“Got … hiccups … bloody … Martin Amis … gave … me … hiccups…”

In the pub on the Embankment, the Diarist — for a paper that had better remain nameless — was suffering. A large water and then a whisky had failed to calm them. In the corner, Manchester United was taking apart Bayern Munich*, and suits were cheering them on. Young thin men in dark blue suits, they were of every race and creed, as long as it was upper middle-class.

The Diarist was from Worcestershire, but she’d changed her accent by sheer force of will at the age of 16, to what the BBC call “received pronunciation” and now she sounded like she owned Wales. Every time she went home her family made fun of her.

But she was suffering from National Health Service bronchitis — “the doctors won’t give you any bloody drugs, they just counsel you” — but mainly from famous Amis, who had earlier addressed the Royal Society of the Arts in a room surrounded by murals of great achievements, mainly pudgy men in fleecy wigs pointing at maps, and colonising the world.

They were proud types, they had confidence in what they were doing, and they seemed to hover over the occasion like its bad conscience, an awareness of falling short. Outside, taking a quick fag, Amis, 60, had looked young, short and compact. In the sepulchral atmosphere of the lecture room he appeared ghastly, the Amis head reminiscent of Kingsley, but hovering over a thin, even starved body.

Amis senior had become, in his final decades, little more than a butt of sack, a skinful of single malt. It went with the “hang all social workers” rhetoric, comfortable and rotund, Lucky Jim who got luckier, travelling from postwar Labour to the Thatcher “miracle”. Amis junior had become a reliable go-to for obscene quotes about Muslims, women, Asiatic barbarity, etc, but it came from no position, no aged and blended world view, just a head floating without a body.

The auditorium was half-full, and most of them were diarists and journos, hoping for an Amisism that could be got viral.

“They’re going to ask him who he’ll vote for,” someone whispered and the ostensible purpose — to plug The Pregnant Widow, his apparently lugubrious tome about the sexual revolution — was soon lost in the Amis lottery. Who would he go, lesbians, Moldovans, tram gunsels?

“The only thing that would have saved my sister [who died of alcoholism and general chaos at age 46] would have been conversion to Islam.”

Woo-hoo.

Ninety seconds in, and we were off. Sadly, that was pretty much it, as far as new material again. For the rest it was kinda like a Uriah Heep German tour bootleg, all the riffs long having floated free of anything resembling an actual song.

“Christopher Hitchens said the only way to have avoided the Second World War was to lose the first.” “What Islam needs is a sexual revolution.” “We still don’t have a name for those post 9/11 people. I suggest Takfirism.” “As far as the sexual revolution goes, well Saul Bellow said have you seen those documentaries with wildebeest.” And around and around it went.

The pens went furiously the endorsement came and went — “I think there’s a need for change but I can’t bring myself to vote Conservative,” (which, if repeated across the country, will save Labour) but there was nothing to really fire it up.

Indeed the whole thing had a curious panto-feel, the ritual movement backward and forward of a villain who everyone knows, behind the make-up is a fading soap star.

It was a fitting motif for day two of the election, as it rapidly became clear what a repetitive slog this campaign was going to be. There was the usual stuff about more futile deaths in Afghanistan, some argy-bargy, and then down to a tussle over the government’s proposed 1p increase in the national insurance levy on businesses. There are now dozens of corporations — mostly retail — that have signed up to say that the National Insurance increase is a “threat to business”, a focused campaign killer if threw was one, and Labour knows it. Brown blustered with a response to it, effectively losing day two of the campaign.

He may have made up some ground, but to tell the truth I switched from Prime Minister’s Questions halfway through to watch a mid-afternoon quiz show called, and I kid you not, Pointless, for an hour or so, partly because I believe that it is in quotidian pastimes such as this that the true beating heart of the great British public can best be surmised, and also because the actress wasn’t returning my calls, and I was good for nothing for a coupla hours.

Pointless is perfect for that — the televisual equivalent of picking at a beer mat. Hosted by a former sketch comedy duo star, the object is for contestants to get the least number of points by guessing the most unpopular answers offered by the public.

The genius of Pointless is that it takes the air of mid-arvo quiz TV — that flyblown nouveau Roman air of marooned futility — and turns it into a positive aesthetic. The more the pace slows to near collapse, the better it serves the show. It is a taste buried deep in the British psyche, inherited from the war and governing, for example, the entire oeuvre of, say, Alan Bennett.

“Well getting what you want’s all right I suppose,” (come on do the accent), “but there’s nowt like failure, lad.”

That mindset extended to politics some time ago, and is the only reason that the two large parties have managed to hold things down for so long. In the final flurry of parliament known as “the wash-up”, the whips from both parties convene and go through the plethora of Bills, private members’ initiatives, petitions, etc, and decide what will get through and what will be thrown out.

Since this includes most of the Bills hitherto trumpeted as evidence of grand change, great British habit of democracy, etc, it’s a demonstration of how fixed the fight is.

Chief among them, pushed through today, was the Digital Economy Bill, designed by Peter Mandelson, the dark lord, apparently after dinner in the Mediterranean with media mogul David Geffen and others, and that essentially makes it straightforward to jail people for downloading a few peer-shared songs, and gives wide scope to the government to ban websites at capricious whim.

Other compromises included the Tories dropping opposition to far-reaching DNA database plans, Labour dropping plans for sex education in primary schools and on it went. Some of them were big, some of them small, but they were all done in such a way as to emphasise the degree to which the whole thing is two self-reproducing parties versus the rest of the country, with the Lib-Dems the only voice suggesting that possibly government was about actually giving such matters a bit of time.

The bums’ rush may discourage those few souls who think the Tories really mean to make a difference in the way things are governed, but it won’t do anything to Labour’s followers, who could win great prizes at Pointless. The evening’s episode of Question Time chiefly focused on Brown’s claim that he was from a “middle-class” family, and whether that now meant lower middle-class or “bourgeois”, a topic that had the panel heaving away like jackals fighting over the rotting remains of a bear.

No gaffes, no great initiatives, just a few hiccups.

“The … lead … is … definitely … Takfirism …”

The hiccups were eventually cured by rapid-fire jokes; “why do Jewish men die before their wives? They want to!” being the one that did it, ironically.

And so we go on, in the great horrory-horrorism, of the thing election. Eyes down for the lowest score. Fire up the Fiasco.

*Bayern Beats Manchester United on away goals for Champions League semis.