Among the dinner party set it’s the topic of the moment: this is the most boring election in history. It’s so boring they can go on about it for hours.

The entire country has gone into a trance, say the chatterati, as hypnotic politicians intone sonorously: “Pensions crisis, you are feeling a very, very big pensions crisis . . . and when I say the words ‘taxation black hole’ you will forget everything I have said and ignore me completely.”

In fact, the prospect of a boring election is a) utterly misguided and b) something for which we should be profoundly thankful.

The great advantage of a post-democratic election in which there are no competing grand visions between the main parties is that there are no competing grand visions between the main parties.

What benefit, for example, would there be in going back to the heady days of the suffragettes — other than seeing Patricia Hewitt, minister for women, throw herself under a racehorse? Who would want to rebuild the Berlin Wall, unless Peter Mandelson happened to be on the other side? And consider what it would be like having an election where you had to choose how best to deal with a genocidal German dictator. Would you be tough on Hitler and the causes of Hitler, or settle for an antisocial behaviour order? Ever since Guy Fawkes failed to blow up parliament, British politics has gradually become more mundane, to everyone’s benefit. Where once we feared communism and nuclear annihilation, now we worry about the risk of catching MRSA during liposuction.

We’re lucky to be having a lacklustre election, as anyone from Zimbabwe will tell you. Here voters fret about having their postal ballots filled in by someone else; there voters just worry about being filled in, full stop.

So it came as a bit of shock last week when John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, disturbed our cosy ennui. Prescott, who acts as Blair’s sop to the working class, likes to see himself as unaffected by the trappings of power, but this is what the great man of the people said when a local reporter in Wales had the temerity to ask him a question: “Why are you asking me about this? I don’t care, it’s a Welsh situation, I’m a national politician.”

When the reporter persisted, Prescott retorted: “You’re an amateur, mate. Go get on your bus, go home . . . Bugger off.”

This was more than Prescott trying to promote public transport. Voters stirred from their slumber, wondering whether the outburst accidentally revealed some all-too-exciting election issues. Could it be that new Labour was actually run by elitist control freaks who didn’t give a monkey’s for local people? Was freedom of speech, like habeas corpus, under threat? These are important questions and for one wobbly moment events became dangerously alive. Then normal service was resumed and the campaign returned to the safely “dull” territory of such things as mass migration, the war in Iraq, the right to life and the future of the global order.

True, the great philosophical issues might be thrown into sharper relief if Prescott punched a voter, as he did in 2001. But as we drift towards May 5, remember what they say in Iraq: it’s better to be mildly bored on the way to the polling booth than to be blown up.

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