This, it has to be said, has been a pretty awful General Election campaign.

Awful in terms of leadership, prospectuses and the unexpected tragedy that was Manchester (and the political horse-trading that followed). Awful in initiation - I struggle even to remember, or care, what the point was supposed to be - and depressing in its likely conclusion.

In saying this, I'm under no delusion that general elections of old were necessarily any better, but I can't remember any that felt this perfunctory, this frivolous or this vacuous in both style and substance.

Is it just me or is every party doing little more than going through the motions? Never a particularly inspiring politician, it's become clear there's no real beginning to Theresa May's talents. The Prime Minister is fond of telling us that politics isn't a game, yet it seems clear that's how she approaches it. Just not very well.

The Conservative Party leader says she needs a stronger hand to get a better Brexit deal, yet we've learned nothing from this campaign about what that actually means beyond platitudes. Detail seems to be going out of fashion in political terms, but it's important; Brexit will succeed or fail on that basis.

I said I couldn't remember what the point of the election was. I remember now, it was supposed to bring parliament together - a goal neither credible nor desirable - but in reality to crush the supposedly unelectable Jeremy Corbyn under the weight of a three-figure Tory majority.

Well, how's that going? That mighty Conservative lead continues to diminish, a useful reminder that premiers who contrive elections - think Edward Heath and James Callaghan - are apt to get their fingers burnt.

At the same time I think the chances of a surprise Corbyn victory, Chris Mullin's "A Very British Coup" come true, remain slim. More likely we're talking the difference between that three-figure majority and one in double digits, perhaps not much greater than that at present. In which case, what precisely was the point?

The Labour leader spoke at a rally in Glasgow yesterday evening, uttering fine words about ending inequalities and governing for the many not the few. But he too is stuck in the past. While his Conservative opponent fetishises the 1950s and grammar schools as the mystical apex of "Great" Britain, Mr Corbyn idealises the 1970s, which by coincidence is when he last appears to have had an original idea.

Thus his manifesto constitutes neither the dangerous radicalism Tories' claim nor the dawn of a kinder, gentler politics envisaged by the ever-hopeful Left. Corbyn is going through the motions in this campaign because he has little choice, out-manoeuvred by the Conservatives he despises so much.

I can't even get exercised about his previous support for the IRA. Not only was it all a very long time ago - one might as well obsess about the Thatcher government's failure to condemn Apartheid - but constant reference to the book of historical wrongs simply distracts attention from what the Labour leader would do in the here and now (not a lot).

It's not even that bad an agenda. At last week's Scottish Labour manifesto launch it occurred to me that the tragedy for a party that, after all, began in Scotland a century ago, is that having arrived (belatedly) at a coherent position: federalist, left of centre and anti (Scottish or British) nationalism, it's found that no-one is listening.

As the BBC's Andrew Neil said during his typically penetrating interview with Corbyn, "the policies are there but the people and the leader matters as well". If, as the Prime Minister is also fond of reminding us, this election is a straight choice between her and the Labour leader, then it's a rather unedifying contest between someone who loves her country a little too much and one who appears not to care for it at all.

Where does this leave the UK's third party, the SNP? Oh, in the usual confused place. On the one hand Nicola Sturgeon is busy rerunning the 1987 campaign, in which Mrs May is Mrs Thatcher and the wicked Tories are intent upon destroying Scotland and Scottishness, yet on the other we're told, contrary to recent opinion polls, that Labour can't possibly win this election so they're not worth bothering with.

This continues the Sturgeon strategy, inaugurated the moment Corbyn became leader two years ago, of continually dissing a politician who embodies the values she claims to represent. Labour, Paisley's Mhairi Black once informed us, had left her, not the other way round, yet when Corbyn came along she and other nationalist fellow travellers stuck with the Blairite SNP. Funny, that.

If nothing else, at least Jeremy Corbyn (along with Brexit) has exposed "utilitarian" nationalism for the opportunistic fiction it always was. Sure, the SNP will still "win" this election in Scotland, but it's clearly running out of steam. That "highly likely" second referendum seems less likely than ever, and the fantasy panacea of independence even more threadbare.

I haven't mentioned the Liberal Democrats, but they deserve at least a paragraph. There ought to have been an opportunity in this election for a federalist party opposed to both Brexit and independence, but then that would have required some sort of leadership. Tim Farron isn't Jeremy Corbyn, but nor is he Charles Kennedy, who might, were he still with us, have capitalised on such a wretched context.

As of today, Nicola Sturgeon told us yesterday, there are just 10 days to "save" Scotland from the Tories. Doubtless Jeremy Corbyn agrees when it comes to Britain, while Theresa May would argue that the same period separates the UK from a far-left premiership that would destroy its potential greatness. One is left wondering who'll save us from this sort of hyperbolic grandstanding.

There's a week and a half of this low, dishonest election left. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said politics was the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. Good luck making up your mind.