MAY I be the first to welcome our new overlords, be they Tory, Labour, Lib Dem, ToryLibDem, LabourSNP, LabourSNPLibDem, or Camembert from the Planet Gong.

Not Ukip, though. I swear to God, if I’m waking up this morning and you lot have gone and voted Ukip in, I’ll... well, I don’t know what I’ll do. In fact, I’ll probably have been carted off for “re-education” or something, and this time next week you’ll see me blathering on about how homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to wear long socks in Europe, or whatever their policies actually are.

Unless everyone is hugely mistaken, we probably won’t be waking up today to a one-party Government. I could be wrong - which you’ll know by now, of course - but the smart money is on the next few days being typified by a bit of horse-trading as everyone tries to get in bed with everyone else to make a government, in the manner of a party round at Mick Jagger’s gaff in the late 1960s.

Naturally, I cast my vote yesterday, and I hope you did, too. The local election papers were a lovely salmon colour, presumably because the political parties had nicked all the best colours - red, blue, green and that strange purple Ukip has adopted.

So when all the macho posturing has done and deals have been struck, handshakes made, promises offered (no doubt to be later broken) and major manifesto planks reneged upon, at some point in the coming days we will have a brand new Government.

How thrilling. We might have Mr Cameron in number 10 again, we might not. We might have Ed Miliband, we might not. We might even have Nicola Sturgeon, though I don’t quite know how that would actually work if the first thing she did was to break Scotland away from England.

All you can actually guarantee is that some of the people who voted will end up with their choice of Government. Some of the people who voted for someone who didn’t win will also get their choice of Government. Some of the people who voted for someone who nearly won will have no chance of their choice of Government.

And some of the people who couldn’t be bothered to vote will sit around moaning about the Government, not quite understanding that they did actually have a choice to go and put an X in a box and possibly sway the entire vote.

Now, the thing we have all got to remember is that we aren’t voting for our rulers. We are voting for our servants. These people are employed by us to shape the country that we want.

We have to remember that, and they have to remember that as well. And possibly, you might have to remind them at every given opportunity that not only did the electorate put them there, we can get shot of them as well. But only those who bother to vote. So don’t be too disheartened if your favourite doesn’t win. There’ll be another election along before you know it. And don’t blame me for anything - I voted for the other guy.