In canto V of Inferno Dante is introduced to Paolo and Francesca whose punishment for their lust in life is to spend eternity being swirled round hell by a wind, seeing and desiring each other but without being able to do very much about it. I was reminded of them on multiple occasions in tonight’s Green Party meeting, the second of the year.

There are local government elections in London in 2026 and a mayoral election in Tower Hamlets. Labour is making a determined effort to stop people voting for it, the Tories are facing an extinction event, Reform has no local presence and Aspire (a moderate social democracy in one borough outfit) which runs the council is incapable of expanding its electoral base. You don’t need to be a strategic mastermind to work out that a party which won 14% of the parliamentary vote without so much as posting a tweet has a good chance of doing well.

This brings us back to Paolo and Francesca. The Green Party has a massive book, the size of an old telephone directory, on how to win elections. Apparently it delivers results in target seats, of which there are two in the area. Knocking a lot of doors over a protracted period seems to be the gist. This is all very well when you have a reasonably stable party system with anti-democratic voting methods. But when you have a rapid collapse in support for the two major parties you have to be a bit bolder.

So, a bit like Paolo, I was buffeted by winds which kept me within a tantalising distance not of the object of carnal desire, more a real possibility of humiliating Labour in one of its traditional strongholds. I know it has been done before by a narcissistic Stalinist pillock who gets worse with every passing day and by Aspire, but this would be from the left with an anti-capitalist, pro-Palestinian democratic party. That would be a first.

Where Francesca and Paolo had to contend with and eternity of winds that kept them constantly in frustrating movement, I was dealing with something worse. A meeting in which it’s considered acceptable to go off on irrelevant tangents and butt in whenever you want, cutting across the person who is speaking. If Dante had put me in hell, that is what it would be. That, added to the awareness that something really big is within touching distance and it is blowing away from you.

On the plus side, my radical suggestion of actually meeting in a room again fairly soon to work out what happens around a mayoral campaign from September onwards was agreed. It will give me an opportunity to bang on about the unprecedented potential of the situation and how techniques that are satisfactory in normal times are a limitation in exceptional times.

Afterwards I retired to the pub with a biography of comrade Guevara and took solace from his reflection after his failure in the Congo to “look optimistically into a future that has to be viewed though a gloomy present” and a couple of pints.