I do not, of course, waste my time watching these ridiculous ‘debates’. Anyone who has taken part in actual debates will dismiss the idea that these events come anywhere close to the real thing. What they remind me of are circuses with a self-important host pacing the floor like a ringmaster and the ‘contestants’ (which is what they are, not candidates) waiting like animals to do their well-rehearsed tricks.

Some blog accounts of Monday’s event said that the contestants had been asked questions like ‘Coke or Pepsi?’ I assumed that the writers were being funny, parodying the triviality of the whole thing. It was only when I watched the above clip that I realized that this had actually happened. Why didn’t at least one contestant refuse to answer on the grounds that such questions were silly and beneath them? I am waiting for the day when one of the contestants tells the smug, overweening TV personalities that run these things (they are not journalists) to get serious or go to hell.

I find it hard to comprehend that we have sunk so low, that we have trivialized to such an extent such an important aspect of civic life as selecting the people who get to govern us. We have ceased to be a serious people and deserve the rotten governments that result.