This probably comes into the man bites dog category of unusual news flashes, but I feel sorry for politicians. At least some of them. Those elected in the last general election in Scotland, and their unsuccessful opponents, were entitled to expect five years grace. Didn’t the fixed term parliament act say so? Didn’t the Prime Minister herself say so in that read my lips moment with Andrew Marr just last month: “there will be no election before 2020; I have no plans for a snap election. It’s not in the national interest”.

On the back of which five year guarantee doubtless various personal plans were made in terms of where to live, whether to re-locate families, where to set up constituency offices etc for the victors, and whether to put politics on hold for a while and explore other career options for the vanquished. Politics, for the players, is a hugely disruptive affair.

And yes, it’s well rewarded in terms of the median income, but in few other walks of life are you expected to submit yourself to the prospect of being chucked out of your job after a few years learning the trade. Neither is it the cushy number many armchair critics might suppose.

Your constituents will expect you to be on hand at all manner of local and social events of the “haud me back” variety, and you will consume more dubious cakes or marvel at more aesthetically challenged floral displays than is healthy for any one human being.

If you are assiduous you will be having surgeries across the constituency where people will come to you with problems varying from the legitimate and urgent to the time wasting and paranoid. And you will be expected to respond with equal tact and interest to both. (One of the many reasons I would be comprehensively unqualified for this profession)

Further, for most Scottish politicians at Westminster, there is the perennial frustration of knowing that there will be many problems raised with you which you are frankly impotent to solve. And that impotence will hardly diminish if, as expected, there is a government returned in London with a handsome majority.

Plus you may have to get a fresh set of photographs taken every few months not just for leaflet use, but so that your family will remember what you look like as you fulfil all of the above obligations. Being an MP undoubtedly has privileges and brings status, but it falls well short of being an effortless gig.

Yet having got to the point, two years in, where new MP’s are beginning to get the hang of things, navigating new demands and logistics and, above all, adjusting to a massive gear change in their lifestyle, the whole game is paused so that the powers that currently be can stage a re-run.

Now I have taken a self denying ordinance about this election and at no time plan to suggest you might like to plight your troth one way or t’other. But as the small army of leafletters, envelope stuffers, lamppost defacers, and sundry other electoral stormtroopers gird their loins yet again, spare a thought for the man or woman on whose behalf they toil.

It may be a noble calling, but it’s often a pretty thankless task.