SO THAT’S it, more or less. Today the nation decides and all that, and tomorrow David Cameron will stand in a grey and gusty Downing Street – for surely the sun will not shine – and declare his victory.

He will make a passable speech, gracious even, and sprinkled with enough “y’knows” to detract from his Eton poshness, as he looks to the task ahead.

Perhaps like Tony Blair before him, and this is a man who has studied every sweetly deceitful word and every mannered tic of the other side’s once-great leader, Call-Me-Dave will feel the hand of history on his shoulder, then make a joke about his own pomposity.

He will no doubt invoke the nation, as politicians do at such moments, and will grandly proclaim that we – the nation, all of us, every pip-squeaking one, apart from the massed ranks of the terminally apathetic, of course – have chosen him and his party to lead us out of the blighted land of the Brown one, and towards the promised sunny uplands that lie ahead, but only after a long and weary journey.

Or some such soul-sapping stuff.

Perhaps I am being too gloomy and maybe Mr Cameron doesn’t have it in the bag; maybe he will not squeak to victory. After all, his smooth progression to preordained power ran aground after Nick Clegg became unaccountably popular in those television debates (and that wasn’t in the script).

Maybe the voters, or those of us who bother – as we really should – will instead choose the inconclusive stalemate of a hung Parliament. This outcome is often seen as a bad one, especially by those who really want to win and feel entitled to own what ‘belongs’ to them.

But in a sense, a hung Parliament probably resonates with what politicians will insist on calling the nation. For the polls have shown a vote split mostly three ways, with each of the main parties winning around a third of the vote, the Conservatives coming out just on top, and Labour and the Lib Dems squabbling over second place.

Victorious politicians newly risen to power tend to overestimate the depth of their support, hence their calls to the nation, as if every one of us thought “Gor blimey, he’s the one for me”, rather than reluctantly casting our eyes along the line-up of usual-suspect politicians soliciting our votes with thin promises and slick patter.

A column published on the day of an election is a useless thing within 24 hours, when its predictions are left blowing about like the previous day’s litter.

So that’s my lot by tomorrow, but whatever happens, it has been a good election to follow, with its ups and downs, constant difficulty to read, novel TV game-show element, and Gordon Brown’s unpredictable slip-ups, eerie cheerfulness and bull-in-a-computer-shop attempts at smoothing what he has previously roughed up.

Now it’s wait-and-see time.

• THAT appalling oil disaster off the Gulf of Mexico is all your fault – and mine, too. As oil companies such as BP, which is carrying the blame for this ecological atrocity, dig ever deeper, and take ever greater risks, to extract the oil used to power our cars and our lifestyles, the chances of such an accident must surely rise.

This is not the observation of a green zealot, by the way.

Far from it, as I drive a big family car, recycle with grudging diligence (what exactly can they accept in those blessed bins?) and recoil from the hair-shirt self-denial of the true green, although I do like my bicycle.

But still, the greasy inevitability of yet another oil disaster does give one pause to think. As the oil companies make bigger and bigger profits extracting oil from our planet’s most awkward and dangerous corners, are the risks still worth it?

I guess the energy-hungry world will decree that they still are, especially as all-powerful oil conglomerates spend millions on political lobbying to get their way.