From the end of the Second World War until Ted Heath’s promise to ‘cut prices at a stroke’, something defining was uttered by a key player in every General Election – and passed quite naturally into the collective memory. More often than not, it was said on the spur of the moment.

Churchill hung himself in 1945 by using the phrase “They will have to set up some sort of Gestapo” in relation to Labour’s plans for establishing a more socialist State in the UK. Six years later he got it right by saying he would “Set the People free” from all the red tape that had ensued. In 1959, Macmillan famously told us we’d “never had it so good”. Wilson won by a whisker in ’64, and his class jibe against Alec Home – “the fourteenth Earl of Home” – was a pivotal moment.

But after Heath’s unexpected win in 1970 – pretty much until the Blair victory in 1997 – the naturalness went out of big elections…..and along with it, most of the excitement. This began in earnest with Saatchi & Saatchi’s control of everything from Margaret Thatcher’s voice to her hairstyle, and carried on into Alistair Campbell’s hugely successful attempt to make Tony Blair look like someone who gave a toss.

The remembered words have become emptier, entirely pre-planned – and (perhaps encouragingly) more likely to rebound on the user. Major’s ‘family values’ looked risible after a few years of everyone in the Cabinet (including him) enjoying sexual congress with somebody who was neither spouse nor significant other. And Blair’s ‘Education, education, education’ reads today like the tombstone inscription of New Labour: great promise, no delivery.

For people who pride themselves on being so wily, contemporary politicians are amazingly lacking in evidence of it. David Cameron is a classic example of what’s wrong with all opportunists: given a real opportunity, they always flunk it.

The Conservative leader had a once-every-generation chance (when the enormity of banker insanity became apparent) to ditch all media-coached evasion, sound-bites and staged poster photo-opportunity drivel in favour of – quite literally – doing it on the hoof, from the heart and with total honesty. Instead, the nearest Dave got to this was a 2008 Conference speech he claimed to be making off the cuff – but which later turned out to be nothing of the sort. When he rose to speak last week and began his chat with “This is not some ruse to capture headlines”, everyone watching immediately thought “Oh yes it is”.

I doubt if many would disagree if I contended that Cameron would be twenty points clear by now, had he stood up and said, “Right, no more daft distractions about small minorities, religious sensitivities or hunting vermin: we are going to focus on this mess and say nothing we can’t deliver the minute after you elect us.” (Even better would have been a promise to raise interest rates, slash budgets across the board, and target every remaining benefit through means-testing – while telling everyone to shut up and take the hit.)

The fact that he, and none of his ilk, would dream of doing this is as much the fault of those who work in the media as it is a failure of political leadership. Indeed, so ‘successful’ have the media been at their jobs, they are now the only target audience of any interest at all to what Peter Oborne dubbed The Political Class.

By ‘the media’, I do not mean some vague description such as those invented by the old Left – ‘military-industrial complex’ and so forth. I mean those who write for proprietors with an agenda, those who try to manage that news, those who devise strategies, those who advise Westminster big-shots on their appearance and dress, those who bully people on-camera and yes, those from my old profession who write ads and sign-off lines that say ‘Yes We Can’. These are not some propagandist’s imaginary hate-figures; they exist and they specialise and – above all – they mislead.

If our rights are being taken away from us by the elite at Westminster, our elections (and genuinely spontaneous politicians) have been stolen by the media monkeys. The May 2010 General Election will not be a contest between alternative policy directions in any real sense: it will be a cynical war between egos in the news and marketing communication businesses. As I’ve written many times before, if we who work online want to stop these gargoyles from doing the same on the web in the future, then we will have to form – at the very least – coalitions to offer an alternative to the blatant forgery of information.

But in the meantime, this is a crisis in our culture every bit as important as donation sleaze. Makeover and grubby donors will not be eradicated until we make it illegal for any political Party either to pay fees for media advice, or accept donations of any kind.

Much as it may stick in the voter’s craw, we must fund the business of politics out of our taxes. Maybe if we do this – and retain control over such a levy – at least we the pipers will feel they are truly answerable to those who call the tune.