It might not be the news you wanted most at the start of a new year.

In January, rotten weather is generally enough to be going on with. Ready or not, like it or not, the 2015 General Election campaign has commenced. Everything you hear from a politician from now until May will hang on a single fact.

The tribe are in a strange mood this winter. Whatever anyone claims, no one truly knows what Britain has in mind for Westminster. The soothsayers, not least in the media, are all over the shop. On paper - where all the world is perfectly predictable - the only argument is over whether Labour can achieve an overall majority. Back in reality, no one seems quite to believe it.

Bookmakers still believe Ed Miliband can do it. Those who crunch numbers reckon that, at worst, Labour will need to do some kind of coalition deal, but should still emerge as the largest single party. Questions then hinge on whether there will be enough Liberal Democrats left to help a new government into existence, or whether - heaven forbid - the Scottish National Party will have something to say about it. Then there's the issue of what voters might feel about such "arrangements".

Westminster politics has become messy indeed. The new cliche in all comment therefore involves the breakdown of the old order. That's true, as far as it goes. Polling in the last month of 2014 showed Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems toiling to win much above 70 per cent of the UK vote between them. The two "big" parties could not muster even two-thirds. So chaos - to an older school of Establishment thought - now beckons.

It has certainly left many observers confused. Has coalition government turned out to be surprisingly stable, all things considered, or has the spectacle of supposed enemies cutting deals at their convenience alienated a large part of the electorate? Contrary to confident predictions from some of us in 2010, the Tory-LibDem pact has held together, but few would claim it as a shining advertisement for representative government.

Nick Clegg's party has done itself terrible, perhaps irreparable, damage. David Cameron's Tories are a surly, fractious lot, itching for fratricidal conflict. Ukip has left ugly lesions on the carcass of the British right. Despite the referendum result - or perhaps because of it - Scotland has meanwhile seemed to say that it will have none-of-the-above, thanks all the same. For a UK still deep in economic trouble, none of this promises happy days.

Labour in tandem with the Lib Dems? That talk might be commonplace in the bars and coffee shops of Westminster. It would sound incomprehensible to some of the voters Jim Murphy says he means to win back in Scotland. As for a deal, even a limited sort of deal, between Labour and the SNP, you can only say - putting it generously - that no-one has explained how on earth that would work.

For now, the number crunchers will assure you that Nigel Farage and Ukip will engineer upsets for others, but fail to pick up seats. If the arithmetic is right - though it never is - the Little Englanders will struggle to hold on to their pair of Tory defectors.

But can the SNP truly win the 49 seats which polls say are theirs for the taking? That's hard to believe. Harder still is the question of what effect the Greens might have, especially in England, on the remnant LibDem vote. And what of Northern Ireland's Democrat Unionists? Even in a tight spot, it would be a foolish Tory who took them for granted. The DUP pursues its own interests.

To repeat: messy. Labour's "35 per cent strategy", founded on the in-built advantage the electoral system gives the party, is liable to look risky indeed in the months ahead. It leaves no room for error and there is no guarantee that Mr Miliband will be able to chart a course from now until May without running into an error or two. There is no guarantee, in fact, that Labour's leader is an individual cut out for fighting an election campaign that is bound to be nasty.

That's part of what people sense, I suspect, and what opinion polls and neat electoral maps fail to reflect. It's why those "personal" ratings for Mr Miliband are so unrelentingly poor. If he's seen as uninspired and uninspiring now - for he is - how on earth will he fare in the madhouse of an election? The idea that Labour can fight its battle as a party and somehow ignore the existence of its leader is utterly unrealistic.

To many voters, especially in Scotland, it makes no odds. The fates of Messrs Miliband, Cameron and Clegg count only as dishes best served cold. "Vote Labour to Keep the Tories Out" (or vice versa) is a slogan that has lost all potency. It feels like a cheap threat rather than a rallying cry. Part of the truth of 2015 might be, in fact, that voters these days take a certain pleasure in rendering those old, "big" parties fearful and confused.

If you believe glib explanations, this is because we have taken to "anti-politics". I don't subscribe to the view. In essence, it says that anything beyond Labour, Tory and a bit of Lib Dem is not truly political, not serious, and not legitimate. It's one reason why those parties have struggled to come to terms even with the appeal - for that's not complicated - of Mr Farage. Denounce his crude message all you like. Don't mistake it for anything other than politics.

The 2015 election will have nothing to do with caricatures of populism. Tony Blair, that perennial ghost at the feast, makes the mistake when he instructs Labour, through the pages of the Economist, to stick with his right-wing formula.

One fun part of watching the then Prime Minister in the flesh (I think it was flesh) in Scotland was his very evident unease. He was always uncomfortable here. But why was that? Scots had voted for him in large numbers. Somehow, nevertheless, he was never too comfortable. It was as though he sensed he might not get away with his patented methods - the triangulation, the devotion to steering right while talking left - for too long.

His heirs - and they are all his heirs in those "big" parties - exude the same disquiet. They would have you believe that voters are just frustrated with "Westminster". In truth, the judgment is altogether more personal. The result is not anti-politics, but the arrival of a truly multi-party system in the London parliament.

Even if you discount the enthusiasm of the poll analysts, the SNP is more than likely to be Britain's third party come May. That says plenty about Scotland, obviously enough, but it also says a lot about how people across the UK wish themselves to be represented. They no longer buy the old, dismal claim that there is such a thing as a wasted vote.

If that troubles those raised to take power for granted, so much the better.