These PR sound bites and political clichés are usually concocted in the cauldron of warped Machiavellian PR spin-meisters. As the global media devours the aftermath of the event, the expression is already spiralling out of control. And I am offering you a chance to name and shame the worst offenders.

There is something exceedingly unpleasant and absolutely merciless about the increase in these ugly, meaningless but highly charged phrases. They sow cynicism and create disconnect. The bloated, faceless purveyors of half-truths and supercilious rhetoric need to be outed.

It is time to try and stop the arrogant few treating citizens with contempt. Folks, at the end of the day we understand the stuff of political cliché. I for one can see the big picture, but we must all have a clear vision for our future. We must stop flip-flopping on this issue.

It’s time for a change. It’s time to move forward. It’s time to move on. No more hidden agendas. Let’s take back our streets from the criminals. It’s time to get tough on crime. Our democracy is at stake. No dream is beyond our reach. We must determine the will of the people. We must do what’s in the best interest of the country.

Let’s find the best political cliché! Come forward with your nominations for the best cliché creator. Let’s name and shame the wordsmiths that conjuror these cringe-inducing clichés. Please post ideas in the comment section of the blog. Remember, the voice of the voters must be heard. Each vote is like a human voice. Every vote is precious.

The failure of anyone to take meaningful control of the country in the wake of the General Election says a great deal about the hype that the media work up as a cappuccino froth of sound bites. It felt like going to a bad movie – the trailer was exceptional but the movie itself is overlong and a terrible letdown.

We may have had debates, but the analogue TV hype didn’t change voters’ hearts. We may have seen an upsurge of the digital agenda, but Twitter and the new transparency still doesn’t reach the soul of the country, doesn’t reach the grassroots. The election has forced us to question the people pulling the strings.

As Labour, Conservative and Lib Dems slug out a coalition, power-sharing or some other solution, the media and politicians are running to catch up with the fact that they spent all night rubbishing the exit polls (which turned out to be correct) and creating hours of vacuous TV that did not capture the public mood.

It’s a communications issue – the metropolitan and media elite are just not listening to what general populace are and have been saying, whether it’s the stream of complaints about Andrew Neil’s vacuous filler with D List celebs during the BBC’s election broadcast, the graphics and polls that say nothing to anyone, or the fact that the nation wants a change and has no real way, in the current voting system, of effecting it. I guess those that had a vested interest in this arena had to keep canvassing and using the pre-election hyperbole.

And as it turned out, there was no Clegg-mania, just a Parliament-wide decrease in trust. No record numbers at the polls – a few got high turns outs but only a few. After all the hyperbole and the grand predictions, it was little more than a damp squib. For the most part, the great unwashed had heard all the hype many times before and were not about to be converted to any other cause by digital means, or by the smug assumptions of the media or politicians. The only swing was towards dissatisfaction, and there’s no electronic gadget that can show that.

The media and the Westminster village are terribly insular and just don’t seem to get that there is an upsurge of people who have spotted that they’ve been hoodwinked. The public, in their indifference to manipulations, may yet shake up the cosy status quo – this has been, on all levels, an election about wrestling for control.

But the weekend has seen the Westminster village fighting hardest for control – the political classes have been keeping us away from the real issues by using the media as a canvas to paint and posit theories as to how the aftermath of the hung parliament might play out. Realpolitik and the bitter truths of the brutal practicalities of coalition have been hidden. The media have been spreading the same facts in slightly different packaging all over the news for days, feeding us what the politicians perceive to be good for us, rather than the truth.

This is advice that needs to be handed on to Nick Clegg, after last night’s second Leaders’ Debate. He appeared to have spent the week following his remarkable showing in the first debate positively wallowing in the good reviews. Certainly his people believed the good press enough to let Clegg give Brown and Cameron enough room to make up lost ground. That said, he survived pretty well mostly thanks to the MPs’ expenses scandal allowing too many people to see the puppet strings in this campaign.

