I have to admit that at first glance I found last week’s Labour Party Political Broadcast quite funny. We Tories portrayed as 1950s toffs, Mr Clegg the ‘Shrinking Man’. Reasonably amusing satire, I thought.

But looking at it again online, watching its grotesque caricatures of my own party as being people-hating, yacht-owning squires, and Mr Clegg as being a political cypher, it occurred to me that it said a lot more about Labour than us.

Not a mention of policy; no promises; nothing at all about the economy, which Labour of course dare not mention. It was, in the words of one left-leaning commentator “awesomely bad; superlatively and wondrously inept ... politically unhinged, and [to most people] incomprehensible.”

Is it not a shame that public debate about politics could be brought so low?

Mr Cameron meanwhile visited the West Country, including North Wiltshire, to deliver a powerful and positive message about the economy; and about the In/Out referendum on the EU which we have pledged to hold in 2017. Every word he said was positive. It was all about the future; about what you will get if you vote Conservative both in the Euro elections and also next year’s General Election. It was about ideas, careful political arguments delicately delivered to the people and the media.

This month’s Euro elections (they do matter, and UKIP cannot deliver that longed-for referendum), September’s Scottish Referendum (which, for the sake of the nation we must win even if there might be a narrow party political advantage for we Tories if 50 or so Labour MPs were to be thrown out of Westminster as a result of any Scottish independence), and next year’s crucial General Election, are life-changing events.

They are not an occasion for the light-hearted bit of fun which the makers of the Labour Party Political Broadcast would no doubt like to portray; far less do they call for personalised caricaturing and political polemic from the gutter.

The world is a fast-changing and dangerous place. Our lives and prosperity are at risk. The whole structure of our place in the world is changing. This is not the time for a bit of light-hearted fun. It is not a moment to have a laugh with a minority protest party. It’s not an occasion to ‘send a message to Mr Cameron’ over various disliked actions or policies.

These elections are deadly serious. We take them lightly at our peril.