Am I the only person who is terminally bored and annoyed by all this speculation about the timing of a general election?

The media are obsessed with the prospect of Gordon Brown calling an autumn election, announcing it at the party conference, or calling a snap election next May. This is an election that does not need to happen for another two-and-a-half years. These days the ink is hardly dry on the crosses we put on our ballot papers before all the speculation starts.

Most of the population don’t care. This is a pre-occupation of Westminster types with their heads up their arses who hardly notice the real world, journalists with blank space to fill, and a few political anoraks.

In the meantime we return MPs to parliament to govern the country. We only get the full attention of those in government for a year or so before they start to spend half their time calculating the advisability of calling another election. Those who are supposed to provide an opposition spend half of their time trying to second-guess those calculations (and if its the Tories in opposition they spend the other half of their time with their non-executive directorships)

This might be taken as a criticism of our current Labour prime minister – well it is. But only to the extent that it is also a criticism of all the previous prime ministers as well for as far as I can remember.

I don’t like it because, theoretically it gives an advantage to the incumbents, although in reality they are as likely to get it wrong, and I don’t like it because it distracts everyone from things that really are important.

Why can’t we just have fixed terms?