That, believe it or not, is what passes for news, for which the great legacy media demands our admiration – and payment.  

Speaking to a (self-described) former journalist recently, we shared views on the dumbing down of the journalist trade. This was a journalist who found an editor admitting to employing two writers "because they are the only people at the paper who can remember anything that happened before 2005".

These are the people on whom we are supposed to rely for our information, unless of course it is politicians who are scarcely, if at all, better informed – and about as mature.

An example of that "maturity" comes from David Davis, doing the usual Sunday TV studio rounds to keep idle hacks entertained.

Speaking to the insufferable Robert Peston, he declared that Britain and the EU are on a "collision course" over the timetable for Brexit negotiations and details over a deal on citizens' rights. The Government, he says, does not accept Brussels' insistence that the "divorce bill" and the Irish border issue should be included in the first stage of talks.

Davis also disputes the EU's wish for the ECJ to have a role in adjudicating over the rights of EU citizens in the UK after Brexit.

According to Davis, there would most likely be a "row" over the summer when it came to sequencing talks, but he nevertheless rejected the idea Britain would have to wait to start negotiations on a trade deal. "We want to see everything packaged up together, and that's what we're going to do", Davis said.

This positions the Brexit firmly in familiar territory for the media, which likes nothing better than the biff-bam narrative – saving it having to do any serious analysis. And meanwhile, the election drones on, the ultimate biff-bam contest which, in this case, will yield nothing but more of the same.

It is ironic, therefore, that one of the "go to" authorities on the current cyber -attack is Europol, with Rob Wainwright - its British-born director – telling us that his agency has recorded more than 200,000 victims in 150 countries. Russia and the UK are amongst the worst-hit countries.

This at one underlines the need for international cooperation but, at the same time, demonstrates that such cooperation needs to extend way beyond the borders of Europe. It is interesting, therefore, to see Europol working with the FBI in the United States, seeking to track down those exploiting a vulnerability in US-originated Microsoft Windows software, first identified by the US National Security Agency.

Whether or not this moves the Brexit debate along is too early to tell, although given the limited abilities of the politico-media nexus, it is unlikely that we will see any intelligent suggestions from that quarter.

Wolfgang Münchau in the Financial Times is doing his best to shift the debate, arguing for a new "plan B" to be produced by UK negotiators. This, he says, should focus on demonstrating to the "colleagues" that the UK does intend to leave, disabusing them of the illusions that the UK can be prevailed upon to change its mind.

If EU negotiators believe that Brexit may not happen, he argues, why offer the UK a good deal? They may even think that a lousy deal could become a self-fulfilling prophesy. They might think that the harder they negotiate, the bigger they can make the Brexit bill and the greater the chances of the UK not leaving.

His recommendation to the UK government would be to liberate their EU counterparts from those lingering doubts, the so-called "plan B" which the UK could adopt in the event of there being a no deal.

The thesis here is that a sudden Brexit could unbalance the EU, which would suddenly realise that its manufacturing companies would be among the biggest losers. The highly complex supply chains into which they have invested would become worthless overnight.

European industry, says Münchau, can cope with a hard Brexit, but not a sudden one. The EU will also find that a large percentage of financial contracts will all of a sudden no longer be subject to EU law - hardly something that is conducive to financial stability in the eurozone. Thus, he ventures, it is only once the EU begins to calculate the costs of a sudden Brexit that these negotiations will start in earnest.

Much of this is the same old, same old game playing, but where Münchau's idea has some small merit is where he asserts that any plan "needs to be fleshed out - with costings, timetables, legal and technical analyses, enough detail to roll out the programme if and when it was needed".

Here we collide with an inescapable truth. Unless, or until the UK government comes up with its own clear ideas for Brexit, we are always going to be at the mercy of the EU and the whims of 27 Member States who have no real ideas of what a post-Brexit environment should look like.

This is something we can take home from Barnier's recent visit to Ireland, where it became evident that he was not exactly brimming with ideas about how to make Brexit work.

Nor is it reasonable to expect the "colleagues" to be the innovators in an enterprise that has been brought about by the UK and is being played out primarily to suit the needs of the UK. If we don't have any clear ideas of what we want, we can hardly complain if the EU's attempts to fill the vacuum don't meet with our approval.

And this is where the election campaign is proving to be a colossal disappointment. Although it is Styled as the "Brexit election", local Tory leaflets refer only to "making a success of Brexit" while highlighting the dangers of allowing Corbyn to carry out the negotiations.

This, squeezed between the media's facile obsession with "slebs" and the vacuity of our politicians, we are no closer to knowing what our masters have in store for us than we ever did.

We are, in effect, being asked to vote for a vacuum, a "strong and stable leadership" whose main claim to fame is that it isn't Jeremy Corbin. And while that might be good enough to satisfy a majority of the UK electorate, it is almost certain that that alone will not impress the "colleagues".

What is on offer is not good enough and, as it stands, we're being taken for fools.