May Day may day

The problem may be that I'm not doing as much campaigning as I should be. Or it may be my opinion poll addiction (they don't matter, they really don't matter) which makes my hands shake every time I guide the little mouse button onto the Guardian election page, with its polls section and the handy guide up the top saying 5 DAYS TO GO (yes, thanks for that). Or it may be the media dribbling on about all the wrong stuff. Or it may be - I don't even want to think this - about Lynton Crosby. His Queensland Gambit is particularly unpleasant, in that it tries actively to make voters stay home. Now this may be politically correct of me, but I thought the point of an election campaign was to make people vote for you. Convince people how great you are, and/or how shit the other boy is, and make them come out and vote to get you in or the other one out, doesn't matter about their motives, the point is they vote. Right? To try to make people think 'sod it, I'll stay home' because they will never ever vote Tory is extremely daring and extremely cynical. I don't know if I'm the only person to think it stinks. The Queensland Gambit is a kind of political bulimia. In the short term it works fine. In the long term it does serious damage not just to everyone but to you in particular. (I'm only using the bulimia metaphor because of the word 'erode' floating around my brain.) Watch out, Lynton Crosby. Instant karma may not get you, but it'll catch up with you eventually.