On each successive evening this week the television news programmes announced the start of the their election coverage with ill-disguised weariness and a curled lip. The more highbrow the programme the greater the curl of the lip and the greater the sense of fatigue. Nobody, they seemed to be telling us, believed any of this rot.

The polls throughout the week remained broadly static — all that frantic effort on our behalf and virtually no effect whatsoever.

For the past seven days we have endured hour after hour of the most sapping, witless drivel from candidates. The general level of intellectual debate can be gleaned from examination of the party slogans. Forward Not Back is so vapid it defies satire. The Conservative’s slogan is scarcely better and seems calculated to offend. “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” No, Mike, I am not. If I ever start thinking what you ’re thinking then somebody shoot me, please.

Occasionally, though, real life intervened. A £100m bung from the government to the Chinese, of your money apropos of nothing, was not enough to save the MG Rover plant at Longbridge. So instead Labour has resolved to bung a whopping £150m — again, of your money — to the dispossessed workforce.

As we have recently discovered, the Labour party has pioneered some proactive and dynamic strategies to win elections in the West Midlands: bribery is the latest and most cunning.

On Newsnight, Jacqui Smith, the trade and industry minister, assured viewers that the government had done everything it could to prevent the collapse of Rover and the loss of all those votes, sorry, jobs.

She was interrupted by David Cameron of the Conservative party who insisted the government should have intervened far more and earlier. Yes, that’s right, a Tory politician advocating the propping up of a decaying manufacturing industry, presumably with your money.

Except that a few moments later Cameron denied that he meant actually spending money. What did he mean, then, Kirsty Wark inquired.

“The government should have been more interested,” he replied.

Then Vincent Cable, for the Liberal Democrats, hove into view and bemoaned the decision of the government back in 2000 to have supported the sale of Rover to Phoenix.

It was gently pointed out to Vince that when the sale to Phoenix was announced he had donned a party hat, opened the bubbly and danced around cheering. At which point he went a bit quiet.

Next morning Vince was on television again talking about Longbridge. Now is not the time to apportion blame, he said, his lugubrious features wreathed in concern for the very real human tragedy that had sadly unfolded. No indeed, mate. Last night was the time to apportion blame, apparently.

It became clear that the opposition parties would not have handled the problem any differently to the government. Nobody said Rover should have been bought by the government to preserve those jobs. Nobody said, hey, look, it’s sad but the car market is extremely competitive and Rover wasn’t up to scratch — so tough, on your bikes.

By now we were all engulfed in a moronic inferno, beginning with a Tory press conference in which Howard, donning the ambiguous smile of a serial killer, tried to make us like him by constantly telling us how normal he was.

“I went to a grammar school in Llanelli,” he told us, correcting the popular impression that he had attended a seminary for the undead in Cluj.

Anthony Minghella directed a sweet, soft-focus Hollywood close-up of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in candlelight stroking each other. The message: Gordon and Tony like each other slightly more than we like either of them, although not much more. But, as with every other staged broadcast or photo call, nobody believed it.

Then Charles Kennedy was caught out on one of the main points of his party’s policy — the abolition of council tax. He floundered, lost in a sea of meaningless statistics, clearly wishing he was back with Sarah and little Donald.

I have never witnessed an election where there was so much disillusion and contempt shown for the people we are about to elect to govern us. This epic disaffection has been best exemplified by Newsnight, which has been on terrific form this past week or so. Paxman has been withering in his scorn for the lot of them.

By Friday I began to wish that they would all shut up for a moment. No such luck. We will have this mad irrelevant fugue in our ears for another 2½ weeks.

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