THAT’S it. I’m not going to vote for them – any of them – any more. Politicians of all parties. The present Government is as bad as it gets, but Tony Blair and Gordon Brown tested my patience and so did John Major before those two creeps.

My exasperation is only partly owing to the fact that they never do what they promise. Take the Coalition, for example.

They say the great task is to tackle the deficit and put the country back on a sound financial footing. They told us how they would do this: they would cut state spending and introduce measures to get rid of business regulation and encourage growth.

But the fact is that, even according to the Government’s own statistics, there will be greater public spending next year than this year and increases again right up to 2015.

And they have not cut red tape and all the other suffocating business regulations. If anything, this straitjacket is being tightened.

Whatever happened to your promised “bonfire of the quangos”, Dave? I suppose the way your lot operates, you would have to set up yet another quango to attempt this.

They lie to us. They are greedy. They are still greedy, even after the expenses scandal caught them with their hands in the till – the taxpayers’ till, our till. But even these excrescences are not quite enough to prevent me from casting my vote. The last straw for me is the colossal banality, the sheer tackiness and cheapness, of our politicians. The way they patronise us. The way they speak to us. They treat us as idiots.

The western world faces economic meltdown.

So David Cameron nips off to the US and is flown on Air Force One to a basketball match with that other poser Barack Obama.

A basketball match of all numbskull activities.

They get themselves photographed drinking the undrinkable Miller Lite and eating inedible hot dogs. Why? They don’t normally do these things. Their usual diet is proper food, fine wine and the best of everything.

They do it because they want to persuade us that they are just like us, or as they would say in their nauseating demotic, “regular guys”. Are we convinced by these japes?

Are we hell.

The same goes for MR Cameron’s pastygate – a PR stunt which also involved lies, smoke and mirrors. And when Ed Miliband was interviewed recently by some schoolchildren, those whom our politicos refer to as “kids”, on BBC Radio Four he announced which pop band he likes to download.

Yuk! The whole political process has turned into presentation and showbiz: the governance of the country is an endless parade of images without substance or reality.

The political culture is indistinguishable from the lowbrow celeb culture.

Statesmen should bear themselves with a gravitas befitting their high office and their noble task. Can you imagine Winston Churchill or David Lloyd George getting up to the foolery we have to observe today? But you don’t have to go back 100 years to find ministers who conducted themselves with dignity. Even Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan did not perpetrate such gutter pantomimes as today’s lot. It doesn’t mean I expect them to be po-faced and deadly serious all the time. The best political wit of the last century was Winston Churchill.

Ah, but when Winston cracked a joke it was in the English language...