Shaken? Vote for the cocktail party

You could always lay in what the more vulgar Tory MPs nowadays tend to call a crate of champagne. But bubbly - crated, cased or solus - is a risky drink for election night. So much can go wrong, and when it does champagne loses its lustre and tastes of foolishness or presumption.

No, given the mix-and-match policies of modern political parties, a far more appropriate tipple for tonight is the cocktail. It has, after all a respectable political history. Winston Churchill was big on martinis, as were his chief comrades in arms; Roosevelt - the man who poured the first legal martini in the United States at the end of the ill-starred Prohibition experiment - used to ply Stalin with them in what a presidential aide called the "four martinis and let's have an agreement" era.

And the cocktail is something of an index of political mood. If cocktail consumption does not correlate exactly with down-turns in the economy, it does seem to have a link with "feelgood factor" or rather the lack of it. Think of the Twenties - socially roaring, but ending in economic depression. Or the sophisticated Thirties, blithely foxtrotting towards world war. Just as sales of chocolate soar during a recession, so the cocktail flourishes when people most need compensatory cheer; small comforts burgeon in troubled times. That's my theory, anyway.

Salvatore Calabrese agrees. He is the chief bartender at that favoured hang-out of wealthy Americans, The Lanesborough hotel in London (before the Thatcher era it was, aptly enough, an NHS hospital). Agreeing with the customer is part of the armoury of skills a good barman must possess. He also disagrees: "'Cos if people only drank them during the bad times, I'd be out of business." Which, thankfully, the best martini-maker in the capital, is not.

But then the cocktail has always been a sign of contradiction, a mark of simultaneous frivolity and finesse. "I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini," wagged some sophisticate in the Thirties. Three decades on Dave Brubeck's sax player could find no way of describing the tone he was attempting to extract except by saying that he aimed to sound like a dry martini. Sgr Calabrese cannot dispute that since both quotes come from the neat little book, full of splendid period illustrations, he has just produced called Classic Cocktails (Prion Books), which charts the history of the admixture.

It is full of improbable anecdotes about the genesis of the term - legends about cocks' feathers, about a chemist from New Orleans (coquetier is French for egg cup), about the drinking ceremonies of a Mexican king. There are almost as many rival claims as there are for the provenance of the martini (the town of Martinez in California, various Italian barmen in New York hotels, or the Martini & Henry rifle used by the British army between 1871 and 1891).

Whatever, the history of the cocktail, and in particular the martini, is the history of our social mores. The word may have been first recorded in 1806 in the Balance and Columbian Repository, and mixtures like Black Velvet may have been traced to 1861, when at Brooks's in London a barman coloured the club champagne with Guinness in mourning for Prince Albert, but it was a political act that defined the drink. Prohibition, which ran in the United States from 1921 to 1933, was the mother of the cocktail. Some 70 per cent of today's cocktails were created during the era of the speak-easy in which men like Al Capone and Joe Kennedy, father of John F, made their reputations and money.

And so it went. The Fifties was the decade of the three-martini lunch (as well as, not instead of) and the Sixties - along with Carnaby Street, Kubrik and Cointreau - brought into fashion the Brandy Alexander (brandy, creme de cacao and cream) into the height of swinging sophistication. Then the film of Casino Royale popularised the massive solecism of James Bond's vodka martini "shaken not stirred" - a thought that horrified purists who drank it stirred so that, as Somerset Maugham once put it, "the molecules [of the gin and vermouth] lie sensuously on top of one another".

But then came Thatcherism, with its shabbiness and champagne, Lawsonism with its boom and burgundy and Majorism with its downturn and designer beer. Until Kenneth Clarke's feel-bad boom, the martini was almost extinct, save in sanctuaries like Salvatore's. "It's really on the up now," says Alex Turner, a director of the improbable London Academy of Bartending, which opened last year and already has produced 100 graduates. "This rise is nationwide, with almost every big city now boasting at least one designer bar where for a fiver or so the feverishly fashionable can partake."

