Can’t trust any of them ….

The election’s over, of course. It’s time to put political arguments behind us.

Well, I don’t think it is – far from it – but that’s a discussion for another day. What I want to write about today is not about politicians or political arguments, but about us. About the electorate.

Because the most worrying and depressing thing about the election for me was the mean-minded cynicism, the lazy thinking, and the shallow partisanship of many of the “ordinary voters” we heard from, either on television or in the street – the half-baked scepticism that declares you can’t trust any politicians, that they’re “all in it for themselves”, and that they’re al liars.

I voted Labour, and I will again, and I was bitterly disappointed by the result, but this isn’t a party political point. So consider this exchange with David Cameron.

He had unwisely promised to get immigration down the “the tens of thousands” – and by the time of the election we’d seen it rise to around 300,000. “You lied!” sneered the audience in one of the televised debates, clearly thinking they had scored an important point. But of course he hadn’t – we can assume that he’d tried to achieve what he’d promised, but he’d found it wasn’t possible. He was foolish to have made the original commitment, but not dishonest in failing to meet it. If you promise to take your wife out to dinner and the car won’t start, or the restaurant’s closed down, or you suddenly lose all your money and can’t afford to go – that doesn’t make you a liar.

Then it was Ed Miliband’s turn for the treatment. “What figure will you get immigration down to?” the audience demanded – and he replied that he wasn’t going to set a figure. He wouldn’t pluck a number out of the air, he replied, because he couldn’t guarantee to stick to it. Stuff happens. You can’t just switch off immigration like a tap.

But of course that didn’t satisfy them. What they wanted was a nice neat figure that they could hold him to. And if they’d got it, when it didn’t happen, they would have shrieked “Liar!” at Ed Miliband too. But of course, we didn’t have to wait for that.

“Do you think that the last Labour government overspent?” asked another member of the audience. “No I don’t,” came the reply, which once again wasn’t what they wanted to hear. There was a shocked intake of breath across the studio – even though he’d been saying the same thing throughout the campaign.

Inevitably, the expected reply came: “You’re a liar.”

There’s an obvious illogicality about calling a man a liar when he tells you what he thinks. Unless you’re inside his head, you can’t know. You may say he’s foolish, or unwise, or deluded, but he’s the only person who knows what’s going on in his brain. But there’s a more important point than that.

There is a perfectly coherent intellectual argument, made by many leading economists, that the last Labour Government did not wildly overspend. There’s every reason to suppose that Miliband did indeed believe that. I certainly do. But it was also quickly obvious during the election campaign that refusing to “acknowledge” overspending was causing the Labour Party significant damage among the electorate.

The sensible thing for Miliband to do would have been to put his hand on his heart, and declare that Gordon Brown and the last government had been guilty of a shocking level of overspending, and promise that it would never happen again. But he decided to tell an unpopular truth – and what did these numpties call him? Liar. They weren’t interested in the truth. What they wanted was to be lied to.

And then there are the down-home little truisms that are trotted out as though they settle the argument. “If I get to the end of the week and I can’t afford a beer, I know I’ve overspent,” said one member of the audience, with the air of a man who had produced the unanswerable killer argument. Well indeed you would, you clown, but you’re not running an economy. Governments, Tory and labour, run deficits all the time.

But it would be electoral suicide for a politician to tell a voter that he was being stupid, rude and ignorant, even when he is. So, like naughty children who aren’t told how to behave, they get stupider, ruder and more ignorant, while thinking they are being shrewd and insightful. So far, it’s either laughable or depressing, depending on your mood. But here’s the thing.

During the campaign, I went out delivering leaflets with a Labour candidate who was one of the brightest young men I’ve ever met. He’s an economist, in his late twenties, and I would guess he could be making £120,000 a year or more in the City, with the prospect of much more to come. But instead, he was pounding the streets in an unwinnable constituency because of what he believes in. Because he wants, in a much overused phrase, to serve his country.

I am absolutely certain, by the way, that there will have been similar young men and women campaigning as Tory candidates. I happen to think they are misguided and wrong, but I admire their commitment. Sure as eggs, their fate will be the same as my friend’s.

He wasn’t elected this time, but it won’t stop him. One day, he’ll be an MP, and cynical bigots who wouldn’t recognise the truth if it was floating in their pint of beer will shout “Liar” at him too, and sneer that he’s only in it for the money. And one day, when he is finally defeated in the polls as most politicians ultimately are, and all he has worked for is trampled underfoot – like Miliband, like Clegg, and like Portillo back in 1997 – they’ll mock him and snap at him, and call him a loser, and think they’re being clever.

There’s a part of me that can’t for the life of me understand why he wants to go on and do it – but there’s another part of me that does.

And it’s deeply inspiring.