demand, without giving any reason.
Blair's purpose was pretty obvious, I think. It was partly to boost turnout at elections, since high turnouts have always flattered politicians' vanity.
But I suspect he also calculated that, historically, high turnouts have generally favoured Labour.
Whatever his motives, however, I reckon he trivialised the democratic process, stripping it of its community spirit, while making it as lazy and casual a matter as ordering a pizza from Deliveroo.
Meanwhile, the rapid spread of postal voting over the decades since has brought with it all sorts of problems and abuses. For one thing, ballot papers have sometimes failed to arrive in time, thereby disenfranchising intended recipients.
Indeed, one analysis yesterday found that this time round, delays had been reported in 34 of the 129 seats with majorities of less than 5 per cent, opening up the possibility of legal challenges to the results.
Then there's the danger of electoral fraud — much greater when ballots are sent by post — with several notorious cases of people casting multiple votes, either from different addresses or through using ballot papers intended for others.
Another drawback is that those who opt for postal votes often use them weeks before the end of an election campaign. This means they may miss out on hearing of policies or revelations that could change their minds, when it's already too late.
On that point, however, I must grant you that there was very little danger of that, this time, since all we heard from any of the mainstream party leaders, from beginning to end of the campaign, were evasions, unkeepable promises and vacuous slogans, interspersed with a series of buffoonish stunts from the Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey.
Indeed, we could all have voted by post many weeks ago, missing nothing of any significance apart from Nigel Farage's reappearance on the scene.
But then we would also have missed out on the thought-provoking, uplifting experience of that time-honoured ritual at the polling station, which so many of us performed yesterday.
So a word of advice to any readers who have never voted except by post: for a full sense of the preciousness of democracy, give the real thing a go next time.
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