Who will be in government after the general election on Thursday? I wish people would stop asking, because I honestly can’t be sure. This is the most volatile election in my lifetime. Even the most grizzled politics-watchers are scratching their heads about why the polls have fluctuated so much, and what the precise outcome will be.

But I know this much: the question as to who will be in government is only slightly more significant than the question as to why.

The uncomfortable truth is that this election has been unpredictable precisely because it has been insubstantial.

A major M.E.N poll, published today, tells part of the story. No one party holding sway; voters heavily influenced by personality politics and less than five hours of TV debate; and, most damning of all, only one in ten people having received a knock on the door from a representative of one of the three main parties to hold their policies up to proper scrutiny.

The politicians told you that this would be a ‘back-to-basics’ election. Less spin, more substance. Less talking, more listening.

But no – that, itself, was just spin. The reality is that this has been a soundbite election; a leaflet election; a TV election; an ‘arms-length’ election. ‘Real people’ have been used as a prop – each leader has surrounded himself with voters at carefully-choreographed events – but they have not been at the heart of the debate.

Consider the abiding image of the election: a ‘penitent’ Gordon Brown ripping up his carefully-mapped out schedule to rush round to a pensioner’s house in Rochdale to issue a grovelling face-to-face apology. Why? Because he was caught calling her ‘bigoted’ after she had the temerity to tear up the script and confront him on the street.

And why did he say that? Because he was angry and depressed at the thought that their meeting – caught by those all-important cameras –was ‘a disaster’.

Yet it wasn’t, at least not by any reasonable standards. Gillian Duffy had trotted out a list of concerns, and Mr Brown had answered them. Not perfectly; but well enough to leave her a Labour voter.

But Mr Brown knows better than anyone that normal standards no longer apply. Politicians are now judged on not just what they say, but how they say it. On how well their make-up hides the sweat from the glare of the TV lights. On the clothes their wives choose to wear.

The prime minister is not a natural, and he knows it. He tries to play the game, then lashes out when he fails. His practised smiles look a little more practised than his rivals’, his rehearsed lines sound a little more rehearsed. Mr Brown shakes his great, clunking fist at the media in howling, impotent rage.

The great tragedy for Mr Brown is that – for all people’s talk of wanting ‘unspun’ politicians – not playing is not a vote-winner, either.

You see it is far too simple to lay the blame entirely at the door of the politicians, or our insatiable rolling-news media.

Last week the Institute for Fiscal Studies said none of the major parties had come clean about the scale of spending cuts and tax rises that would be necessary to combat Britain’s huge national debt.

No one, claimed the IMF, had gone ‘anywhere near’ identifying what they would need to do to meet their own timetables for tackling the deficit.

It was an astonishing claim at a time when the economy is surely the biggest issue facing every man and woman in the country.

And yet – would we really thank the parties if they told us the truth? When George Osborne gave a doom-laden, cuts-laden speech to the Conservative conference, the Tories’ poll ratings took a dive. The shadow chancellor has since tempered his language. Too little truth and voters bristle; too much, though and they get scared.

We are complicit in all this. For all that we may mock and scorn them, they are entirely at our mercy. If they don’t tell us what we want to hear, they don’t get elected. It is like evolution in its cruel simplicity; but the engine is not natural selection, but us. Don’t like your politicians? Take a good, long look at yourself, too.

And ask yourself difficult questions. Are people still voting on deep-seated convictions about how the country should be? Do they even have such convictions? Do they talk about politics round the dinner-table? Do they look at the manifestos, or follow the policy debates?

And think again about Gillian Duffy – a woman with Labour in her blood and questions in her mind, who thought she had every right to barge in on the prime minister’s photo opportunity and put him to the test. By Thursday, she may come to symbolise the end of Mr Brown’s political career. But she may also come to symbolise the loss of something far greater and more precious than that.

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