Recognising that this piece is in questionable taste, if you’ve recently had a bereavement you should probably look away now.

Here’s a fact: in the eight weeks leading up to the General Election, deaths in the UK are down by 9% compared to seasonal averages over the last five years – claims the Office for National Statistics.

I’ve come across people during this electoral run-in who’ve told me “I’d sooner die than vote for Gordon Brown”. But these new figures suggest that a more positive trend may be in play here: the will to live.

It has been recognised by both mainstream and complementary medicine for decades that long after we should be dead, some of us keep going because we have an aim. In Stephen Hawking’s case, it is the obsessive desire to find the secret of the Universe which has kept him mortal: what you might call a Less Brief History of Time than he expected. Grandparents-to-be often hang on, see the wee one born, and then conk out.

So in the absence of other explanations, my hypothesis is that some folks are hanging on purely to savour the privilege of seeing New Labour humiliated. Sick to death of pc doublethink, Harmanite feminist fantasy, Brownite denial and Mandelsonian fibs, almost one in ten of those in God’s waiting room during the last two months have clung to life in the expectation of hearing the Prime Minister say “I lost – goodbye”.

Statistical causality is a very difficult thing to prove. But if the deaths are up 18% after May 6th, I shall be off to my publishers with a book idea that could prove to be the year’s big blockbuster.