On the day of the 1997 election itself I was in Graz, Austria, buying furniture for our office in Bosnia. Anne was still (heavily pregnant) in Belfast. Even in Austria, CNN and Sky News were available so I was able to help an American colleague follow what was going on – the extraordinary thing was not just the huge scale of the Labour victory, but also the Lib Dems winning more seats, despite the lower vote. And then I woke up in the morning with this odd memory of a dream that Anne had phoned me in the very small hours to tell me that my sometime vague acquaintance from student politics, Stephen Twigg, had defeated leading Conservative Michael Portillo. Impossible, I thought, and went in search of a coffee…