The first of the parties' ‘spring conferences’ comes and goes and has anyone said anything new?

A lot of big speeches and a lot of hot air from the Conservatives, suddenly feeling chills in the spine and fear in the belly as the opinion polls get closer.

The Liberal Democrats in Birmingham in a fortnight won’t be any different. It’s no time for controversial debates on policy, so like the others we’ll really just be having a pumped-up but really rather tedious rally.

We are told this is going to be a ground-breaking election in which the three TV debates between the party leaders will enthrall the country and lead to a new (or rather old) level of enthusiasm for voting.

I don’t believe it. They will be tightly prescribed with scripted questions and a very minimum of real repartee between the three leaders.

Each will be one-and-a-half hours of boredom, with the only frissons of excitement coming if any of them is seen to make a gaffe. Indeed, the slightest comment off-message will be front page headlines the following day. And I guess that no-one outside the political club will care a button or a fig.

I do despair of political discussion in this country which is more personalised and less serious than it has ever been since democracy took hold. These debates will make it worse by turning the election even more into a personality show between the three leaders.

I was at a meeting recently with Mark Thompson, the Director-General of the BBC, and suggested to him that the Parliament Channel (Freeview channel 81 in these parts) could be used for some genuine in-depth policy debates during the campaign.

I don’t think he understood what I was trying to say. He did tell me they would be doing this on Newsnight and Question Time.

TV coverage is more and more presented as ‘politics as entertainment’. It may or may not be fun but it’s not serious discussion of what Tony Benn called ‘the issues’.

A general election should be a lot more important than the X Factor or the Eurovision Song Contest. Or even Goal of the Month.