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There’s an expression used in football to describe an approach to the game that discounts the virtues of elegance, style, beauty, originality and daring, and — concentrates on blocking, frustrating and grinding down. It’s called ‘winning ugly’. While degrading the game, it often works. But having won a match, a football team does not have to govern the country for five years. It does not need our love, our patience or our intellectual respect. The Conservative party attempted to win the general election by winning ugly, and in doing so, they have lost some of our love and our respect. That, I reflect, is what, without direction from the top, ‘professional’ modern campaigning risks achieving.

Elections matter. They are fundamental to our way of life. So, while it is appropriate that the campaigns stopped on Tuesday to mourn the victims of the heinous terrorist attack in Manchester, democracy demands that they resume as quickly as possible. The terrorists must know that they will never change how our society functions. This is an odd election. Everyone assumes they know what the result will be and the real psephological debate is over just how big the Tory majority will be. On Monday, even the most panicked Tory was only concerned about what Theresa May’s U-turn would mean for the party’s margin of victory, not the actual result. But her retreat on social care will have ramifications far beyond 8 June.

Though I don’t think much of Theresa May’s paternalistic soft-left politics, I do like her no-nonsense style. That Q&A she did for the Sunday Times where she was asked ‘Sherlock or Midsomer Murders?’ — ‘I’ve watched both’ she replied — was hilarious in its Olympian imperviousness to the convention, established by Tony Blair, that prime ministers must kowtow at all times to popular culture and sentiment. So too was the extraordinarily unevasive answer she gave when asked recently why she was committed to allowing Conservative MPs a free vote on rescinding Tony Blair’s fox-hunting ban. ‘As it happens, personally, I’ve always been in favour of fox hunting,’ she said. Me too.

Normally, the first anniversary of a prime minister taking office is the occasion for a lot of opinion polls and assessments. But by going to the country early, Theresa May has pre-empted that. By the time she has been in No. 10 a year, the voters will already have delivered their verdict via the ballot box. Still, it is worth assessing what May has done so far. When she arrived in No. 10, her team had three main priorities. They wanted to complete the modernisation process by making the Tories more appealing to the so-called ‘just about managing’ classes, and to those outside the party’s heartlands. They were determined to shore up the Union — to see off Nicola Sturgeon’s renewed drive for Scottish independence.

General elections are meant to produce a government and an opposition — ideally, a decent version of both. It is obvious what government this election will deliver: a Tory one with an increased majority. That, after all, is one of the reasons why Theresa May has decided to go to the country three years early. But it is not clear what opposition there will be. What passes for optimism in moderate Labour circles these days is the belief that a shellacking in this election will lead to Jeremy Corbyn’s departure, as the party’s membership sobers up and elects a new and sensible leader. But it is far from certain that this will happen.

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I don’t remember the BBC running a documentary 100 days into Barack Obama’s first presidency and kicking him from pillar to post. Interviewing almost exclusively people who hated him, pouring scorn on his every utterance. They did it this week to Donald Trump, though, and even wheeled out Jeremy Paxman to present this travesty of a documentary. Because Jeremy was interviewing exclusively people with whom he wholeheartedly agreed, he didn’t get the chance to put on that famous supercilious expression we all used to love, back when he was good. Shame. With Obama, as I remember, it was a very different approach. The studio floors were still awash with liberal ejaculate well after 100 days of his singularly inept presidency had elapsed.