AS we enter the home straight in the latest race to lead the country, I thought it would be nice to express my gratitude to many of the politicians and would-be politicians involved.

Are you one of those people? If so, thank you.

Thank you all for every inspiring moment on our TV screens, radios, social media and in our newspapers.

Once again, you have demonstrated the unerring accuracy with which your collective finger zeroes in on the national pulse.

Were I the sort of person who uses phrases such as “attuned to the zeitgeist” I should definitely do so in describing you.

Thank you for recognising, for example, that when some interviewer asks you a question, we at home do not actually want to hear you answer the question.

No, we want to hear you answer a completely different question entirely of your choosing, and perhaps introduce your answer with words such as: “The key issue here is...”

Thank you for realising that we have no interest in hearing you honestly address any alleged failings, weaknesses or wrongdoing in the past.

When you are questioned, say, about some unspeakably racist thing you have said, done or failed to address in the past, we do not want to hear you so much as apologise, let alone say you will try to do better in the future.

We should much rather hear you say that what you did wasn’t nearly as bad as what somebody from another party did.

Thank you for recognising that we ordinary people are generally a bit stupid.

We are so irremediably dim, in fact, that were you to put a plainly-expressed list of policies through our letterboxes we’d probably eat it, be afraid of it or feel compelled to chuck bones into the air like the proto-humans in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the monolith appeared.

Thank you for hitting on the strategy of instead disguising your leaflets as other things, such as community newspapers and magazines.

My favourite is probably the leaflet disguised as one of those human interest magazines with a title such as Take a Rest or Have a Sit Down - the sort of magazine filled with stories such as My Hubby Didn’t Tell Me He Was A Gila Monster, and whose crossword clues are along the lines of: “Four-legged animal. Goes Woof. Not cat. (3).”

Thank you for your evident recognition that were any three of we ordinary people to find ourselves in a Mastermind final against a brace of short planks, the short planks would inevitably go home with the cut-glass bowl.

Thank you for recognising that when a terrorist atrocity happens, we expect that respectful words of sympathy toward the victims, and of reassurance to the rest of us, are kept to a minimum.

Thank you for understanding that what we really want to hear under such circumstances is you squabbling over which party’s fault it is, rather like a bunch of three-year-olds trying to blame each other for a dropped ice cream at a birthday party.

A special thank you to those among you who treated the unbearable deaths of two kind young idealists with all the respect and reverence one might reasonably afford to, say, a balled-up piece of silver paper used in a game of blow football.

Thank you for recognising that we are too dull to care about how we all, irrespective of ideology, might advance, become better and make a better society.

Thank you for recognising that we should much rather hear you banging on about how yours is the only way and everybody else is Satan incarnate.

It is just the message we need in these troubling times.