I would, in normal circumstances, be immensely obliged to the Electoral Commission for the newspaper, TV and radio adverts that it has been funding since the election was called.

Without the commission, I would have had no idea that there is an election next week. And thanks, too, for suggesting that I vote. Despite, I only now realise, having been eligible to vote in five previous general elections, it had never once crossed my mind to do so. I had not been aware that — as the adverts so helpfully point out — politics is about education, crime, the NHS and all sorts of other things. I was completely ignorant of the fact that I live in a democracy and am thus entitled to vote. I had never thought that, if I don’t vote, I can’t influence which party is in government.

Unfortunately, however, I will not be able to vote next Thursday after all. I am, you see, dead. I stopped breathing a while ago. No one bothered advertising the fact that, in order to live, I need to keep breathing. Indeed, it’s a wonder I didn’t conk out many years before, since no one had taken out a TV ad to tell me that I need to eat.

Has there ever been a more fatuous, inane or plain stupid advertising campaign than that which the Electoral Commission is now running? I cannot imagine that there is a single sentient being in the country unaware that there is an election next week. It does not need a national advertising campaign to break the news.

As for the idea that anyone not intending to vote would, on noticing the commission’s adverts, suddenly realise that politics matters — pur-lease. The decision by the grandees who comprise the commission to launch such a campaign reveals nothing so much as their breathtaking contempt for the intelligence of the average non-voter.

Of course when I write that the Electoral Commission has been funding these adverts I am not being strictly accurate. The money to pay for the campaign has not come from the pockets of Sam Younger, its chairman, or his fellow commissioners. It has come from you and me, taken from us by the Government so that it can be spent as a group of bureaucrats sees fit — in this instance, telling us how we should behave in a democracy. Whatever next? A taxpayer-funded campaign telling us it is our duty to “Back the (Olympic) Bid”.