IT is not quite as bad as a 3am phone call, but there is something about a knock on the door that sits ill with the modern psyche. Finding a stranger right there on the doorstep seems so bold, so intrusive, so indicative of being torn away from the TV to be sold something you do not wish to buy – like dusters, or a politician.

Theresa May loves an afternoon of door-knocking. Indeed, the Prime Minister was reportedly so upset at how little time had been allocated to this activity during her visit to Scotland last week that she took the matter up in heated terms with her team. “I’m a doorstep campaigner,” she declared, “and from now on I want to spend proper time knocking on doors and seeing people.”

So it was that this Boudicca of the box hedge strode out along an Aberdeenshire street, only to receive a metaphorical custard pie at every door. It might have been an actual custard pie if anyone had bothered to open the door to her, but they did not. The only civilians she encountered were out doing the garden and cut off her visit with a swift “No thank you” before she even got a hand on the gate. At every other house, no-one was at home. Allegedly. Oh grandma, what big sofas you must have in Aberdeenshire. All the better to hide behind, my dear?

Since calling a snap election, Mrs May has been busily engaged in trying to make this the most presidential campaign the UK has seen. She is not alone. In Scotland, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Conservatives’ Ruth Davidson have been doing the same, leading from the front and making the political as personal to them as possible. While UK and Scottish politics have been going in this direction for some time, it is only in this campaign that the downsides for voters are becoming clear.

Far from taking every opportunity she can to meet “ordinary” people (that’s you and me, folks), Mrs May seems to have spent the campaign so far trying to avoid them. Taking her cue from her predecessor, David Cameron, audiences at her events are made up of party members and other supporters, carefully doughnutted behind her waving placards with her slogan “Strong and stable leadership”, lest the PM somehow forget the phrase she has already uttered a zillion times already. Other placards, emblazoned with her name, make it look like the crowds are there to support the Theresa Party rather than the Tories.

She has refused to take part in live television debates, thus devaluing any such events held without her, and in the sit-down interviews she did at the weekend with the BBC’s Andrew Marr and ITV’s Robert Peston, question after question was batted away with some formulation involving those same S words again. She is not so much the Teflon candidate as the candidate too boring to bother with, and that, one suspects, is exactly the strategy her campaign team have settled on.

Mrs May is in no danger of losing the election given the general uselessness of her main opponent, but if her campaign is allowed to go down as the template for future elections then disengagement with the political process, and subsequent buyer remorse, can only increase. As an editorial in the Evening Standard (edited by one George Osborne: I believe you know him, Prime Minister?) put it yesterday: “There is nothing wrong with repeating election campaign slogans: the problem comes when the election campaign amounts to no more than a slogan.”

One can understand why party leaders are tempted to adopt a presidential style. There are fewer hostages to fortune if the ordinary bods at rallies are your own supporters. Why bother with televised debates or extended interviews when they change so few minds and any message you want to give to supporters can be sent by social media? Then there is the most tempting reason of all to lead from the front: that you are simply the best the party has to offer.

This can be seen most obviously with Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson. When the tactic works, it can be extremely effective. With the odd obvious exception, every SNP MP elected in 2015 owed their position to Ms Sturgeon, whose performance at the televised debates, and on the stump generally, famously even had viewers in England asking if they could vote for her. Ms Davidson has long been packaged and presented as the acceptable face of Conservatism in Scotland. Among her peers, in Scotland and further afield, she is a star: affable, upfront, as at home sitting on a bison as on the Have I Got News for You panel.

The problem with identifying a party too closely with one individual is that the shine, sooner or later, comes off the golden one. Ms Sturgeon’s persistently high approval ratings defy the notion that Scotland has reached “peak Sturgeon”. That, and the fact she had performed so well in previous elections (the not so little matter of losing a Holyrood majority aside), appeared to make her the obvious choice to be the sole focus of her party’s campaign. What she says inevitably dictates the agenda. That works fine if the message is clear – vote Yes, vote Remain. But in this campaign the message from the FM has been muddled.

First she said the General Election was not about independence. Now she says a second referendum and who should decide the timing of it, Westminster or Holyrood, is “at the heart” of the election. Already, she has been painted into a corner, the one marked constitutional politics, and with no-one else around to deflect attention by talking of other matters, she will be stuck there for the rest of the campaign. The party could always break the glass on some emergency Salmond, but that tactic, on past performance, can bring its own problems. As for Ms Davidson, the glister came off her as a leader when she failed to condemn the shameful rape clause brought in by her party in Westminster. That is the thing about casting yourself as a strong leader: sooner or later someone or some issue will put you to the test.

In the hurly burly General Elections of old there would have been multiple opportunities to tackle Ms Davidson on the rape clause, Ms Sturgeon on independence, and Mrs May on whether or not she has what it takes to make a success of Brexit. But such is the all show and little substance, presidential style of this campaign, it will be a fortunate voter who feels they have had all their questions answered. That suits certain party leaders, but it does nothing for the state of democracy.