The think it’s all over…it isn’t now.

The worst things about this General Election campaign have been as follows:

1) It has gone on forever and I am bored sick with it.
2) Politicians have barely engaged with ordinary people.

I do not enjoy General Election campaigns anymore than I enjoy watching my favourite football team play a vital match. It’s a tense, stressful time where the clock seems to have slowed down almost to a standstill. I might enjoy the odd moment or two, but the result is so important I just wish it was all over. I didn’t even enjoy the election night in May 1997 when it was blindingly obvious that Labour was going to win by a landslide. It was only when the real results started coming through that I knew it was really true and by that time I too tired emotionally to enjoy it properly. I certainly didn’t enjoy every election from 1979 right through until 1997 because we had always suspected and soon knew what a shockingly divisive and unpleasant government Margaret Thatcher would form.

But at least in those days, politicians did engage with politicians more than they do now. The main leaders in general, but PM David Cameron in particular, have gone to enormous lengths to avoid a “Gillian Duffy moment”, rarely meeting ordinary people, preferring staged events like Cameron’s midnight arrival at ASDA in Bristol where the mainly Polish nightshift rejoices in earning little more than the minimum wage to proper debates. Cameron refused to debate Ed Miliband, unless the Green Party was involved (what?) and spent the entire campaign almost literally surrounded by spin doctors and aides. They are terrified of being asked a question by a real person that they can’t answer.

And the public DO want to hear the arguments. My view is that last week’s Question Time featuring individual leaders was so fractious specifically because the public was pissed off that the politicians had been seen to be avoiding them.

These politicians have forgotten why they are in power in the first place, which is that we put them there. They are not supposed to be there in order to tell us what to do. They are supposed to be there to represent what we want. It has never been like this in my lifetime. Of course, we need leadership in tough times but in general these people are supposed to act on our behalf. How can they do this in any meaningful way if they don’t bloody talk to us?

It’s David Cameron who should be calling me Sir, not the other way round. Still, hopefully after tonight he can spend more time with Jeremy Clarkson, Rebecca Brooks and Alex James.

Thank god it’s all over tonight, except that it probably bloody won’t be, not for weeks and weeks whilst politicians talk behind closed doors trying to put together a government. And if you think the newspapers have been a total disgrace during this campaign, acting on behalf of their owner oligarchs, tax dodgers and overseas citizens, just wait to see them if Ed Miliband is invited to form a government.

Another campaign going on for months, no one talking to us. It doesn’t sound or feel much like democracy to me.