…For example, he reserved particular joy for the sending of young men to their deaths. Especially with the right musical backing.

And the cymbals suddenly split away from the rest of the percussion, throwing the mass of bodies into a new, more violent, time-signature. He grits his teeth as he moves with the surge, pressed ever tighter to bodies hot and wet with sweat; brushes clenched fists and spikes and hair.

As he starts to feel himself fall, he opens his eyes to the dark dampness of the relaxation tank. He turns his body, kept afloat by the salt in the shallow waters, and hears the water slop about him.

There was probably some philosophical point to be made about the thirty-pounds-an-hour expense of this sensory deprivation. But it was not one he concerned himself with, now, as he closed his eyes and felt deeper into his brain, his being vibrating more loudly and confidently than ever, in this safe house of isolation.

He sees himself as he was last year; weekends away from the wife with crack cocaine and naïve young girls. The old cliché: socialists will falter over money; for Conservatives, it's sex and sleaze…

Oh, sleaze. You get numb to it after a while. But if you leave off, perhaps for the duration of a busy working week…

He remembers himself travelling back from these walkabouts, back to reality. Everything too slow, everything tainted with the dulling touch of others. He sees himself boiling away like a psychopath, grinding his teeth and fidgeting while in pleasant company.

And no-one ever – ever – noticing.

That is at once the great thing and the fatal thing about our society. When you're riding that wave, on the shoulders of others, everyone is complicit. And there is that uniquely capitalist reduction of the spatial dimensions – only up! up! up! higher! higher! higher! more! more! more! – there is no down. But when you lose that height and your lift begins to falter, no-one will ever see or know, because of the removal, from the consciousness, of any alternative view.

Everyone has a right to be happy. The new party billboards carried that slogan without even a hint of irony, because the focus groups didn't have even a hint of irony. And it was working. Happiness wasn't something you made for yourself as the pay-off of years of graft and careful thought; that myth was long dead. It came in a pill. It would come to you, if you waited long enough.

In the room next door, the shadow chancellor indulges himself with the Guantanamo Experience – wrapped up in an orange boiler suit, eyes bound, death metal thundering into his ears, burly men marching him from his cell to the interrogation room and back again. It was, he said, exactly what he needed. From boardrooms to water-boarding: a nice change of pace.

And when you left, and the same was undoubtedly true of the right honourable gentleman next door, you saw things; the trees and the birds and the Sun and the moon; as though for the first time, having shed your over-saturation.

This revitalisation showed through in his face, in the polls, and in his policies. But he still allowed himself guilty pleasures, now and then.