So David Cameron is going to sue the Lib Dems about a leaflet we’re putting out in Henley? Well, I haven’t seen the leaflet, and I don’t know whether what it says is true or not. I certainly don’t know if it’s actionable, but I suspect there are lots of Tories who think it is, and lots of us who think it’s not. Chances are it’s neither absolutely true or absolutely false, which is why a judge somewhere might get to decide. Whatever it is, there are so many borderline lies that inhabit election leaflets from every party, and they’re the types of thing that drives me mad and makes me wonder why I’m doing this kind of thing at all.

It’s no surprise that temperatures are running a little high down there. This is a by-election on top of another by-election, right after the local elections. There are some people who’ve barely slept in three months, and I’m surprised they still remember the candidate’s name let alone write only lovely things about his opponent.

But it’s pretty rare for any leaflet to be greeted with cries of “See you in court!”

Maybe the threat of legal action might reign in some of the more outlandish leaflet claims from all sides, and maybe it will cascade down to the lowly likes of us campaigning in local elections. Because even here our leaflets can sometimes go way over the top. And screeching half-truths about opponents makes us all look like bickering idiots with nothing positive to say.

Political leaflets are odd. It seems as if we consider it unacceptable to think the same as our opponents on any issue, even though we do think the same thing on many especially at a local level.

If there’s a hospital to be closed, we’re against the closure and we strain every sinew of our being to find even the most tenuous reason why our opponent might not be. “The government of his party wants to shut hospitals” is reasonable, if there’s evidence to back it up. But is it fair to say “The Council run by his party 150 miles away shut hospitals”? Or “25 years ago his party shut another hospital”? I don’t think that it is. But if there was the chance to write it then I can bet my bottom dollar that somebody would.

And we do it all the time – all the parties do it all the time. I don’t even care if it works to win votes, because if it does it also works to convince voters that we’re all drones incapable of doing anything but degrading our opponents who are, on the whole, perfectly decent people who wouldn’t want to shut hospitals in an ideal world.

Even at my most local of levels, at the last election we screamed at Labour and they screamed at us on things that, really, we weren’t miles apart on. Rainsough for instance. So much was made of the failure to renovate the shops. We blamed Labour and Labour blamed us, when the truth is that it’s neither of our faults. It’s a symptom of neglect caused by people who’ve long since retired or died and who could’ve been wearing any colour of rosette under the sun back in 1981 or whenever the hell it was. Luckily for us it was a red one so we could blame them. But I don’t think it was fair to, because they’re not standing now and the guy who is seems a perfectly nice chap with a brain in his head and some good ideas.

Of course, there are times when we genuinely disagree. When there’s clear space between us. And we should let every voter know where both sides stand on these issues. But even here there’s surely a better way of doing things than we manage in our elections. We paint ourselves as haloed saviours, and the opposition as salivating attack-dogs ready to rip communities to shreds simply because they’re too stupid to see the obvious solution we’ve seen.

Neither of these two personas is right, yet why do we treat the voters as too ill-informed to recongnise that issues are nuanced and that there rarely is a black and white solution? Surely we can’t believe what we’re saying?

Is it any wonder that people are disengaged, when what we give them to be engaged with is a cartoon version of the issues which they probably already know isn’t very well connected to reality? In a by-election, whoever wins will have been called a bumbling buffoon by his opponent in at least half a dozen leaflets on every doorstep in the constituency. This hardly does much to help with a respectful society, does it?

I know that there’s an end game to campaigning. I know that the more Councillors we elect, by fair means or foul, and the more MPs we get by tipping the swing our way through no-holds-barred campaigns, the more likely it is that one day, one day, we’ll have the chance to put our policies into practice and make a real difference. But do those ends justify the means that we sometimes use? And would it only be a pyrrhic victory if we obtain power and influence by shouting down our opponents with smears and out-of-context quotes? How can we strive to be leaders when our journey to leadership is marked with such questionable moral judgement?

We should all try and do something different, I think. And it’d have to be all of us at once, because if we alone became the party of nice leaflets I suspect we’d get truly panned.

I doubt it will ever happen. Campaigning is so targeted and sophisticated now that before too long the likes of Mosaic and hacking into the Tesco Clubcard database will mean we can just leaflet half a dozen swing voters until they collapse under the strain of it all, and then fill in a proxy vote for them at their hospital bedside.

But I just wish we would all take a breath, lose the tunnel vision and remember why we’re in it in the first place. It’s not to hire lawyers and fight over leaflets full of mis-quotations in the High Court. It’s to spread our good ideas and change things for the better.

Rick