There can be no denying it. I’m gutted

Troy lost. The Achaeans, tiptoeing out of their wooden horse in the drunken hours of the city’s post-party night, opened the gates to their army. The warriors poured in, killing the men, raping or enslaving the women and children, burning, smashing, destroying.

They saw it coming. Or rather, Cassandra did. The Greeks are coming, she said. Oh yeh, they said. Pull the other one.

I know just how they felt. Last week I took an afternoon off from campaigning and went to the Troy Exhibition at the British Museum. Having recently re-read the Iliad, I couldn’t wait to see what the Museum made of Homer’s ancient poem.

I am now convinced that the Epic is not fantasy, it’s history.

A city besieged by an army obsessed with a perceived slight. Convinced of their moral right to kill thousands because of a love affair. It really makes sense to me now, after the General Election on Thursday.

Is this a spurious comparison? “a perceived slight”? If I were to say that Brexiters are obsessed with the conviction that the EU is to blame for the sufferings of the working class under Austerity, and voted for the Party which caused it? And in their thousands they enlisted. With terrible consequences. A case of very slight thinking, in my perception.

I shouldn’t have been surprised we were so soundly slaughtered . Standing for a seat as a Green Candidate in the recent election was both brave and stupid, and defeat was fated. After all, this was the Brexit election. The Enemy was superbly armoured, equipped, utterly without scruples or any notion of fair play, prepared to use every trick in the book and a great deal more. Our so-called allies were weak, led by an idealistic, indecisive fool. And there I was trying to get a message over that few care about: that all life on this world could be facing an Extinction Event as catastrophic as that which destroyed the dinosaurs millions of years ago.

And all they cared about was Helen.

There are too many flaws in the comparison for it to stand up. Except, of course, for how I feel.

Rather as Aeneas the Trojan felt, looking down from a nearby hillside at the burning city that was his home. He can hear the screams of the women. His old father lies at his feet. His son clings to his hand. Aeneas would, Virgil tells us, go on to found Rome. I suppose if I am to take this melodramatic comparison further, I would be the father – all the glory days of Troy behind me, living long enough to see it destroyed but not long enough to see the glorious empire arising out of the ashes.

Gutted. We fought a good fight, but there was no way we could have won. Not by fighting fair. As I have said many times, we the Goodies are hampered by our scruples, our morality, by ethics. The Baddies aren’t.

Take refuge in cliché at times like this. The pendulum swings, it shall swing back again.