No, said the Peer: “we will play to Gordon Brown’s strengths…there will be more emphasis on the tough decisions he’s taken”. His Lordship didn’t enlarge on the specifics, but he needs to bear in mind that fifty times nothing is still nothing.

Perhaps he has another more extreme approach. I await the announcement of free hearing aids for all those thinking of voting LibDem. From these wireless devices will emanate the voice in heads symptoms he referred to: one can hear the purring now:

“Now then everyone, I want you all to vote for that nice man Gordon Brown as your way of saying thank you for all the tough decisions he’s made quite selflessly on your behalf, and then once he’s gone back to the Funny Farm, I’ll take over and, as you know, I’m just a quiet well-groomed little pussy-cat…..”

David Cameron’s ‘giving it everything’ is also being taken to new extremes. With the rain pouring down in many places yesterday, he appeared to promise that a Conservative victory would usher in an epoch of barbecue summers. But this morning on Marr he was giving it everything to suggest that his Government will be about quiet effectiveness and a lot of repealing. The first Queen’s Speech, in fact, will mark a departure from previous practice, in that it will be mainly about undoing rather than doing.

This was all it took to get Labour’s Ulster Secretary Shaun Woodward going on the subject of how ‘divisive’ Dave was being in this quite callous, cynical, and politically expedient expression of no faith in the last thirteen years of 38,763 new legal instruments. Few Members will know more about divisiveness than Shaun, who divides his time between the seven properties he owns around the world.

With grey clouds only a hundred feet above much of the UK, Nick Clegg said that for his Party, “the sky’s the limit”. A couple of opinion polls last night were suggesting that in fact his limit has been reached, and that only cloud-cover has got him this far. Some of those who watched Debate III: This Time it’s the same as Last Time have caught on to the fact that Cleggover is not just a pretty face, he’s also an empty head. For those who were in any doubt about this, Gordon Brown referred to him as “a game-show host”. Politics is, indeed, a funny old game.

The sky truly is the limit for our national debt unless it’s tackled quickly. Mervyn King somehow contrived to say, in a very publicly private way, that the mess New Labour got us into is going to poison the chalice of anyone trying to tackle it over the next decade or so. A dead-heat election also won’t help, if only because it will be seen abroad as a preface to more wrangling and then – sooner rather than later – yet another exhausting campaign for the voters.

So given this reality, it will come as no surprise that The Independent has chosen to endorse a hung Parliament. This has nothing to do with the editor’s 25-1 bet with Paddy Power taken out in 2007: in a way it would make more sense if it was. No, the Indie – truculent to the end – has come out for the Hung Parliament Party. I give up.