Let me be very clear – in case it's not obvious to anyone who reads this column.

I am a political junkie – an election anorak. I can’t get enough and I can argue and campaign and pore over old election results until I’m the only person left who hasn’t gone off to the pub or gone to sleep with boredom.

So the news that the Tory leader David Cameron has started his General Election campaign must be – for people like me – the best New Year announcement ever. Yes?

Well, no actually.

And I can’t imagine that it has the whole country waiting for the snow to clear so we can all go out and start dancing in the streets.

We know that the General Election will, almost certainly, be on May 6. Gordon Brown could ask the Queen for an earlier date but given the current state of the opinion polls he not likely to do so.

So we know the date much further ahead than usual and we know that once again we’ll have a double vote in most of England.

The difference this time is that the council elections will be for the districts – Pendle, Burnley, and Rossendale in this area – rather than the county.

But it’s all four months away and if Mr Cameron thinks that everyone will be glued to their TVs, their computers and even the newspapers during all that time, just to hear his latest daily policy gimmick, I fear he is deluded.

Of course everyone is already in a state of high excitement over the promise of three 90-minute television “debates” between the three main party leaders. Aren’t we?

If the American examples are anything to go by they’ll be carefully structured, the leaders will have spent days training for them, and their main aim will be simply to not drop any clangers.

The odds are they’ll be the ultimate in political tedium with Mr Brown churning out rows of statistics and Mr Cameron getting very worked up over not very much at all.

I might have hopes that Nick Clegg could trump them both by being a bit dangerous – bold and different – but I wouldn’t put money on it.

I fear we are all in for a switch-off spring.