I do not understand the Rochdale episode or, as some flittering soul has called it, “Bigotgate”.

Would the public, presented with the flat facts – harassed premier, polite in public/exasperated in the car – see more than an irked blip on a heavy day? Of course not.

But this was a national media event, big because TV commentators and headline writers hailed it as half a notch below Armageddon.

Gordon Brown was reacting to Mrs Duffy’s phrase ‘these people.’ ‘These people’ was what Thora Hird, snobbish middle class in A Kind Of Loving, called her working-class son-in law. It is probably what Eton calls Slough Comprehensive.

It is certainly what some British folk call incomers, Black, Brown or Polish. As for ‘bigot’, that American expression has been the liberal comeback since Rosa Parkes was arrested for sitting down in the wrong part of a southern bus. Neither term was sensible in Rochdale, nor mattered very much.

Indeed Mr Cameron, in the Independent this week, on his Oxford tutor, was more offensive – and stuffy with it. Vernon Bogdanor, our leading political scientist and very unpartisan, had feared that Tory cuts would fall on the poorest. ‘I must take time out, after the election,’ said the young leader ‘to give him a tutorial.’ The entire brouhaha reflects a holy terror among politicians of saying the wrong thing and consequent failure to say anything. Dull, stale and reiterative they may be, but politicians know that they are a stumble away from blood sport. A flash of candour, a touch of anger – and the dogs will be out.

So they close down, box clever, use minimalist language – and debate sounds like opera without the tunes. But how can you argue with a snarl I heard on a TV vox pop slot: ’They give the money to these bankers instead of us’? Friedrich Schiller, the poet, nailed that. ‘With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.’ So the dullness is guaranteed – minimal, watered discourse. In cricketing terms, it has been forward-defensive batting to bowling directed at batsmen happy to be contained.

Yet we know from Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, and from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, that after this round of high-profile non-communication, things are going to be hellish. The criminal greed of US and British banks – trading junk debt on projects sold to clients, which they then backed to fail - means salaries slashed, jobs scrapped, higher VAT, good, old-fashioned wholesale suffering – and we have not seriously discussed it.’ The prospect’ as an Austrian statesman remarked during late 19th century central European disintegration, ‘is desperate but not serious.’ Sadly, Nick Clegg contributed to the inadequacy by failing to expand on his first, excellent performance. As was argued in the first of this quintet of articles, success then did not rest upon boyish grins, but on specifics.

The Liberal Democrat leader was brave enough to propose meeting a hunk of the debt by scrapping Trident, hinting that pretending to be a major power was beyond our means. He also proposed putting up taxes at the top and abolishing them at the bottom. He hasn’t exactly resiled, but the drive on specifics has faded. Perhaps the personal triumph has thrown him, for the national media have intervened. They have discovered what they understand, Clegg the Celebrity. “Issues, not personalities” said Tony Benn 40 years ago; and, then as now, experienced men in London newsrooms laughed behind their hands. Both Lib Dems (and Labour, surreptitiously) might also have argued that a balanced Parliament with no boss majority was a positive good thing. David Cameron, who does at times, sound like a very old choirboy, solemnly deplores a three-force Parliament. ‘Unsound old chap, parties squabbling for power; our nation needs a strong leader.’ The answer to that is plain.

Poll tax, privatised railways, photo-iris ID cards, 24-hour drinking, the Iraq war, a catalogue of the wrongheaded and the iniquitous: all passed parliaments with single-party majorities. Given that, surely putting in enough contrarian MPs to veto executive-minded MPs is the single best thing the electorate can do.