It was supposed to be more complicated. After the vote, they said we’d have to get out the constitutional slide rule to try to work out who’d won. The Wikipedia entry on “minority government” experienced a huge spike in traffic. There were more bitter arguments about legitimacy than five seasons of Jeremy Kyle. Everyone agreed the election would herald the gravest constitutional crisis since the abdication, or that time Jade Goody slagged off Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother. Many said Ed Miliband was certain to become prime minister.

Yep. That’s what they said.

Instead, on the night, we got what Game of Thrones fans might call an “Ed Wedding”; from the shock exit polls onwards, the bloodletting never let up. Now we’ve got the full-fat Tory government that virtually no one predicted. And this is where we find ourselves: halfway through the Cameron Decade. The Cameron Era. Cameronian Times.

Five more years of a shiny computerised toe in a prime-ministerial suit, clonking hither and thither, a thin smile above his shiny chin. He won the election, won completely. Won the shit out of it. He’s already downloaded an OS update, rebooted and entered “phase two”. Maybe this time around he’ll develop some identifiable personality traits for satirists to latch on to, beyond being a bit distant and ultimately unknowable. We can only hope.

Labour, meanwhile, have tumbled through a wormhole back to the 1980s. Some say it’ll take them a decade to recover, but there’s a precedent for it happening sooner. They were similarly wiped out in 1992, yet won by a landslide just five years later, fronted by a messianic warmonger. So there’s that to look forward to.

The Lib Dems came out worst. As a nationwide cultural force to be reckoned with, they’re now precisely as relevant as Anton Du Beke. It’s clear that, in coalition they were a kind of shock absorber for the Tories – Nick Clegg, in particular, functioning as a hate-magnet, deflecting anger away from Cameron and Osborne. It was inevitable: Clegg seemed like such a blank. He was the default pre-customisation character in a video game. A photofit of a bloke you once met at a barbecue. Someone in a lift at Southampton Radio. As a consequence, he could embody whatever seemed most psychologically convenient for you at the time, which is perhaps why, back in 2010 – at the height of Cleggmania – the public projected their hope on to him, only to replace that with scorn about a year later.

The polls, though. The polls. For a long while it had seemed implausible that Ed Miliband could ever be prime minister – surely he was too gawky, gauche and inherently comic – but the polls began to claim he was in with a shot. An early run of impressive campaign performances underlined it: they changed the way we looked at him. He suddenly appeared confident, charming even. The underdog made good. He became a quasi-ironic sex symbol. Even that insane 8ft stone pledge card couldn’t completely wreck his chances. But only because they were already wrecked.

Yes, all that pre-vote buzz was ten hundred million thousand years ago, because the polls were wrong and we’d never actually thought anything good about Miliband ever. And the polls were wrong because people were lying to the pollsters. The glaring disparity between the weeks of pre-election polling and the actual result is surely useful scientific data: perhaps the most comprehensive investigation into the difference between what people claim to think and what they actually think ever undertaken. Clearly, voting Tory is a guilty pleasure some people won’t readily admit to – like masturbating or listening to Gary Barlow. Or masturbating while listening to Gary Barlow. In the voting booth. Using your free hand to vote Conservative. Cameron’s Britain.

“Public opinion” helps to shape countless policy decisions every day, from the colour of the wrapper on your KitKat Chunky, to whether or not we should bomb some faraway kingdom. So it’s worrying to discover we might as well have decided all this shit on a dice-roll. In fact public opinion itself might not really exist, at least not in a form that can be measured outside of a secret ballot. Traditional public opinion had everything thrown at it in the run up to 7 May. Opinion polls, opinion worms, online votes, TV news vox pops – and all of it coughed up unreliable results. In an age where anyone can say whatever they want, online and all the time, to absolutely anybody, it’s bizarre that none of us seems to know what anyone’s thinking. Not without asking them to mark their opinion down using a pencil and a bit of paper, like it’s 1962 or something.

If there’s one thing we can get out of the 2015 election, apart from five more years of Gammonhead, and five years of Labour pacing its enclosure like a depressed polar bear, it should be an end to nervous, presumptive policy-making. Never again need any decision be guided by an opinion poll, or a focus group, or the popularity of a hashtag. Maybe that’s a good thing. Or 10 bad ones glued together. I have absolutely no idea and neither do you. Because none of us knows anything.