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Stanley Johnson (Boris’s Dad) was flush with paternal pride when I bumped into him at a recent birthday party, by which stage, the Tory-triumph floodgates had been flung wide open – and this was even before the Great Massacre at Crewe & Nantwich. “Clemency!” he roared in jubilation as he joshed about his plans to stand as MP for Henley, “Have you met my son?”.


I smiled: “Fraid I’m one of those Londoners whose ‘trust’ you talked about having to work ‘flat-out’ to earn. Nice to meet you”. Boris stared at me as if I was clinically insane – which, given the adulation being showered on him by everybody else, was quite understandable. The press had gone bonkers when he arrived.

While some on the left stay at home to lick their wounds, I have spotted a few of their bravest out and about: a valiant Ben Bradshaw, for example, turned up that night, along with (amazingly) Gordon Brown’s official spokesman and special advisor. But, strangely, nobody seems very interested in them anymore. Not only are the diarists and their like now buzzing around dynamic young Tories like bees to a honeypot; even those who once counted themselves firmly New Labour appear to be jumping on the Conservative bandwagon. “Doesn’t Samantha Cameron look gorgeous?” asked one dyed-in-the-wool Fabian friend of mine the other day. “I just love her handbag…” I nearly choked on my cosmopolitan – yes, I’m afraid I too have succumbed to Sex and the City fever – but such fickleness seems to have been the order of the past few weeks.

 

Off to theliterary festival of the year, where in 2007 Gordon Brown received ovations and everybody was in raptures about the Milibands. This year it was the Tories who were out in force. George Osborne presided over a scintillating discussion on Afghanistan – “I’m having a great time”, he grinned – and on her daily Sky Arts book show, Mariella Frostrup thought nothing of asking the Shadow Chancellor’s wife, Frances Osborne, how the likes of she and Sam Cam were going to deal with the strictures placed on government wives. As if ‘government’ was a foregone conclusion. At the parties, meanwhile, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was just around the corner: the talk over the canapés was all ‘Oh, when we win, we’ll do this…we’ll do that…’ It seemed churlish to point out that a single swallow doth not a summer make: that it will probably be two whole years before the next general election, and that a little humility – even despite the slow-motion train-crash that currently resembles the government – might go a long way.

Humility, it seems, is also in short supply in the Barack Obama camp. Speaking at the festival on her excellent book Chasing the Flame, about UN special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello who was killed in Iraq in 2003, Samantha Power apparently needed reminding that the US Presidential election hasn’t, er, actually happened yet.

 

Sacked from his campaign for calling Hillary Clinton a ‘monster’, the brilliant academic, hotly tipped to be Obama’s national security advisor should he win, couldn’t stop herself talking about ‘President Obama’. It was one thing to let this slip at a party – oops, I thought: I’ll blame that on the champers, love. But in front of a live audience, she did it again. And then, with a little “gosh – I just can’t help myself, I keep calling him President Obama”, promptly went on to announce what said President will do “in his eight years in the White House”. The audacity of hope, it seems, is fast becoming the audacity of entitlement.

 

Talking about humility – and hope – I’ve just got back from Madagascar, where I’ve been making a documentary about the charity Operation Smile. I was deeply ignorant, I have to admit, about the seriousness of cleft lips and palates in the developing world. I believed the problem was primarily cosmetic, and had little understanding of the extent of its related development issues – malnutrition, speech defects, social exclusion, infanticide, widespread lack of education and employment. But my eyes were duly opened as I witnessed at first hand the phenomenal work of these volunteer surgeons and medical professionals, who between them perform 11,000 free facial reconstructive surgeries a year and change many more lives in the process.

 

After the recent weeks of political grandstanding and complacency, of listening to promises made at British elections and by-elections that will probably be broken or ignored, it was refreshing – and humbling – to see somebody promise to make a difference to people’s lives, and then, actually, do it.

 

Clemency Burton-Hill is a writer, actress and broadcaster, and a contributing editor to The Spectator.