Watching Paris burn at the weekend, it occurred to me that saying ‘I told you so’ was a lot less fun than I thought it would be.

I surprised myself by not emitting a bitter cackle at the viral clip of the young French woman trying unsuccessfully to reason with looters. She is seen repeatedly shouting things like ‘C’est pas la cause!’ (‘This isn’t the cause’) and ‘Pourquoi vous faites ça?’ (‘Why are you doing this?’) and seems incredulous as her world view smashes rudely into reality.

It turns out that when all your predictions were gloomy ones there’s not actually much pleasure in them coming true

Incidentally, what exactly is ‘La cause’? The media are still, incredibly, referring to the riots as ‘cost-of-living demonstrations’. This is a fantastic new euphemism for urban destruction. I look forward to hearing it in different contexts – how about ‘In 1940, London suffered greatly from the Luftwaffe’s cost-of-living demonstration’?

The combination of mass uncontrolled immigration into the West from the Third World and socialist economic policies has been giving me the heebie-jeebies for a long time. I couldn’t foresee it ending any other way than this. And I thought I would get a cynical little kick when these incidents finally arrived. But no.

It turns out that when all your predictions were gloomy ones there’s not actually much pleasure in them coming true. I felt only terrible pity at the humanity of that video, along with generously sized dollops of fear and anxiety.

I really did assume there’d at least be a silver lining of smug satisfaction at seeing progressives get what’s coming to them. As a nasty right winger with a hate-filled heart, I was almost looking forward to it. But it turns out I’m not even going to get that. The lid being ripped off progressive naïveté is just horrible to behold.

In fact, I now realise that I was in a naive little bubble of my own. Because in some secret cell, hidden even from myself, I longed to be wrong. I wanted to be surprised, to be able to shrug embarrassedly and say ‘silly old fool, I spent all that time worrying about nothing’.

I suspect this might be a more common quality that we think. It perhaps explains the (little) bounces that both Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch are getting in the polls at the moment. A few rays of optimistic sunshine lift the heart. We long for some good vibes, or even just a bit of a rest. The news is a tsunami of outrage. Pretty much every institution that we took for granted no longer functions. Most of the trivial little distractions that we loved have been smashed up, for reasons that nobody can understand. So Burnham’s amiability and cheery demeanour are a little lift. I get it

I even feel its slight pull on myself. A tiny hopeful part of me wonders, maybe there is some magical way of conjuring up money from nothing that John Healey knows about? Such speculations never last long, but the impulse is there.

It is always brought crashing pretty swiftly back to the ground. In the wake of the destruction in France, it was positively surreal to hear Burnham’s latest bus nonsense – a ban on playing music out loud that is utterly unenforceable. And then Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh – a name I suspect might live in infamy when the lights go out – piped up to suggest that Shabana Mahmood’s paltry piddling on indefinite leave to remain would ‘threaten community cohesion’. Presumably the nodding through of millions of people from around the world didn’t threaten cohesion at all.

There was also the perfect timing of the French ballon going up shortly after the hilarious nonsense of the English ethnicity debate. Ironically, all of that twitching, clucking and embarrassed fretting about English identity – sweaty palms, nervous glances, and desperate panicked positioning along the lines of social class – is the most identifiably English thing imaginable. Nothing – absolutely nothing – could possibly be more English than letting the country be invaded but not wanting to say anything because that would make you look uncouth.

Such comforting evasions and happy delusions are on their last legs. We are all, sooner or later, going to be that young woman pleading in the rubble. And it won’t be any fun at all.