‘I think everyone is finding this concept of safe spaces quite extraordinary,” declared Theresa May last year. In which case, why is she conducting her election in one? Everything for which May specifically lambasted university students – terror of debate, a sense of entitlement, a failure to embrace what this country was built on – could have come straight from her campaign team’s playbook.

In 2015 David Cameron held election events only in sealed venues, where handpicked workers were forced to serve as his backdrop under the watchful eyes of their bosses, and were consequently about as likely to interrupt his patronising homilies on the minimum wage as they were to be the ones required to live on it.

May went one better on Thursday evening by holding an election event in a Leeds workplace after everyone had gone home, with her speech attended instead by invited Conservative party workers. Or as she put it the other week: “I believe in campaigns where politicians actually get out and about and meet the voters.”

There is no greater snowflake alive than a modern Tory leader in an election campaign where meeting the real electorate is regarded as too much of a risk. It is as if the Westminster epidermis has been pierced for a few weeks, and is especially vulnerable to infection from outside. Everything must be done to cocoon the patient.

With Lynton Crosby back in a strategy role, the Tories were always going to decide that televised election debates were a risk of which they have no need; consequently May declined the invitations before they were extended. Jeremy Corbyn accused her of “running scared” and of “run[ning] away from her duty to democracy”. A few days later he announced he too would be copping out. Over the next few weeks, we shall see if Corbyn still enjoys his rallies quite so much – and if we don’t, it will be because his people have decided they are too much of a risk to hold during an actual election, when people other than Branch Jeremians may take an interest in showing up.

Instead of a reasonable embrace of risk, we have a corrosive health and safety culture around elections these days, hidden behind by the very people who hypocritically claim to hate such things. “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” Mario Cuomo’s famous dictum is something to bear in mind when you hear a Conservative replicant repeat the phrase “strong and stable” for the 37th time that day. If that’s the poetry, just imagine the absolute state of the prose.

The 2015 Tory manifesto used the word “plan” 121 times, devoting a mere seven words to one aspect of this plan that would affect the lives of millions of voters. Namely: “We will find £12bn from welfare savings.” That was it. As John Lanchester pointed out in the London Review of Books, they devoted three times as many words to polar bears. “We will press for full ‘endangered species’ status for polar bears and a ban on the international trade in polar bear skins.’” Did they honour or not honour the bears commitment? Either sounds like the sort of fortune the Tories could live with being hostage to.

This time around, the endlessly Daleked phrases are “strong and stable” and “coalition of chaos” (the latter a zombie soundbite from 2015). To watch Philip Hammond answer each question in a Sky News interview on Friday morning with both phrases was to be made powerfully aware that you can win without really respecting the electorate, or even letting it know meaningfully what it may be voting for.

Just as Cameron wouldn’t have dreamed of troubling the 2010 manifesto with the massive NHS changes later enacted, so the 2017 Tory effort will be an exercise in not saying anything. The head of one Tory thinktank judges: “We are going to see the thinnest, most feeble manifesto full of vacuities – but that is a real problem. They should seize the opportunity in an election they are almost bound to win to put forward a genuine Conservative manifesto.”

They won’t, of course. May has not so much called an election as shut one down. Forgive the return to this, but I find it impossible to watch modern electioneering – particularly as practised by the most successful side (the Tories) – and not think of José Mourinho’s football methodology as codified by his biographer, Diego Torres.

1. The game is won by the team who commit fewer errors.

2. Football favours whoever provokes more errors in the opposition.

3. Away from home, instead of trying to be superior to the opposition, it’s better to encourage their mistakes.

4. Whoever has the ball is more likely to make a mistake.

5. Whoever renounces possession reduces the possibility of making a mistake.

6. Whoever has the ball has fear.

7. Whoever does not have it is thereby stronger.

Mourinho, who once advanced to a Champions League final after a game in which his side had a mere 19% of possession, has long been accused of practising anti-football. We can now look forward to another anti-election, in which the Tories win ugly (and bigly).

Long term, health-and-safety elections will reinforce people’s anger about elitism

It goes without saying that they campaign like this because they have judged it a price worth paying. Prizing the elimination of risk above anything else works. Or rather, it works in the short term. My own suspicion is that you make a pact when you indulge in that kind of electioneering – and that the deal gets collected on eventually. This way of doing business contributes to the electorate’s justified sense that they are held in contempt. So you’re not eliminating risk; you’re just deferring it. Long term, health-and-safety elections will reinforce people’s anger about elitism, and the strong sense that politics is something that self-interested people do to them, and not for them.

As various electoral results over the past year have indicated, contempt for the voters can create the most seismic risks of all for the political class. After all, if your plan was so good you said “plan” 121 times, how come you’re now editing the Evening Standard or turning tricks on the after-dinner circuit? Something for the current “strong-and-stable” parrots to bear in mind.