HERE is my cut-out-and-keep guide to political parties. It is possible the parties may wish to cut it out and throw it away instead, which is fine.

Sometimes the Conservative Party is known as the nasty party. There is a reason for this. The Tories may try on different coats, and for a while David Cameron was modelling a nice green number, but that nasty old raincoat with knuckledusters in the pocket is usually taken off the hook eventually.

Sensible Tories realise that being a nasty party might put off voters; unrepentant old-school Tories secretly like belonging to a nasty party.

Occasionally the nastiness wears a paternalistic frown, to indicate that whatever unpleasant policy is being pedalled is really for our own good.

The trouble is, even the nasty policies don’t live up to their billing. Last week reports suggested the sharp rise in tuition fees might not cover the cost of maintaining our universities, thanks to graduates not earning enough to start paying off their loans.

So that’s one nasty policy that might not be working; now here is another. The bedroom tax, according to a BBC investigation, has to date only resulted in six per cent of people affected moving to a smaller home. So this unkind measure causes misery to people who are not well off by any yardstick and is not saving as much money as the Government said it would.

But let’s give this policy its proper name of the spare room subsidy. The aim was to free up “under-occupied” social housing for families on waiting lists, a reasonable idea in theory but carried out, it now seems, with a degree of vicious incompetence.

One playful irony in all this is that plenty of Tory ministers and MPs have very many spare rooms, which may or may not be “under-occupied” – some of which might well be receiving a subsidy in the shape of Parliamentary expenses.

Now Labour. The Labour party is exactly what nowadays? What a tricky question. Perhaps I should leave a blank space here for readers to write in their own thoughts.

Under Tony Blair, a good leader and prime minister until he wasn’t, Labour made itself attractive to voters by pretending not to be the Labour party. This was a good idea in immediate electoral terms, but leaves Ed Miliband leading a once-successful party that alienated many of its core supporters and is no longer liked by the new friends it tried so hard to impress.

Here’s the old-fashioned answer to my question: the point of the Labour party is to represent the workers. Nowadays that sounds like a quaint bit of museum-worthy socialism, because nobody says such things any more for fear of frightening undecided voters. Yet those old certainties did at least represent something; nowadays, in the middle-ground scrum of politics, it can be hard to spot the difference between the parties.

The Liberal Democrats have become in effect the friends of the playground bully. All their once-timid, well-meant dithering has been replaced by the blind certainty of government.

Mind you, not all has gone to plan. Business secretary Vince Cable, a key Lib Dem, is said this week by the National Audit Office to have ignored advice that the 330p share price for flogging off the Royal Mail was vastly under-priced – losing taxpayers as much as £750 million in a single day.

Regretfully, you cannot ignore Ukip nowadays. Think of Ukip as the Bucket Of Disgruntlement Party. Nigel Farage walks around with a big bucket into which disillusioned men of middle years or older throw all their sour feelings about how rubbish modern life is. Mr Farage has been carting that bucket around for a while now and it is dangerously full of nasty slop.

You never know: one day the bucket party might even get itself an MP.

• FORGET five a day – according to a new study by experts at University College London, we should be eating seven pieces of fruit and veg a day to stay healthy. Seven! That sounds like an awful lot of the green stuff. We’ll all be chomping veg from dawn till dusk.