Matt Forde looks forward to the most boring election on record

It’s election year! Yes! We are in a select group of people who are genuinely going to enjoy the next few months, unless you care about the outcome. We are about to get bombarded by posters, broadcasts, emails, tweets and loads of new campaigning techniques. Most of the country will find it, at best, boring and, in all likelihood, infuriating. Most people get a direct mail and pop it straight into the bin. I can’t be the only one who, during the campaign, will get a letter and go, ‘Ooh, handwritten “PS”, and it looks like it’s from a residents’ group. Very clever.’ Electronic communication is robbing the nerds of their boxes of tat, though. You can’t get an e-card out to show your grandkids. The link won’t still be working. At least the Labour clubs of the future will be tidier. There’ll be no back office full of material from elections past. I say that – I was in a Labour club a few years back that still had some undelivered leaflets from the 1950s. I’ve delivered the odd round late but that really is taking the mick.

The only tragedy is that the standard of debate at this election will probably be the poorest of all time. The signs have been there for a while. Prime minister’s questions is still great television but the standard is woeful. Prime ministers are often accused of not answering the question but Ed Miliband is the first leader of the opposition I can remember who can be accused of not asking one. Count the amount of times he’ll respond to David Cameron with something like, ‘The prime minister just doesn’t get it. He’s ruining the NHS and he won’t admit it’. That’s not a question, it’s a point. Both men have descended into a style of exchange where they both try and tell the other what a particular word means. It often starts with Cameron going, ‘I’ll tell him what leadership is, it’s about taking tough decisions’, to which Miliband will spring up and say, ‘I’ll tell him what leadership is, Mr Speaker, it’s about doing the right thing’. It’s naff and I wonder how far it will go. ‘I’ll tell him what condensation means, Mr Speaker, it’s about the build-up of water vapour clinging to a window’. Which no doubt is getting worse under this government. As if the economic era we’re living in wasn’t complicated enough to understand, this odd mirroring makes it difficult for people to understand the differences between the parties.

Miliband said at the start of the year that Labour will have four million conversations between now and the election. Maybe he’s just building up a bank of material for his next conference speech. He’ll have a job remembering four million anecdotes of what people said to him in the park. It will be a record, apparently, but I don’t know what the current record is. Also, in a country of around 60 million he’s saying that 56 million of us are going to be ignored. Which most people are probably happy about. Having worked for the party I know how these things go. There’ll be a genuine attempt to hit the four million target. These early weekends will be full of spring-heeled activists taking the good message to the people and eagerly inputting the data. By the time it gets to March and head office are on the blower to the regions, there will be all sorts of creative accounting going on. ‘Well, I said hello to the person in the café this morning, so that’s another conversation and I said thanks to the bus driver and the bus was packed so that’s another hundred’.

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Matt Forde is a stand-up comedian and talkSPORT presenter. He used to work for the Labour party
www.mattforde.com