It is going to be a squeeze on those green benches. Maybe they will have to come and go in shifts, or put beach towels down to grab their “spot”. With polls predicting a majority bigger than Blair’s and mightier than Attlee’s, the Commons authorities will have a job on their hands accommodating the legions of Labour MPs heading their way.

In fact, the Commons will have the same number of MPs as before, 650, but the make-up will be different. The chamber will be a sea of red with a sprinkling of blue, orange and yellow, some dots of green, and whatever colour Nigel Farage plumps for (gammon pink?).

No wonder Labour tails are up. You could see it at Scottish Labour’s manifesto launch yesterday. Happy campers everywhere. That’s not supposed to happen. Scottish leader Anas Sarwar was so up for the fight he launched his campaign for Holyrood in 2026 while he was at it. There’s confidence for you.

Without wishing to do a Rishi on anyone’s parade, one might wonder whether Labour is having too easy a time of it in this election. Should their path to power be quite so free of obstacles as seems to be the case?

Despite constant pleas from the leadership not to take anything for granted, the lads and lassies just can’t help themselves sometimes. Why should they when even a senior Tory concedes the fight is all over bar the shouting, and it is now just a question of limiting the damage.

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For Grant Shapps, whose transition from Tigger to Eeyore has been dizzyingly swift, the important thing now is to deprive Labour of a “supermajority”. Don’t give them too big a majority or they’ll get too big for their boots. “The country doesn’t function well when you get majorities the size of Blair’s or even bigger,” Shapps warned this week. Concede defeat with weeks to go - that will show ‘em.

Ruth Davidson has joined in the bizarre rallying call, urging voters in Scotland not to punish the Tories by voting SNP. “Let’s be honest,” writes the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, “I know a lot of people are unhappy at the state of politics not just in Scotland but across the UK as a whole - and frankly I’m one of them. But you need to ask yourself, how would any of that be helped by electing more SNP MPs?”

It may not change anything. But my goodness it would make a lot of people very happy to see the Conservatives take a drubbing. Others are hoping a similar fate awaits the SNP elsewhere in the country.

Taking pleasure in another’s misfortunes. There ought to be a word for that, something German maybe. Whatever you call it, the noble baroness is not above indulging. She will be watching Nicola Sturgeon play pundit on ITV’s election night programme “to see her face as she realises her push for independence is finished”. Steady on, Ruth. No need to bring the tank out.

It is good for democracy to have a clear-out now and then, and there is little the governing party can do about it. Call it Callaghan’s law, after what the former Labour prime minister told an aide in 1979 shortly before losing to Margaret Thatcher.

“There are times, perhaps once every 30 years,” said Callaghan, “when there is a sea change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea change, and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”

Labour supporters would laugh bitterly at any notion the party has had it too easy in this campaign. Never has happened, never will, they would say. Old hands will tell you that even in 1997, on the eve of Blair’s victory, it was by no means certain the party would win. Labour had been caught out before, in 1992, and it was not going to be fooled again. Next time it would be a lean, mean, election fighting machine, forged in the fires of past battles with the Tories and the media.

Labour has used the same playbook as Blair’s New Labour, but neither Sir Keir nor the party has been put through the mill to the same extent. They just haven’t. Starmer likes to talk about how much Labour has changed since the bad old days of Jeremy Corbyn. He is not so keen to talk about his own leap from Corbyn ally to enemy.

When picked up on this by Beth Rigby in the Sky News debate, Starmer looked the most uncomfortable I had ever seen him. The moments when an interviewer has genuinely given him a hard time are few and far between. There have been skirmishes over tax, but after the umpteenth denial, even the doughtiest of interviewers will give up.

It is Callaghan law at work again - voters want a lot of things from an election, but first and foremost they want to blow a collective raspberry in the face of whatever lot was in power, or in the SNP’s case, is in power.

But a win is a win. Does it matter how it was achieved? It does if the party fails to deliver on expectations. Labour has played a canny hand here. It has fought a campaign built on the desire for change, but at the same time its message to voters is “fear not, things won’t change”. Taxes won’t go up, there won’t be a splurge on spending, there will be no chaos here, thank you very much.

Yet a party cannot behave in government the way it acts in opposition. Choices must be made. Promises, however vague, need to be fulfilled. Otherwise, voters will start to wonder why they bothered. There was one change Starmer could have signed up for but has not - scrapping the two child benefit cap. It is what Scottish Labour wants, what Gordon Brown wants, what many of those hoping to become Labour MPs want. It would have been a clear expression of intent, but Starmer won’t commit.

The subject will no doubt come up in Question Time this Thursday. Four party leaders, Sunak, Starmer, Swinnety and Ed Davey, will be asked questions by a studio audience. It will be a tricky night. As Kate Forbes learned recently, Question Time audiences have limited patience with politicians who won’t answer the question. Sir Keir could be in for his toughest test yet.