I couldn’t wait. I had to find out the result. I knew we had another day of polling to go, but I rang up our polling guy anyway. And what he told me will help you to understand the destiny of today’s Queen’s Speech.

It had been a week since Gordon Brown’s big announcement. He hadn’t long been Chancellor and the media was still hanging on to his every word. He had proclaimed that Labour would be spending billions of pounds more on hospital and schools and the story had been on the front pages for days.

So I was anxious to know: what did voters think? Did they agree with the spending? Did they approve of the approach? The answers might, I felt, change the course of politics. So we (I was working for the Tories in those days) ordered up some focus-group polling — groups of voters who discuss issues with a moderator. And after a couple of days I just had to have some answers.

Well, the pollster said slowly, here’s the thing. They didn’t answer any of the questions you posed because, erm, they’d never heard of the announcement. None of them. At all. They sort of knew who Gordon Brown was, they weren’t totally sure what a billion was, although it sounded like a lot of money, but they most certainly hadn’t come across this spending stuff.

It was my first proper introduction to what has become one of my rules in understanding politics. Most people, most of the time, aren’t following. And the gulf between the amount of attention politicians and pundits believe voters are paying and the amount they are actually paying is vast.

In any given week you can read any amount of political speculation about how an event or an individual might influence the next election. The speculation goes this way and that — he’s up, he’s down — and no one ever seems to reflect that the overwhelming likelihood is that hardly anyone has heard of the individual concerned or cares about the event being discussed. It’s the dirty secret of politics.

In his invaluable book on the last election campaign, Smell the Coffee, Michael Ashcroft provides the result of polling he commissioned to track the impact of Conservative campaign activity. For two months in the run-up to polling day, voters were asked: “Has there been anything in the news about what the Conservative Party has been saying or doing that has caught your eye this week, whether on TV or radio or in the papers?” Most of the time the proportion who could think of nothing hovered around 90 per cent.

And, Lord Ashcroft adds: “Even some events that were covered prominently in the news were recalled by almost nobody.” Recall for most Tory promises peaked at 2 per cent. “The central campaign messages of cleaner hospitals and school discipline peaked at 1 per cent.”

Focus group research confirms this. In Westminster there is fevered discussion of so and so’s prospects given the latest to-ings and fro-ings. Out there? Recently the Times pollster Andrew Cooper, of Populus, asked a group to name another prominent Tory apart from David Cameron. “Ed Balls,” replied someone. “Yes, and his brother, Ed Miliband,” said another.

A group in Nottingham were probed on Michael Howard’s Jewishness. Did it matter? When asked if they could recall any Jews in British public life there was a long silence. Then came one confident reply: “Whoopi Goldberg.”

In his book Tides of Consent James Stimson records pollsters’ surprise when they started investigating public opinion in America. They had thought the public would be reasonably well informed. “The tone of astonishment of these first reports is testimony to the wild unreality of the portrait we expected to see. What these studies found was that ordinary Americans knew almost nothing about public affairs, and appeared to care about issues as much as they knew: almost not at all.”

They found that, when asked about attitudes to “Russia”, most Americans were not very hostile. The expected hostility was present when the question mentioned the “Soviet Union”. But when the word communist was inserted, the answers became unusable — they were entirely hostile. Political scientists hit on the word “nonattitudes” to describe the doorstep creation of survey responses by people who had no true opinions at all.

Last week’s fuss about Mr Brown’s handwriting led some pundits to conclude he had had a bad week and a greater number to argue that he had had a good week. The truth was that most people barely noticed that he had had any sort of week. They hardly knew about the letter and they didn’t care much.

Politicians and pundits share the idea that people are constantly re-evaluating their position. But not at all. At a few big moments they might pause and think again; the rest of the time they let events float by, or at best reinterpret them to fit with their existing views. In 1997 Tories thought perhaps Robin Cook’s affair would shake Labour’s goody-goody image. Instead focus group respondents just assumed he must be a Tory because he had had an affair.

But out of all this, surprisingly, something heartening emerges. And that’s where the Queen’s Speech comes in. Because people don’t know, aren’t following and don’t believe politicians and their promises, they can only judge them on one thing. Whether what politicians do works.

Political ignorance isn’t stupidity, it’s economical use of time. A very nice friend, who reads the newspaper every day, told me that she didn’t think David Cameron would win the election. Why, I asked? Because the Tories will win, she replied. But he is a Tory, I exclaimed. Oh, she said, I thought he was Conservative. When I thought about this later I realised that she didn’t know much about politics because the knowledge would make no difference to her, would change nothing. She votes rarely, and only when it really matters to her. Following politics? Why would she want to do that?

Mr Brown hopes that the Queen’s Speech will establish dividing lines with the Conservatives. This is an entirely forlorn hope. Voters won’t notice these dividing lines. And they won’t notice the measures in the address until they begin to make an impact on their lives. Which, since there isn’t much time left before the election, they won’t.

In other words, this is a day when everyone will get dressed up, the Queen will speak, Gordon Brown will speak and David Cameron will speak. Everyone will go home again and nothing of any political significance will have happened.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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