Two lessons learned from the breakfast buffet at the Hilton Hotel, Deansgate, Manchester. First, the plates are no longer minuscule, but pleasingly broad. However, they consist of a smallish bit in the centre and a gently elevated wide rim – the message being: put the food only in the middle. The outer circle is simply decorative, so don’t be uncouth.

The second is that you are no longer enjoined to help yourself. There’s a bloke there who does the serving for you. So if you go up and say ‘bacon, please’, he will put a piece of bacon on your plate. One piece. The same with the sausages, the fried eggs, the tomatoes. One of each. Of course, you can request more. You can say: ‘I’d like seven hash browns, please.’ I did that on my second morning and he looked at me funny, but I got my hash browns, counted out, one by one. My guess is that most people feel cowed or ashamed and do not ask for more in case the man thinks they are greedy, and that this is therefore a potent means of portion control.

Seventy years ago you would have been served at your seat by lots of waiters. Ten years ago you just helped yourself, piling vast amounts of fried food onto your plate so that in the end it resembled the bucket from which Mr Creosote ate his food in the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life.

I would surmise, then, that the economics have changed. Wages are very low, especially in the private service sector, while the cost of food has rocketed. The Hilton is probably saving a lot of money by having a bloke enforce an involuntary diet on the hotel’s customers. I suppose it is preferable to the policy adopted by some hotels in, for example, Malaysia, where the same economics applies – cheap labour, expensive western foodstuffs – and where you can pile your plate as high as you want, but you get charged for the food you leave behind. In other words, you are fined for not clearing your plate. The schtick here is to shame westerners into not wasting food when the indigenous population, just beyond the hotel gate, is starving, but it’s really just another form of portion control, of course.

Increasingly corporations present money–saving measures as being part of their progressive ethos – such as those signs in hotel bathrooms telling you not to use the towels so that the polar bears or rainforests might be saved by the reduction in laundry. Incidentally, the Hilton was fine and many of the staff spoke English, or its awful Mancunian approximation.

I was there to attend the Social Democratic party’s 2022 conference, something which I know many of you will consider to be the consummate exercise in futility. And then, having poured a little scorn, you will go back to despairing of Liz Truss and her spatchcocked cabinet imbeciles and being terrified that Sir Keir and Sturgeon might get in. In which case, I much prefer my futility to yours. We have recently evicted a Labour councillor from Middleton in Leeds, a seat which they had never previously lost. The SDP won (in a seat consisting of about 20,000 voters) with more votes than all of the other candidates combined, a victory occasioned by our candidate, Wayne Dixon, putting aside his sense of futility for five years and persuading people. In the end, when the Middleton voters put aside their sense of futility, they did so en masse and suddenly discovered it had not been futile after all.

The defeated candidate was young and middle-class and he was not terribly gracious at the count, bless him. Throughout the campaign Wayne had to put up with the usual barrage of mud-slinging, defamation and bullying from the Labour party, beginning of course with the accusation that he was ‘racist’, with not the slightest shred of evidence and despite the fact that Wayne is at least partly from Traveller stock. Their hatred had no bounds, because they knew that the game was up – and now the good people of Middleton have a white working–class bloke who knows how to define the word ‘woman’ representing them – which I daresay the left will think is regressive and beyond the pale, but which makes him truly representative of the area.

Shortly after this win, a councillor in Derbyshire defected to the SDP from the Tories because – for reasons which you may well be beginning to comprehend – he found his party absurd. More recently a fairly prominent Conservative donor has decided that it would be slightly less futile to bung the SDP some dosh than it would be to carry on giving it to the complacent and arrogant Tories. These are small victories, sure – but they have a significance. We would of course benefit from proportional representation, but even without it we will continue to chip away at the walls of futility until futility gives up the ghost.

The conference was well attended and featured excellent speeches from the likes of Joanna Williams, Peter Whittle and a charming and benevolent John Cleese – the latter a nice twist, because at last year’s conference, Lionel Shriver had compared us to the People’s Front of Judaea: another intimation of futility, but one which was met with surprisingly good humour.

One of our problems is that we are a proper party with a comprehensive set of policies which have evolved over the years, rather than being a transient phenomenon like Reform or Reclaim or Regurgitate, what-ever, which can make up policy on the hoof and doesn’t care if it makes not the slightest bit of sense. We are the only mainstream party which doesn’t bob down on to one knee in a spasm of hyperliberal self-abnegation and which knows that it is unequivocally wrong for men who wish to define themselves as women to insist, under the law, that the rest of us have to define them thus as well. It’s a fiver to join.