Someone will say something outrageous into a mic that they didn’t realise was on

“How can it be that hard?” you think, first of all. “You’re wearing a transmission device. How can you not know that it might transmit something?” Directly after that: “How hard is it to avoid saying racist or misogynist or in some other way unacceptable things? Most of us manage to avoid saying those things by not thinking them in the first place.” This is what psychologists call “forbidden thinking” – the more you know you’re not allowed to say or do something, the more you fixate on it. It becomes even worse in times of stress, which is why the classic teaching example is the mother who visualises stabbing her baby with a nappy pin when she changes it. (“They should really take babies away from mothers who are nuts,” the students think, followed immediately by: “You use a pin with those things?”) Basically, this entire period involves more than a thousand prospective candidates journeying the country with nothing in their heads but outrageous words. Why they can’t take their mics off is anyone’s guess.

Someone will come up with a dodgy, faintly racist poster

They will think it’s on a knife-edge between bigotry and plain speaking; they will probably think it’s really clever, because any poster that can exist upon this knife edge must be dead subtle. In fact, it will be as blunt as a head-butt, as racist as the Ferguson police department, and the best you could say about it is that it’s not quite actionable. Let’s take as an example the racist Home Office van: “Go home” it said, “or face arrest.” Exquisitely delicate. I can barely even make out its target audience.

Someone will insult a pensioner/war hero/terminal cancer patient

Again, I feel for the politicos: the now-established way to prove you’re a person-of-the-people is to remember everyone’s name and the exact scenario that makes them discussion-relevant. This, if it’s a talent you really possess, makes you not an everyman at all, but almost superhuman. None of them can really do it. “Stuart” always becomes “Steve”, “war hero” becomes “suspected victim of radiation sickness following exposure to a nuclear test site”, and shame is inevitable. That’s the likeliest cause of an insult-event, but it could also come from blurting out a forbidden thought. (“Yes, you were very useful when there was a war on, but now you’re just incredibly old and expensive,” for instance. I’m just on an imaginative excursion. I’ve never thought a thing like this.) The fact is, there is no technique for dealing with this: to remember both a person’s name and their unique situation, you have to care about them. Electioneering trips people up, shunting them in front of more people than they could ever conceivably care about.

Someone will slip up on social media

The recipe for a truly disastrous modern media moment can be disaggregated from Emily Thornberry’s white van/flag debacle, which cost her her job. First, context: there was a simmering unspoken debate in Rochester over who despised the electorate the most – did the Conservatives hate them for not being rich enough? Or Labour hate them for being neither rich enough nor cultured enough? It was a little like that moment at the start of a velodrome cycle race, where they go incredibly slowly, waiting for the other to take off. Anyway, Thornberry took off, and the world chased. If you sense a velodrome moment during an election – let’s say the debate is waiting for someone to literally ban immigration, or call Angela Merkel a Nazi – you can bet that tweet-gate is just around the corner. The other, obvious, ingredient is an MP who still doesn’t really understand the difference between a public forum and a private one. This is all MPs: 999 times out of 1,000, their tweets are met with a wall of silence. You can forgive them for thinking they’re talking to no one until, suddenly, they’re talking to everyone.

Someone will get emotional during a speech

Here’s what I’m thinking, stay with me, I don’t think it’s sexist (unless I, too, have fallen victim to an election-period brain freeze): some idiot spad will decide that what a politician needs is his bad-ass wife to say something in support of him. The whole point is that she has a life of her own and doesn’t come off at all as a caring spouse: that’s why she must do it, and it is also why she finds it unbearable. It’s like the Taming of the sodding Shrew. In frustration and embarrassment, she will, inevitably, start crying.

Someone will take an awkward photo with youths

Alex Salmond, the teenager and the Solero has almost ruined this photographic genre for everyone. But give them a chance; someone might better it. Although I cannot imagine how.

Someone will say ‘Hello Bradford’ in Birmingham

And yet, given the thoughts swirling round their minds, they should really be congratulating themselves that the slip wasn’t “Hello, You Stinking, Depressed Post-Industrial Shithole”.