You can say just about anything during this election and sound brilliantly informed

This is an election for bullshitters. It’s brilliant. Time was, as a young idiot working in newspapers, you might be afraid of opening your mouth and making loud and lofty predictions about the shape of the next government. Now it’s fine. You might not know much, but nobody else does either. You can talk and talk and talk, and it’s very hard for anybody to say, with any sort of confidence, that you are entirely wrong.

You see, this industry is dominated, some would say unfairly, by people who actually know stuff. They might have an intimate knowledge of the swings of the elections of 1923, 1974 and 1974 again. Or they might understand polling. Present them with eight shopkeepers from Penrith who’ve gone off tax credits and they can extrapolate to tell you how a schoolteacher might vote in Bognor Regis. The thing is, all this is predicated on the understanding that there are vast numbers of people who wouldn’t think of voting for a Liberal Democrat because they didn’t know what one was.