In the mould of Manchester's Dry 201, London has the ultra-hip Euro bar Riki Tik which specialises in Woo-Wou (a cocktail of vodka, peach schnapps, lemon and cranberry juice). At Bar Ten in Glasgow the best-seller is margaritas and at The Courtyard in Leeds they get off on chocolate-flavoured vodka. It's back with a vengeance in New York too, where the Ultimate Beefeater Martini is garnished with a single sliver of blue fillet steak.

The competition is now on for the driest martini. There is nothing new in that, of course; Winston Churchill made his by pouring gin into a pitcher and "glancing briefly at a bottle of vermouth" across the other side of the room. But today's bartenders use vinegar shakers to float two drops on the surface of the driest gin (never Gordons - that is best downed with tonic) or throw the vermouth from the glass before the spirit goes in.

At the most in of the new venues - the Met Bar in The Metropolitan hotel in London - they call their barmen mixologists. I went along to see their top mixer, 22-year-old Cairbry Hill, a former medical student, to discover the secret of his martinis, which come in mini, classic and greedy sizes and 24 alcopop flavours including, strawberry, passion fruit and chocolate orange.

As a mission of investigative journalism it was a failure. For this temple of lush minimalism - home of music and fashion industry types, and their victims, good-time PR girls and men who looked like failed extras from a Quentin Tarantino movie - refused me admittance on the grounds that I was not a member (of a hotel bar?), though I suspect it was really on account of my deeply unhip corduroy suit. (I am in good company here; Riki-Tik once turned away Tarantino himself for wearing a suit, though probably not corduroy). Undaunted I ploughed on to the Atlantic Bar and Grill to watch the substances slipping down the throats of bare-backed women, pony-tailed men wearing silk suits and unseemly characters who looked as if they fled Iran when the Shah fell.

The atmosphere had that same mixture of spirits, sex and sin which characterised the age of the flapper, only without its subtlety. The Twenties was a time of innuendo. Its cocktails bore cheeky names like Knickerbocker, Temptation and Bosom Caresser; its advertisements were full of delightful ambiguity.

But if Marlene Dietrich liked men who like martinis, at J W Johnson's in Manchester, where 20 per cent of drinks sold are now cocktails, they are altogether more direct. One of their best-sellers is a Screaming Multiple Orgasm. You might think that the fun is in asking for one rather than drinking its mix of Kahlua, Baileys, Amaretto and cream. You would be wrong. You can get it in a glass in the bar upstairs but in the nightclub below the customer can lie spreadeagled on the bar and have the waiter of her choice administer it in a way of which readers of a respectable newspaper might prefer to remain in ignorance.

Back at The Lanesborough, I settle for a White Lady (gin, Cointreau and fresh lemon juice). Sgr Calabrese is pondering his Floating Voter, an election night special (see recipe, left). "I think it will work - red, blue and yellow. That is sweetness with Labour, the non-alcoholic virginity of the Lib Dems and strength for the Conservatories." I am thinking of an old epigram: One cocktail is just right, two is too many and three is never enough. Was it the same, I wondered, with terms of office?

"It will taste good," Sgr Calabrese pronounces. It may well do on the night. But what about the after-effects? A five-year hangover is a thought to be reckoned with.

FLOATING VOTER

v

An Election Night Cocktail

created for 'The Independent' by Salvatore Calabrese

head cocktail barman at the Lanesborough Hotel, London and author of Classic Cocktails (Prion Books, pounds 9.99)

1. Mix a few drops Grenadine, 2cl Fraise du Bois liqueur, 1 cl Cointreau and a little lemon juice. Shake. Pour into a high-ball glass full of ice.

2. Pour in a mixture of fresh orange and mango juices. Trickle over a bar spoon so the yellow layer floats on the red.

3. In a separate glass mix 2.5 cl of Beefeater gin and a few drops of blue curacao. Float the mixture on the Lib Dem layer.

4. Garnish with a strawberry (very British).

5. Serve with three straws, one in each layer, to enable all three to be tasted together while keeping the red, yellow and blue distinct. The Tories get the short straw but Signor Calabrese is too diplomatic to point this out.