We columnists have never been more useless

It takes some agility to shoot yourself in the foot and saw off the branch you’re sitting on, while hoisting yourself with your own petard, all at the same time; but that is what I shall now attempt. In this analysis of general election commentary I shall argue that over the last two months Britain has been all but choked by a surfeit of comment and analysis on the general election. Can any reader remember when there was an election that produced so much?

Or, in the end, produced it to so little useful purpose? If last Christmas Day one had fallen into a coma only to awake on 8 May, thus missing every word that has been spoken by broadcasters or written by columnists like me, if one had never read an opinion poll about voters’ preferences until the real poll on 7 May, if the machine-gun fire of mindless soundbites and the drone of endlessly repetitive party leaders’ speeches had never once this year impinged on one’s consciousness … would one be any less capable this weekend of forming an intelligent view of the result?

Some of us, like the Telegraph’s estimable James Kirkup, have