The general election campaign will begin tomorrow. It would be nice to think that will herald the roar of three well-oiled party machines streaking towards the finish line.

Instead – if the past weeks and months are anything to go by – we will hear instead only the coughs and splutters of three backfiring old bangers.

The latest opinion polls – Labour on around 30 per cent, the Conservatives on 39 – tell the story.

A desperately unpopular government, unable to reconnect with the voters who delivered them three handsome victories in a row.

The Tories incapable of delivering the coup-de-grace; regarded with scepticism and lacking in intellectual weight and coherence.

And the Liberal Democrats – still, after all these years, the electoral bridesmaid. Still marooned on around 20 points, whichever leader they choose and whatever policies they devise. The eternal third party, unable to make significant headway even in these profoundly third-rate political times.

The result of all this may yet be a hung parliament. In a way that would be fitting. An election which should be the most fiercely contested and winnable in years, yet everyone ends up losing.

So what’s going wrong?

Labour, admittedly, face some major handicaps. They were the party in charge when the banks collapsed; they have built up a huge deficit which needs to be repaid.

Yet unless they are honest about the sickness, no one will believe in their cure.

Gordon Brown does have a positive story to tell about the action the government took in the critical days, weeks and months after the crisis hit. He can, plausibly, make the argument that his party made the right decisions when countless billions were at risk.

That provides the foundations for a campaign, but it is not, in itself, enough.

The electorate expects any party – and certainly a party which has enjoyed 13 years of unfettered power – to also focus on positive change for the future.

Labour promised in 1997 to transform the country. Has it finished the job? And if not, what does it want to do now?

Labour strategists seem dimly aware of this fact. They have tried to re-run the 1997 ‘pledge card’ trick. But consider the five promises this time around. ‘Secure the recovery’, ‘raise family living standards’, build a high-tech economy’, ‘protect front-line services’ and ‘strengthen fairness in communities’.

Problem number one: there is nothing there with which the other parties would publicly disagree. Problem number two: the pledges are vague, and none is actually measurable. Problem number three: these are all things Labour has claimed to be doing since the Blair landslide.

As such, they raise difficult questions. How long does it take to build a hi-tech economy? When will our communities be ‘fair’?

Labour’s one solid ‘big idea’ – a National Care Service – seems simply too big and too expensive for these hard-headed times.

Yet being creative doesn’t have to be expensive. Look at what they have done in the past. Devolution didn’t take money; creating Asbos didn’t take money; reform of the Lords didn’t take money. They took vision and nerve.

Labour’s negative campaign isn’t working, either. Witness the disastrous poster of David Cameron as Gene Hunt; it smacked of student union politics.

It was a vaguely amusing idea that served absolutely no strategic purpose.

The previous idea – to portray Mr Cameron as a ‘posh’ person with ‘posh’ priorities – was the bluntest of weapons, but at least it was a weapon. Portraying him as a working-class cop jarred horribly with that strategy.

David Miliband – seemingly one of Labour’s finer minds – was reduced to defending the poster by saying: “He [Mr Cameron] wants to re-run the 1980s, including bringing back foxhunting.”

If Labour are still trying to fight elections on foxhunting, then they really are in trouble.

The Tories, meanwhile, are hamstrung by a lack of clear thinking and a lack of genuine talent.

There is still a sense that many in the party don’t understand – and in some cases don’t accept – the ‘modern Conservative’ philosophy Mr Cameron is trying to sell. They don’t feel it in their bones.

That is a constant danger to the Tories – and one their opponents are desperate to exploit. Mr Cameron has overcompensated by pumping out policy after policy to try to give substance to his ‘vision’. That confuses rather than illuminates.

Instead he should be boiling down his reforms in health, education, and so on, into two or three headline proposals.

He also needs his shadow cabinet to step up and share the burden. Too many of them still seem lightweight or gaffe-prone – Chris Grayling, the would-be Home Secretary, has now made three major blunders in less than a year. William Hague – one of their genuine big hitters – has become mired in the Lord Ashcroft saga.

On the economy, meanwhile, they will only get credit for being honest about cuts if they are specific about where those cuts will fall.

As for the Liberal Democrats, a hung parliament – and a place in a coalition government – may well be in their long-term, as well as short-term, interests. The British people don’t yet see them as a party of government.

They might become one by default – not by winning, but because their rivals seem dead set on losing, too.

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