I have, at last, a title for the flimsy stocking-filler volume I have been meaning to write for some years. I shall call it: The Resignation of Ruth Kelly - And Other Excellent Decisions Made at Three O'Clock in the Morning.

Think. Think hard. The decisions you have made in your life in the wee small hours - either ripped to the tits on booze and whatever else took your fancy, or merely sleepless and staring into the abyss - were they any good?

Was that really the best person to go home with? Should that e-mail to your boss really have been sent? Was that phone call to your ex's mother to say you'd always fancied her, and could you come round now with a bottle, really quite such a good idea in the cold light of day? Probably not.

That's why I've been feeling a bit sorry for Ruth. You see, I was at both school (Westminster) and university (Oxford) with her. It is fair to say that between the ages of 16 and 21 she could not make a move without my being there to witness it. And thus I think I have a unique insight into what almost certainly went on at 3.15am last Wednesday morning in Manchester's Midland Hotel.

“Give me one more hit on that bong, Dave,” Ruth will have croaked, reaching over to David Miliband, red-eyed and smirking like a toad as he cradled the home-made water pipe and flamed another little mound of crumbled skunk, “And then I'm gonna snog your face off!”

“Hey, kids, it's three o'clock in the morning!” James Purnell (with whom I was also at university) will have shouted. “I've never been up this late. Let's steal motorbikes and ride to Taunton!”

“These pills are mental,” Ed Balls (who was in my very college, Keble) no doubt hooted, from the top of the wardrobe where he had been squatting all night with his sweater pulled over his knees, pretending to be an owl. “I'm gonna photocopy my privates and fax it to The Sun!”

“No, no, wait,” Ruth no doubt interrupted, desperate not to be out-boyed by the boys. “I tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to resign!”

“Yeah, right,” Alan Johnson (who was not at university with me, or with anybody else) will have said, as he briefly relaxed his determination to get the cat stoned with blow-backs, “I bet you are!”

“No, I really am!” said Ruth, probably. “I'm going to go out there now and call a press conference and just do it. I've seen the light. This is Babylon. We're in chains. I'm gonna set us free!” And with that she'll have had one last massive lug on the almost-empty tequila bottle and bolted for the door to run down the corridor to the lobby and do what we all now know she did.

And in the morning, I'm guessing, she will have woken up with a massive headache, breath like a fox after a night on the bins, and, as the details of the night gradually came back to her, a growing sense of self-loathing and regret.

On the other hand, maybe she woke up with nothing but a feeling of great relief. She may well have snuggled up to the warm body of her long-suffering husband and said to herself: “Thank God I didn't shag David Miliband.”

In other news: “Rat announces decision to leave ship to spend more time with family.” In the light of developments at the Labour conference we caught up with the rat who became a star of English folklore when he was thought to have “deserted a sinking ship” - but, faced with the flashbulbs and a forest of microphones, the now rather elderly member of the species Rattus rattus claimed his decision to withdraw from the boat had been misunderstood.

“I didn't desert the ship,” he said, “and I never suggested that I thought it was sinking. I merely looked about me and saw that the endless cycle of rope-chewing, cheese-stealing and disease-spreading was taking its toll on me as a parent, and I decided that I owed it to my children and my family to put them first. If I did not, I knew I would come to regret it deeply.” Before departing on a long European holiday with his wife and 914 children, the rat took time to wipe away a tear, and to praise the ship's captain as “a towering figure”.

While we have no reason to disbelieve the rat, we cannot help recalling that the ship, if we are not very much mistaken, sank soon afterwards.

Ruthie's having kneecapped her boss so effectively this week will no doubt see David Cameron (with whom I also overlapped at university, well, almost) heading up to Birmingham for the Tory conference with a song in his heart, and not just with excitement about the glamorous location.

But wait, old pal. I am afraid I have a bad omen to offer you. A sporting one. You know how England's World Cup quarter-final defeat to West Germany in 1970 was said to have lost Harold Wilson the general election four days later? Well, how do you think the election chances of an Old Etonian might be affected by the news that for the first time in history - in history, mind - the Old Etonians' Eton fives team will not be competing in the first division of the national league when the season begins next week?

It's the biggest story in sport since the Olympics. Last season the Old Etonians, the ones who invented the game and gave it its name, finished bottom of the first division and were thus relegated to the second for the first time in the 1,200-year history of the game. It's like if Arsenal, who have never played outside football's top flight, were to be relegated. Only a bit posher. And with a lot less money. And no foreigners. Or sponsorship. Or anyone giving much of a toss.

Minority sport it may be, but if Eton is still the laughing stock of the fives world come the next general election, I think David, Boris and the Torytonians in general could find themselves under a spot of pressure.

But not from the Labour Party, obviously. For if anyone can take heart from the Eton fives league, omen-wise, it is the Liberal Democrats. The party's leader, Nick Clegg (with whom I was, not surprisingly, at school), may be pleased to know that his alma mater's team, The Old Westminsters (for whom I played every game last year), had its most successful season ever, narrowly pipping the Harrovians to finish second in the league.

A new dawn in fives. A new dawn in politics. Hey, that's a hell of a slogan. Maybe I can be of some use as the Lib Dems surge to victory. I shall expect a call from Mr Clegg. Round about three in the morning.

An item on the BBC news website headlined “Men with sexist views earn more” revealed this week that men who displayed reductive and dismissive views of women “consistently out-earn more ‘modern-thinking' men”. And it's just as well, because you have simply no idea how expensive it is to get a bird's knickers off these days.

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