This election campaign has been nothing but a disappointment filled with fakery – something has to change

Politics may remain a grubby old game, but we cannot let the antics of the last few weeks be repeated again

Even allowing for the way that politics has always been a dirty business, few general elections have been as disappointing as this one. Given the scale of the challenges facing the nation, and the momentous nature of the decisions that will be taken in the coming months and years, the dismal standard of debate, and in particular the prevalence of so much deliberately misleading and fraudulent material online has been deeply dispiriting. Our politics, with rare exceptions, have certainly failed to rise to the occasion.

Take the torrid “punchgate” affair. Respected journalists were briefed by a Conservative party source, or sources, that a Labour activist had thrown a punch at one of the health secretary’s aides during a visit to Leeds General Infirmary. They tweeted the news too readily. To adapt an old saying, the lie was halfway around the internet before the truth had got its boots on. There was, as a video proved, no such punch, and the tweets were withdrawn, and apologies offered. The net effect, however, was to distract the attention rightly being paid to the plight of a four-year-old boy, Jack Williment-Barr, forced to lie on the floor because of a shortage of beds.

Then came the bots: bogus Twitter accounts sending identical messages – supposedly from a friend of a nurse at the Leeds hospital – suggesting that the whole story of the boy on the floor had been an elaborate hoax. When in fact it is the tweets themselves that are hoaxes. A political party may or may not be behind these tweets, but it looks extremely suspicious, and the political motivation behind it is obvious. Much the same may be said about the leaked documents about Brexit and the US trade talks that made their way onto the internet and then into the hands of the Labour Party.

The Conservatives were plainly culpable in passing off their Twitter account as an independent fact-checking service during the first TV leaders’ debate, and they saw fit not even to apologise for it. They also saw nothing wrong in a blatantly misrepresentative video that tried to make the sensible and highly intelligent Keir Starmer sound like a blithering idiot.

Beyond that was the prime minister’s unusually strong aversion to being interviewed by Andrew Neil. Given his past humiliations at the hands of Mr Neil it was not surprising – but the prime minister and his team had made frequent promises that he would appear, including one from Mr Johnson himself on The Andrew Marr Show. No matter; the interview format was trashed as “tired”, and the prime minister simply failed to turn up – an unprecedented refusal in modern times.

The many TV debates, like so many of the interviews, were infected by meaningless sloganising and untruths. Fakery flourished as never before, taking advantage of the new channels on social media that are is pitifully unregulated by our archaic election law and toothless Electoral Commission. The Liberal Democrats were called out for producing bogus local “newspapers” and contrived bar charts, which, in their case, is not a first offence.

Margaret Beckett suffered the indignity of a bogus website being set up in her name that urged people in Derby to vote Conservative; Boris Johnson snatched a mobile phone form an ITV reporter; John Ashworth had a candid phone call recorded and leaked, and then claimed he was “joshing” – the bad behaviour has been endemic. And much of the media – print and web-based – are as partisan as ever.

The low point in the campaign was undoubtedly the terror attack on London Bridge – when the tragedy was used with unseemly haste by Boris Johnson for political purposes. As the father of Jack Merritt, one of those murdered, said, his son would not have agreed with “vile propaganda” promoted by the Tories and parts of the media.

It is unlikely that any of this will change whoever gets to form a government this week; however it is the Conservatives’ thinly veiled threats to the BBC and Channel 4 that represent the more potent threat to real news and the rights of citizens to have access to at least some sources of information that are not utterly dishonest. The only cause for optimism to emerge from the swamp is the way that the very new channels of social media that are being subverted by the political parties and their allies can also be used to correct the untruths, spread the truth and allow the voters to see and read things at first hand.

Only in recent years, for example, has every party manifesto been available immediately online (not that they attract an avid mass readership). Twitter users soon seize on evidence of manipulation in stories that used to be carefully intermediated – spun – by a select band of newspapers, magazines and broadcasters. Now anyone can publish a story, a video or an opinion, and not all are false or worthless. Thus the video of Mr Johnson sheepishly handing back the ITV reporter’s mobile phone and having to confront the case of Jack Williment-Barr has attracted around 10 million views on Twitter alone – far more than would have seen a routine apology on ITV.

The public has never been better served by independent fact checkers or by think tanks such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies, able to sift fact from fiction as best they can. The smartphone has made it possible for stories to be corroborated or disproved – as in the punchgate affair – playing the kind of role VAR does in modern football. And when Mr Neil delivered his damning soliloquy on Mr Johnson’s cowardice it went viral. It did not enhance the prime minister’s already untrustworthy reputation.

Still, this new media is still in its infancy, and the dangers posed to democracy are already apparent. Politics will continue to be a grubby old game.