Last Night's Political Telly: Stay up too late and you might hallucinate Neil Hamilton winning an election

It was four hours after dawn when the vision appeared - the ambulant byword for 'disgraced politician', returned again to parliament

Ukip's leader in Wales, Neil Hamilton (Getty)

Some people travel to the Peruvian amazon and drink the boiled down roots of psychotropic cactii. Others stay up until hours after dawn watching the local election coverage on the BBC News channel. In both cases the risks are profound and the hallucinations terrifying.

09.23. The sun beating in through the slats of the blind. Can it really be him? Can it really be Neil Hamilton, an old man now, standing in a sports hall in Llanelli, his tie and rosette a psychedelic purple and yellow, striding up to the lectern, his face split into a terrifying grin?

Regular abusers of this stuff know the secret to staying sane is to never allow yourself to believe that what you’re seeing is real. And of course, I know it can’t be true that Neil Hamilton has been returned to public office. You can’t accept brown envelopes stuffed with cash in order to corrupt the parliamentary process to which you have been elected, you can’t become the most disgraced politician of your generation, use that as a handy vehicle for a decade long campaign of reality TV humiliation, and then, twenty years later, stand for election and win. I know it can't happen. But honestly, if you'd seen it. It looked so real.

Some people who are into all this claim that the nausea, vomiting and (in extreme cases) diarrhea are an essential part of the process. That they cleanse the body and mind, and clear the path to your spirit guide. Others warn that lasting psychological damage is done. That you never truly recover. Now I'm over the worst of it, I'm inclined to agree with the latter. And for the people of Carmarthenshire, I fear the same.

Elsewhere, the script didn't go quite to plan. The polls had been closed for two hours before the election coverage began in earnest. There was no knockout exit poll. Everybody was still too confused. This was a psephological opus of unfathomably deep complexity. The Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the London mayoralty, hundreds of local councils and - do not forget - 40 Police and Crime Commissioners.

Where do you start? Jeremy Vine gamely leapt up and down on a CGI map of the nation spread across the studio floor, his tendinous calves teasing out narrative threads from Orkney to Southampton, their administrative borders glowing obligingly blue or red or yellow as he did so. Only Iain Duncan Smith, whose glabresecent head appeared on the studio wall shortly after midnight, brought any real clarity to the occasion, distilling the impossible complexity down to a single, perfect anecdote. He had been knocking on doors in Chigwell in Essex and someone had told him that he ‘doesn’t like that Jeremy Corbyn.’

For Labour’s permanently embattled leader, the storm clouds did not gather quite as expected. Southampton; Hastings; Exeter; Crawley; this is precisely kind of roll call your average Shakespearian maverick with a coup to mount might turn to. But not last night. Their loyalty held. Labour kept an unexpected hold on all these councils, meaning the anticipated humiliation was not quite as humiliating as Corbyn’s enemies had hoped, and leaves them in a rather difficult position. Yes, it’s true that when in a similar situation Michael Foot gained 500 odd council seats, and Jeremy Corbyn only lost 30 odd, as opposed to the 300 that had been feared. But the disaster was just too small. The body count too low.

“It’s too soon to judge,” John McDonnell promised as the perma-startled Nicky Morgan stared disbelievingly on. “We’re building a foundation. We’re building a foundation.” There will be those who believe him. But it’s the building that’s been blown up. The foundations were already there, and they’re shrinking. Had he been at the ayahuasca? It’s too soon to judge.