Buzz off] Vanish] Scram] Scarper]

ROLL ON next Thursday. I look forward to the chance to go out and jolly well vote Labour. I live in one of those constituencies in which, some have argued, a tactical Lib-Dem vote might be better. But I don't see it like that. I've been looking forward to this vote for months. I want to pack it with all the meaning I can. I want it to be an aggressive, memorable, noisy, irritating, uncouth gesture - a vote that would be the equivalent of the remark you can't take back, ever.

I want it to be a depressing vote. I want it to be thoroughly discouraging, the kind of vote that would make the average Tory politician think: well, if that's the way the electorate's going to be have, one really might as well not bother. That is, I want my vote to express a quite shocking lack of gratitude to the government for all that they have done for my country.

A Lib-Dem vote - we all know what that will be taken to mean. It will be taken to mean that I'm sulking; I could still be won back at the next general election; I'm just suffering from ruffled feathers. In other words, a Lib-Dem vote is a flirt's vote, a tart's vote, if you don't mind my saying so.

Worse than that. The Lib- Dems are trying now to persuade people to vote tactically. But if they receive a tactical vote, will they admit afterwards that it was just tactical? Will they say: actually, a lot of this vote really belongs to Labour? Of course not. They will detect yet another Liberal revival, a populace turning out en masse for the new style of politics they represent. Yes, they will happily hijack the very identity of the tactical voter.

Whereas a Labour vote - that is something to be taken seriously. It doesn't say: I'm sulking. It says: I'm angry, I'm through with this. It says: enough's enough. It doesn't say: I may relent next time around. It says: buzz off] Get out of my hair] Vanish] Scram] Scarper]

So a Labour vote has a quality of honesty, directness, application to the matter in hand (which is to depress this government out of existence). A Labour vote, in this sense, is healthy. It has a clear conscience, a clear pur

pose, a vision. It is at one with itself. It needn't apologise. Only a Labour voter will be able to answer the question 'What did you do in the great European election of 1994, Daddy?' with any kind of pride.

Let's make it a watershed. A wash-out. A white-out. A Suez crisis. A thing that, when a Tory thinks about it years, even decades, later, he has to put his fingers in his ears and blather about something else in order to drown out the thought of it. Let's stage an electoral catastrophe of truly Canadian dimensions.

The second reason for looking forward to Thursday is that it marks the end of Labour's phoney war. Don't get me wrong. It's not that I want the party to start tearing itself to pieces or to descend into a snakepit of vituperation. But this niceness is beginning to get a little eerie. And we've heard enough of these Labour politicians brilliantly avoiding the interviewers' patient attempts at questioning on the leadership campaign.

Of course the interviewers are right. It rather does make a difference who is going to run the Labour Party, and it rather does matter to the kind of voter whose prime concern on Thursday is with the merits of Labour's European policy. (But see above: the prime concern on Thursday is to damage the Tories as much as possible.) The convention that we'll leave all this talk about leadership until after the talk about Europe is just an amusing piece of nonsense.

And it was a particularly fine dirty trick of the Blair- Brown camp to get permission to release the news of their electoral pact, in defiance of the phoney-war rules of engagement. Gordon Brown made his announcement 'because the news had already leaked out', or 'because it had proved impossible to keep the lid on such an important development'.

Of course it had] Of course it would] Brown and Blair had a long-standing pact, we were informed early on, that neither would stand against the other for the leadership. They met and had a summit, ratifying their pact and agreeing that Brown should stand down. Only two people needed to be privy to the ratification terms: Brown and Blair. So one or other, or both of them, leaked. Then they appear to have gone privately to Margaret Beckett and said, look, there's been a leak, we'd better make a formal announcement.

And the left looks on and says: hey, there's a dirty trick - Blair-Brown aren't playing by the rules. And then they 'detect a fix', an agreement between Brown and Blair that Brown will be responsible for economic policy, or economic and social policy, whichever source you trust. One wants to shout at the left: of course there's been a fix, of course Blair-Brown aren't playing by the rules.

But whose dirty tricks do you respect more? The left has Ken Livingstone openly defying the rules, talking freely about the leadership campaign, calling Blair potentially the most right-wing Labour leader ever. Is this,

as dirty tricks go, a dirty trick of distinction? I think not.

But a dirty trick whereby the phoney war, the Grand Moratorium on Leadership Discussion, is punctuated by Brown's magnanimous standing down and his endorsement of Blair - this is surely a dirty trick to admire and cherish. It has that quality of blatancy which characterises the very best dirty tricks.

If one were a supporter of, say, Michael Portillo, one would admire the blatancy of his disloyalty to John Major, the way he gets away with whatever misconduct suits him. If one admired Peter Lilley, one would admire the blatancy with which he has gone off 'for a rest' in his French holiday home in the midst of the European campaign, leaving Mr Major on the hustings.

Tony Benn used to have that gift of blatancy. Lord Tebbit has it today - that gift of working to his own agenda while affecting the very minimum of loyalty to party and government. You might say that all these people have their own agenda and that that is what matters to them.

I hope the Labour left fights well on its agenda but I can't say I'm sorry that Blair-Brown got off to such a flying start. It seems to bode well for them. It seems to bode well for Labour. And that means, too, that it bodes well for the left.