Corbyn is doing a Marxist word-yawn in Blackpool, Boris is stealing Theresa May's lines and the Lib Dems have a ridiculous new candidate

What we are being asked to take part in is not so much a general election as a slow motion Naked Attraction anxiety dream

How can it possibly be real that in exactly a month’s time, we will be wandering into a polling booth to actually vote for one of this lot?

What we are being asked to take part in is not so much a general election as a slow-motion Naked Attraction anxiety dream.

There we stand, wide-eyed and in the raw, while the terrifying options slowly reveal themselves, feet-first from inside their colour-coded cubicles.

We’ve actually got to agree to meet up with one of these things in a public place and oh my god why has that one got a tail? Are they, are they actual scales?

How’s turquoise got its tongue down there? And why is it forked? Stop filming! Stop filming! What’s going on? I can’t feel my legs! Help! Help!

Oh well. This is where we are. If we are to view the four main options side by side, at the end of one of the more subdued days on the campaign trail thus far, what leaps out at you is absolutely nothing at all.

Jeremy Corbyn has been doing his “the rich are bad, the poor are good” schtick in a conference room in Blackpool, his now traditional Marxist word-yawn. Still, it makes sense in a way, because he was born rich, and he is very very bad indeed, and if he’d been born poor his talent wouldn’t have taken him beyond the end of his road.

Boris Johnson has been doing an “interview” with the fearless interrogators of the Conservative party social media team, who have pursued him in and out of a canteen to ask him what he likes to have for breakfast, and who you should vote for in the next election.

(To this one, he genuinely said the words, “Vote for any of the other parties and you’ll end up with a coalition of chaos” – the same message, verbatim, as David Cameron in 2015 and Theresa May in 2017. If you’re taken in by that risible filth for a third time in four years then you deserve absolutely everything you get. Unfortunately, you will also be inflicting it on those that don’t deserve it, but oh well, that’s democracy. “Suck it up, losers,” as Alexis de Tocqueville almost said.)

Nigel Farage, meanwhile, has been cancelling various bits of his campaign tour – Cornwall, this time – presumably as he tries to work out some way to getting his campaign bus round the country without passing through any of the 317 Conservative constituencies he’s no longer campaigning in. A real chicken/fox/grain/river game, that one, although I’m happy to help out with the first bit (you leave the chicken on the campaign bus.)

All this, to achieve the now-fabled thing called “cut-through”. The most trendy analysis of this late decade is that politicians are being crap on purpose. Tell blatant lies, embarrass yourself, put out statements in Comic Sans and the conversation is shifted on to your territory, even if it’s to argue with you.

And on that front, it’s the Lib Dems who’ve really stolen a march on everyone, who have today officially named the “Stop Brexit” man, last seen waving his banner behind an exasperated MP on the 24-hour news channels probably about 10 seconds ago, as a parliamentary candidate.

Steve Bray is his name, and he’ll be carting his four-foot-long Victorian megaphone up and down the Cynon Valley for the next month.

His message is simple enough: “Stop Brexit.” It is rumoured to be the only two words the man knows.

It is more than 100 years since Oscar Wilde observed that there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. But these words were offered by way of self-consolation, having found himself the subject of public vitriol. They were never quite intended as strategic advice. Never mind, eh? Times change.