It’s not just leaders making up lost ground – since Obama swept to power, there have been no significant advances in new media’s ability to influence thing. Surprisingly, given that GE2010 was expected to have an enormous social media impact, all the balls are in the analogue media’s court after two game-changing Leaders’ Debates. It has been conclusively proved that many millions of people will watch old media if the content is great.

There’s no doubt that the experience is deepened and aided by new media, and by Twitter in particular, but that’s not what’s been driving the sudden change in the shape of British politics. In the same way that the X Factor created a big moment for old-fashioned “round the box with the family” television, the Leaders’ Debates have made politics absorbing. It’s been political karaoke, particularly from Labour and Conservative, and people like to see a politician who recognizes that he’s on strings and tries to escape them, as Clegg did exceptionally in the first debate and pretty well last night.

It’s this karaoke element that has lead to Gordon Brown’s complaints that this is too much about personalities. But then he is too prone to throwing stats at the audience still – even though his performance last night was more human. Whether he likes it or not, politics does get overshadowed by personalities and the majority of the people who have been newly engaged by these debates have been talking about the personalities as much as, if not more than, the policies.

None of the parties have truly harnessed the digital media – they still rely on pumping out propaganda and all saying that their leader won the debate. None of them seem to have learned from the satirical backlash on Twitter against the right wing press’s demonisation of Clegg – these papers are on the back foot since people started skitting their more rabid pronouncements.

It will probably come down to the third and final debate to carry forward the hype and the election. But will people vote? Have these debates given people the confidence to vote? And will the rumoured upsurge in registered voters translate into hordes at the polling stations? Perhaps we should take a Twitter poll to find out.

When I saw the news that John Sergeant had apparently fallen on his sword and retired gracefully with a bow from Strictly Come Dancing, I initially thought to myself ‘What a magnificent publicity coup!’ With a little time and distance from that first reading, I have changed my mind – I am no longer convinced that Sergeant left the show willingly and, whilst the publicity is excellent for him, it would probably have been better had he stayed the course. Or had been allowed to stay the course.

Consider this; John Sergeant was clearly enjoying himself. His dancing was improving and he was clearly enjoying the onrush of cult status his continued survival on the show brought forth. Certainly the audience were relishing him – he may have scored consistently low with the judges, but each week there he was again, shuffling around the dance floor with a look of steely concentration in his eye.

The public tend to treat such shows as popularity contests rather than talent contests, and Sergeant’s slightly bumbling, hope-for-the-best dance persona was a natural winner in that context. I’m also certain that there were a large number of viewers voting for him who were simply delighted to see a more elderly gent shuffling through the numbers next to the bright young things you get everywhere these days; these voters are the same sort of people who registered their disapprobation with Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand recently.

But there was clearly an enormous revolution amongst the judges and producers of the show and I would suggest that they pushed John Sergeant onto his sword. Why would he want to leave the show, after all? He was making a name for himself outside the political and journalistic circles he was best known for, an excellent example of the process I describe in The Fame Formula, wherein, to stay famous, a person has to come up with a new string to their bow every fifteen months.

It’s not as if, in these cash-strapped times, every talent show contest winner is going to make an enormous impact overnight. Last year’s Strictly Come Dancing winner, Alesha Dixon, has not been propelled into the celebrity stratosphere, as one might have normally expected – although this may change in the wake of her forthcoming album release.

John Sergeant, however gracefully he may have departed – in stark contrast to some of his performances on the dance floor – can surely not have wanted to go. His insistence that it was time to go before the joke wore thin was a definite publicity coup – he admitted his failings and got on with it – but the fact that he said “it’s like when you decide when you leave a party, and the time to leave a party is before the fight starts, and I think that’s really what’s happened on this occasion” is most revealing. The producers were clearly attempting to protect the Strictly Come Dancing brand and, if he had not gone, things may have become ugly.

PR people can ponder the publicity coup aspect all they like, but the truth of it is surely that the public have had the ability to decide the show taken away from them in the name of brand protection.