When Nigel Farage declared the election over yesterday, nobody blinked.

The Conservative party is 40/1 against to win most seats, the Labour party 33/1 on,  Money queues up to make fractional gains out of any ideologue prepared to put their money on a lost cause or lay Labour.

Will the Conservatives give it a go – promise to abolish inheritance tax, blockade the Pas de Calais, purchase Ruanda? Will Labour go into total lockdown – Rachel Reeves and Kier Starmer are doing passable impressions of crash test dummies. Will the Liberals become the party of the photobomb, will Count Binface laser Nigel Farage? These are the burning platforms of the next four weeks.

But the weirdest thing about this election is the weariness of the electorate. The wonder of Labour’s latest political broadcast is that they managed to engineer a degree of passion out of the vox-pops they served up. How much better would it have been to get the authentic voice of thousands of the electorate say in unison

“I’ll vote for Starmer because he’s too boring to f*ck up”.

It’s amazing that the political machine has managed to supress so much personality amongst politicians in return for the moronic parroting of Sunak\Hunt v Starmer/Reeves.

But I suspect that we are reaching the nadir and things will slightly get better.

Last night’s leader’s debate showed Starmer to be an over-promoted bureaucrat while Sunak came across as an over-educated banker. Neither model has general appeal, we did not find much to laugh about in our household. It will be left to Feste the fool in Clapton to point out the glaring shortfall between what Blair and Thatcher gave us, and what is currently on offer.

You may ask if this matters and this depends to what extent we see this as a presidential style election. Ironically, the strength on the bench is not being analysed, we are judging the teams by their captains not by the sides. We have no form to judge the Labour party by, but that from 15 years ago, our experience of the Conservative Government is why they are 21% behind in the polls.

The election is over, Farage is right in that. The debates show us little but the relative levels of rhetoric and poise of the leaders of the principals. For the first time in decades we are about to vote in a party on the basis of their capacity to be boring. This may not win you Britain’s got Talent, but it does make for a better governed nation.

Julie Etchingham, the chair, showed us how much we need female intelligence in Government and how little we got of that last night.