10 Boring Conversations You Will Have in the Pub Tonight

Politics. We've all spent months talking about it. Now, politics has finally happened. All we have to do is talk about it a little bit more, then it will finally be over for another four and a half years, and we can go back to football, shopping and fucking as the prime movers of our pub conversation.

But not before we've had at least three of these hackneyed chats at the pub/club/taxi rank/house party/piss dungeon orgy/Turkish bath after work tonight…

1) NICOLA STURGEON SHOULD RUN ENGLAND AND WALES TOO

"Wasn't she superb? The real story of this campaign was the women."

"Totally. The women really showed those white male Oxbridge types. Apart from Natalie Bennett."

"Yeah, she was crap."

"And what about that Welsh woman?"

"Huh?"

"You know, there was a Welsh woman too at one point. Wasn't she good?"

"Was she?"

"I suppose. I didn't really watch the debates. I'm going on what they said on Gogglebox."

2) HOW CAN THE TORIES WIN WHEN ME AND MY FRIENDS ALL VOTE LABOUR?

"Where are these people!?"

"I know! I just don't understand it. Everyone on my course at SOAS is Labour or Green."

"I know. Like, all the people I follow on Twitter were lighting up with #milifandom. I thought that was the moment we'd broken through."

"It was all over the social feeds I've carefully curated with people whose opinions I agree with."

"It's not like we only move in shallow circles of people who reinforce our own prejudices, is it?"

"Course not."

"I mix with loads of different people in my job at an NGO."

"Precisely."

3) THE REAL STORY HERE IS THAT WE ARE BECOMING TWO COUNTRIES

"That's the real issue."

"It really is."

"That's how history will remember this election. The point at which the 300-year-old Union irrevocably slipped away."

"Everything else is going to be forgotten a hundred years from now, except that."

"It's that big."

"It's huge."

"It's enormous."

"It's elephantine."

"It's epoch-making."

"Oh, it's bigger than that."

4) NOW THAT THE TORIES HAVE GOT IN I'M GOING TO LIVE IN SCOTLAND

"It's going to be like Southern Scandinavia once the Nats are done with it. They'll have to take us in as refugees from Cameron's England."

"I know. The bleak reality of this icy English plain can no longer be borne. I'll miss all my friends, but we need to support the Socialist utopia."

"Where in Scotland do you think you'll go? Glasgow?"

"Nah, too shitty."

"Edinburgh?"

"It's fine during Festival season, but…"

"Inverness, Dundee, Aberdeen?"

"Too far out."

"So…"

"Well it's an aspiration more than an ambition."

5) IT'S THE MURDOCH-OWNED RIGHT-WING PRESS THAT STITCHED IT UP FOR THE TORIES

"Of course, yeah."

" The Sun with that bacon sandwich front page."

"That was what got him in the end."

"Hateful, desperate stuff. Murdoch will stop at nothing until he has made us buy all of his very popular media products."

"The problem is that the people who buy these rags, you know, the working people we're trying to raise up, they can't see through it."

"Precisely, it's a failure of education."

"Yeah it's what happens if you treat people like they have the ability to make up their own minds."

"Yeah. They start buying the Sun and the Mail in massive quantities that eclipse the rest of the dailies. It's a failure of democracy."

"If only a quarter of the people who buy the Sun read the Guardian, they'd know all this."

"They really would."

6) HAVE YOU HEARD OF 'SHY TORY SYNDROME'?

"What's that?"

"Apparently pollsters consistently under-report the Tory vote, because people don't want to tell them they're voting Conservative.

"I know what you mean."

"There's even a Wikipedia on it."

"Okay."

"It's 1992 all over again – people making nice for the polls, then going into the booth and stabbing Ed in the back with their pencils."

7) HONESTLY THOUGH ED JUST WASN'T LEFT WING ENOUGH

"You think?"

"That's what skewers the Labour Party every time. They never learn that people really want hard-left ideals. Tony Benn knew that. Greatest leader we never had."

"Yeah but Michael Foot."

"We just need to reach out to people – make them realise that socialism matters. If he'd offered to nationalise the railways, abolish private schools and raise the minimum wage to 20 quid an hour, he'd be in Downing Street by now."

"Yeah but Tony Blair."

"You're not getting it, are you? Ed was never going to win if he didn't get out there onto the pit closure picket lines, singing 'The Red Flag' and pledging to scrub the bourgeoisie from history."

"You want another drink?"

"Glass of the Moët if you're at the bar."

8) THE GREENS ARE A WASTED VOTE

"No way. I voted for a party that's challenging the status quo."

"Yeah bet you feel happy now you've wasted your vote and the Conservatives have got in."

"Yes because they're the only party standing up for the issues that really matter. The long-term issues."

"The issues don't matter if they're only given an airing by a fringe party promising the moon on a stick to everyone."

"I need to vote with my conscience."

"Your conscience has brought us to the present situation."

"It's time for new forms of politics. The old system is dead."

"It seems to be bearing up quite well, though, given the Greens have only one MP and the Tories 333."

"Change starts here. You're either part of the problem or you're part of the solution."

"The solution is not to vote Green."

9) DID YOU STAY UP FOR VINCE CABLE?

"Nah, I went to bed around Douglas Alexander."

"Was that before or after Danny Alexander?"

"After, I think."

"After Charles Kennedy?"

"Oh, definitely after Charles Kennedy, but before Ed Balls."

"Was Kennedy before Jim Murphy?"

"It must've been. Definitely before Simon Hughes, Jo Swinson, and Ed Davey… but after David Laws, Esther McVey and George Galloway."

"Right. Gotcha."

10) DID YOU HEAR WHAT KATIE HOPKINS SAID ABOUT…

"Shut up or I will fucking batter you."

@gavhaynes