This has been the least engaging election campaign I can remember. You could sense newspaper editors’ collective sigh of relief when a royal baby arrived to take over the front pages as the final week of campaigning began.
No doubt commentators are right to blame the spin doctors who, mindful of Gordon Brown’s encounter with Gillian Duffy in Rochdale in 2010 (in which he called her a “bigoted woman”), insulated the party leaders from unscripted contact with the public. The loss of journalistic scrutiny of party policies in daily press conferences, which were the centrepiece of campaigns until televised leaders’ debates killed them off, removed a further element of unpredictability.
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