Well, I hope you’re happy now you selfish bastards. You got what you wanted.

Thanks to you Labour now has a leader with dignity, honour, compassion and above all honesty and integrity.

In a very real sense Labour has become Labour again for the first time in a generation.

Shit.

Oh, it’s alright for you lot, with your demands for social justice and fairness but did any of you once give a thought to those of us who toil at the coalface of savage abuse, misanthropy and satire?

No.

Some of us have spent a large portion of our lives howling at the moon and attacking the New Labour project under first “El Presidente” Tony Blair and then “Dead Ed” Miliband.

To borrow a phrase from the late demented Hunter S Thompson, this column beat New Labour like a gong, every chance it got.

He had Nixon and the campaign to re-elect the president, I had Blair and his neoliberal megalomaniacal mendacity.

Multiple illegal wars, anti-trade union legislation, PFI, flogging arms to despots.

I used to have to get up early just to make sure I could fit all the anger and hatred in.

And of course it wasn’t just Blair, there was a whole gallery of grotesques and hypocrites to pick from.

A quick glance at the front benches and you could have been at the Nuremberg trials.

Then of course there was the charisma vacuum of the Miliband years which saw the party not so much bring the fight to the Tories as bleat pathetically on the sidelines that it wasn’t fair.

The sheer spinelessness of Miliband was a thing of wonder, you were amazed he could actually stand up at Prime Minister’s Questions — and then promptly wished he hadn’t.

Even the Cain and Abel-style frisson after he stabbed his brother in the back fizzled out almost immediately and couldn’t manage to make him interesting.

Between Miliband and the mad-eyed bison Ed Balls, Labour lost any last semblance of credibility as well as any lingering impression of competence.

When your best idea for an election stunt is to erect what amounts to your own political gravestone nothing more needs to be said.

Like an old blind sheepdog taken behind the barn and shot, Miliband should have been put out of his misery years ago.

It would have been the kindest thing for all concerned, but then that’s not how we play the game in this country — lame ducks have to limp on into ignominy and, if they’re lucky, obscurity.

In many ways Miliband and his craven cronies made it too easy. It was like shooting fish in a barrel — with a rocket launcher.

At least with Blair you had to spend a moment working out what he was lying about this time and why. With Miliband you didn’t have to bother.

You couldn’t throw a stick in any direction in the Commons without being sure of hitting a bastard, a blowhard or a quisling on the front benches.

From the Bullingdon bullies to the Blair-lite mediocrities by way of the Janus-faced Lib-Dems.

They were all tainted.

Everything about them was a gift from heaven for the satirist, the way they looked, the way they sounded, the rubbish they spewed out.

The only problem was narrowing it down.

Now, when I look at the Labour front bench an unaccustomed feeling comes over me. I think it might be happiness. Or, horror of horrors, that rarest of commodities — hope.

Either way it’s not good for business. You can’t mock and deride people you fundamentally agree with and in some cases actively admire.

You just can’t generate the requisite bile and rage.

Well not unless you work for the Scum or the Daily Heil you can’t anyway.

But don’t feel sorry for me.

You did what you had to do and I respect that, really I do.

And anyway, I’ll always have the Tories.