Anybody who has worked in any sort of office job will be familiar with the phrase “death by powerpoint” to describe the arse-numbing boredom of sitting in one place while being subjected to a stream of bar charts and bullet points. This week I coined the phrase “death by democracy” when faced with a local Labour party AGM.

By the way, that is not to say it was a bad meeting. The atmosphere was great, which you would expect under the circumstances, there were no arguments, and everybody was on the same side. In the past there were times when there were factions and fierce competition for one side or the other to grab the levers of power. There were also times when every decision by the Chair would be challenged, and the wording of proposed changes to standing orders would be debated in Jesuitical detail.

But there was none of that. It is not just that everybody was in a good mood from having won the General Election last week both nationally and locally. When I was unwell I stepped back from all this sort of thing. With a knackered immune system I was avoiding contact with anybody as far as possible, and then Covid came along and everybody else joined in with that distancing. With Corbyn in charge I had little enthusiasm for diving back in even when I was up to it, so there were a lot of old friends I had not seen for a long time and it was great to catch up with them. There were also some newer faces. Even one person who only joined the party a week before.

So why “death by democracy”?