I DARESAY it is not necessary to remind the devout that May 6, the date chosen for the general election, coincides with the Feast of St Prudence. She, so profitable to the altar candle trade, was a 15th century abbess of Milan who in a high wind, could persuade the sheep to dance for her.

What good this did the sheep is historically unclear, but it is certain that Prudence’s most obvious acolyte, Gordon Brown, will be hoping to choreograph a similar response from electoral flocks up and down the land over the next five weeks.

Personally, I feel far more inclined to cry ‘bah’ than ‘baa’. The toe-cap of my stoutest right boot is poised to kick the shambling Scotttish pastor’s backside, fearing that to jig supinely behind it it might lead me into a bloody abattoir.

But wait, oh wait. Why am I still hopping undecidedly about like the proverbial one-legged contender in a backside kicking contest? It is because I have just watched the prime minister’s only possible supplanter, Duke Dave Cameron, tearing around Westminster on a traffic-blocking bicycle.

What I so suddenly see in him is a pink, fleshy, self-preening Tory boyo, full of false smiles that never quite reach two duck-egg blue popping eyes, and a giddying propensity to move in zig-zags. God knows where he, or the teams of chums, ancient and modern, trotting in wheezing spasms behind him, think they are going. All I know, instinctively, that it is not in my direction.

My dilemma is wearying. I can think of at least a score of reasons for throwing Labour out of office. The first, and by no means the least important of these, is that I am dead against uninterruptible one party rule. The lot seeking yet another five years’ contract have been in for nearly 13 years—a transit of life so long that I have gone grey in it, seen kiddywinks reach their chavtime twenties in it, lost most of my dander for cigarettes and wild women in it. The bright babes Blair ushered in for decoration have turned to thin-lipped, finger-wagging crones.

Time for a change? Yep, it ought to be, even if on the day, it ain’t. Longevity apart, this marathon Labour administration has got many things so disastrously wrong. Education? What education? At least a third of the kids leaving primary school are unable to read and write, and the universities are filling up with adolescents who require remedial classes before studying for Mickey Mouse degrees.

One correspondent of mine chides me, without irony, for refusing to accommodate a presumed readership many of whom being from foreign parts, still can’t recognise an English Taxi sign and the rest, though born and bred here, only words addressed to a reading age of nine. The urge to assume a universal and unalterable cretinism has become proscriptive.

And then there is the bullying. Unceasingly, throughout each of its three terms, the party of the people has found one damnable way after another to boss the people about. No singing in the rain, no dancing in the square, no frolicking in the grass. Well, no: I’m exaggerating a bit about those, except, maybe, the grass.

The others are atrocities yet to come. But young women have gone to jail for not leaving their dustbins out at the right hour. Pensioners have been lifted for inadvertently dropping a piece of orange peel. Pubs have been raided for letting their regulars smoke. The anti-smoking ban has altered the nation’s social landscape more than any edict since Cromwell’s. It has led to war veterans standing in the pouring rain outside their British Legion Clubs, puffing on the comforting stuff that kept them going when the stormed Normandy. Many of these clubs have closed down—along with many a Connie, and yes, as many a Labour club. 

The zest to impose laws against simple pleasures has not been accompanied by an equal eagerness to combat serious crime. Murders and armed robbers are let out of jail many months, and sometimes years, before their sentences have expired. Justice Minister Jack Straw, once so stern a law’n’order man, says they must be, partly because the jails are overflowing, partly because the government submits to eccentric European ideas on the human rights of malefactors.

At weekends, the streets of our town centres are surrendered to roving gangs of hooligans. There are council inspectors, comically known as “education enforcers, “ patrolling the streets in search of accidental and preferably elderly litter louts. They have no mandate to enforce punitive education on the rampage.

Against this government, I draw a withering charge-sheet. It should settle the matter. But it doesn’t. I have a long memory, and when I look at Duke Dave I cannot help thinking, ‘Could that be another Ted Heath? Or worse, a Thatcher?” And with the Tories it could be, as it was last time they were in, not 13 years hard but 18.

Sorry folks: it’s boring. But for the first time I am politically a baffled member of the vast multitude that can’t make up its mind.