I’M more likely to eat my own children than I am to vote for Ann Widdecombe.

She’s one of those politicians who’ve become ‘celebrities’ due to their eccentricity, and who give every impression of believing their own publicity.

Galumphing about on Strictly Come Dancing may be amusing but it doesn’t make her right-wing views more palatable to me.

Nevertheless hers is one of the few names that I recognise on the list of Euro election candidates for our region.

Let me see, who have I heard of?

There’s Labour MEP Clare Moody. She takes trouble over answering emails.

There’s Green activist MEP Molly Scott Cato.

There’s Andrew Adonis. I went to his talk at the Arts Centre last November. There’s journalist Rachel Johnson.

Oh, and that UKIP creep who tweeted about whether he might rape MP Jess Phillips. I won’t name him.

Er, that’s it. No one else ringing any bells.

Does it matter? Well, yes it does.

Set aside your Brexhaustion for a minute and consider this.

Suppose any deal does eventually get put to a second referendum. Suppose Britain decides to stay in the EU. Whoever gets elected next Thursday would be there representing our nation for five years.

Yet we know nothing about most of these people.

Even the major parties have been conspicuous by their absence from my doorstep. All we’ve had so far are two flyers, with big pictures of Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage on the front. Neither of whom feature on the ballot paper.

Shortly after postal voting forms dropped through our letter boxes a fortnight ago, a neighbour came up to me and asked: “How are we supposed to know what these candidates stand for? Especially the independents?”

Maybe we’re supposed to research them online? Let me know if you get round to it!

Yet I don’t like the idea of voting for a list of names simply on the basis that they’ve been approved by some party politburo.

Plus we don’t have a clue which factions will win the internal battles currently tearing both Tories and Labour apart. So a vote for either of those parties is a leap into the unknown.

It’s all so remote. Which plays into the hands of the professional headline-grabbers who hog such a disproportionate amount of TV airtime – think Boris, acting the buffoon, or Jacob Rees-Mogg, the smug personification of entitlement. We feel like we know them.

They enliven the gloom of the news bulletins, don’t they? But do you honestly imagine that your concerns are their motivation?

We’ve got to take the election seriously. And we mustn’t let anger at the inadequacy of our political class blind us to what’s in our best interests, which is to exercise our hard-won right to vote.

A lot of people say they’re too disgusted to bother. But no-one in power will know why you abstained, so they won’t learn from it.

The only meaningful way to protest is to spoil your ballot paper. Scrawl ‘None of them’ across it. Or possibly something stronger.

No-one could blame you for that.

anneriddle36@gmail.com