On Friday Saturday evening, I went out for a noisy drink with Mr and Mrs Wardytron, their livejournal friend Jim(?) and a posse of goths. Thank you, Wardy, for inviting me. It was fun.

One of the few serious topics of conversation that came up was the new Conservative Party leader. It’s not been often in the past few years that the words “Conservative Party leader” and “serious” have appeared in the same sentence, except when “serious” has been followed by “difficulties”. Wardy suggested that now the leader of the Labour Party will be the one with the difficulties because the media have decided on a story and the story is that David Cameron is a plausible contender for Prime Minister; the media have gone further than that in fact: they are already writing the story of his triumph over Gordon Brown. I don’t believe that it’s going to work out like that in reality, but things are certainly going to be more interesting from now on.

What worried me slightly yesterday was that the Observer‘s Money columnist William Keegan, he of the unchanging Dean Friedman hair-and-tache and unreconstructed Callaghan-era economics, wrote a piece yesterday about how Gordon Brown had nothing to worry about. Since Keegan’s predictions about the British economy and his Old Labour criticisms of the Chancellor’s policies have been pretty consistently wrong throughout the reign of the Blair administration I am now officially scared.

I wonder what the collective noun is for a group of goths?