UNDER Labour I never had lunch. This was because right up until the last time they were in office I never called it that. I called it dinner. Dinner I called tea. I was, back in the days of Old Labour, quite dreadfully working class my dears, and in fact for a right good space of my life I couldn't afford to eat whatever I called it at lunchtime.

Even when so-called enlightened employers issued me with Luncheon Vouchers by Monday morning I was always so broke I sold the LVs for a pittance and starved the rest of the week. This includes a job under one of the enlightened employers who was a Labour peer and his wife a Labour peeress.

Doubtless Lord Llewellyn Davies and his wife were too busy thinking up socialism to pay their minions enough to eat at midday. The only thing I seem to remember having in my stomach all the time I worked for was bile. Certainly not lunch.

And for a long time under Tory rule I never had lunch either, because for a considerable stretch of it I was a schoolteacher and lunch then consisted of either swallowing some muck at the school dining hall in the company of fat children with spots and fat teachers with spots or having to share a staffroom with the sort of people who had their own seats in the staffroom. I had lunch - two large whiskies - in Heraghty's.

So it wasn't until I made the great escape that I managed to enjoy what is surely one of the most civilised circumstances and that is lunch. Luncheon is what it once was called but to me that summons up luncheon as in ''Luncheon Meat'' and that is Spam and anathema. But lunch. By which I mean, restaurants, gleaming napery, silver cutlery, fawning waiters (but not too fawning), and all bloody afternoon with a snooze afterwards.

What lunch does not mean is the nonsense one hears in sitcoms in which the characters are always saying things like ''I'll just fix myself some lunch dahling!'' and you just know what they mean is a tub of fat-free yoghurt and a slice of muesli-flavoured crispbread. I don't give a rats if it is healthy, it is assurededly not lunch.

That sort of lunch is even offered in some eateries and very nasty it looks, too. I suspect it is the weemenfolk who thought up such snacks and called it a meal.

In fact I was taken to a place like that in Glasgow a few weeks back, a smart place, supposedly, and sat down at a table. There were hundreds about me all gobbling away, swallowing piles of noodles and crispy baguettes filled with lettuce and Philadelphia cream cheese. (A basic point about a decent restaurant is that no matter how busy it is you should never feel that you are eating alongside anybody other than your fellow diners at your table.)

I took a look around this fashionable spot and peered at the menu and then spoke to the brother who had dragged me into this joint and then we both went off to find somewhere where the food was lunch. As far as I could see the grub on offer wasn't a meal. It was nothing other than glorified cheese on toast. And that's not lunch. That's a tightener after licensing hours.

But for the past few years of Toryism there wasn't any bloody lunch either because it became fashionable not to have it. In fact it became fashionable to be so feart of your job and the bosses that you sat at your desk until your bahookie was red-raw hoping to Jasus that you were noticed working, or at least not noticed not working and having lunch. Even journalists, especially the young ones, took to the bum-on-seat-all-day manoeuvre. The days of long boozy splendid repasts seemed to be over.

Public relations people, whose job used to consist entirely of giving chaps like me lunch, began to offer what they sometimes called a ''working lunch''.

The only time I allowed myself to be conned into this I discovered that this was exactly that and we were handed plates of smoked salmon sandwiches in a company office designed by Sir Basil Spence in his senility with a No Smoking policy while some idjit went over a bar chart and explained how well his company had achieved their targets in an exciting new development.

At the time of writing I cannot tell who is going to be in No 10 today, but one thing is sure. I am going to have lunch today. And tomorrow, and the day after. My first lunch under Labour?