BARELY had the first results trickled in from Thursday’s elections than the main parties were, as the BBC’s Nick Robinson pointed out, ‘polishing their excuses’.

The Lib Dems had ‘lost their humanity’. A senior Labour source reckoned their own leader ‘looks weird, sounds weird, is weird’.

For the Conservatives it was not having a ‘legitimate debate’ about immigration.

Over the coming months all three parties will be holding expensive inquests, ostensibly to find out what went wrong but really to find new ways of blaming the voters.

Unlike the politicians, everyone in Britain knows that the three reasons the main parties did so badly were David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband.

Wealthy, privileged, London-based and totally out-of-touch with the way ordinary people have to live; no wonder they don’t get it. How could they, cushioned as they are by giant salaries, high-earning spouses, excellent state education for their kids and a fat pension at the end of it all?

But there are a host of reasons why, as one lifelong Labour voter memorably told his local MP: “You people need a kicking.”

Like a carnival of grotesques, characters from Abu Hamza to White Dee from Benefits street have played their part in stoking our ire.

Cruel and badly-executed policies like the Bedroom Tax, the pitiable treatment of elderly people in so-called care homes, the way that nearly one million young people now feel themselves to be on the scrapheap, the fact that parts of the NHS – slowly being privatised to death – are so broke they can’t pay the electricity bills.

All these things have contributed to a growing and furious desperation in Britain.

For years they told us that nothing could be done about Hamza, spouting racist bile on the streets of London, guarded by the Metropolitan Police, his family of scroungers leaching money from the state. In the end it took the Americans to convict him of crimes that our security services must have known damn well he committed, but for which we were too indolent and cowardly to prosecute him.

Then there’s White Dee, left, too ‘depressed’ to work since 2007. But not too depressed to appear on TV, large it in Magaluf, and apparently sticking two fingers up to the people who pay for it all. Why haven’t Dave and Nick and Ed realised that this kind of carry-on is like a red rag to a bull for all those who are scraping by on reduced salaries, or who are on benefits and trying to get off them?

Then there’s the Human Rights Act which must have cost all the main parties hundreds and thousands of votes with its constant emphasis on ensuring that murderers and rapists have more rights than British crime victims.

The fact that the millionaire public schoolboys, David Cameron and George Osborne tell us we’re all in it together when we know and they know we’re not.

The fact that Nick Clegg conned students over tuition fees, presumably because he was so obsessed with grabbing power.

The fact that, when questioned, Ed Miliband doesn’t even know what is the cost of an average shopping basket, or the name of the candidate he’s turned up to support, as happened in Swindon earlier this week.

I could ask why the politicians don’t get it but that would be daft because, by everything they’ve said and done, we know that they don’t and never will. Because they don’t want to.

For a long time now, the British people have been told by the very same politicians who have let us all down so badly that we are ‘apathetic’ about politics.

How dare they.

We crave decent policies, workable solutions, honesty and hard work from our leaders.

We are longing to find someone and something decent we can believe in and who will not lie just to get in office and then claim thousands in expenses when they get there.

It’s not the voters who are apathetic, it’s the politicians. As this week’s election has proved. And if they take one message from all that’s gone on this week it should be this: we’re on to you.