The party manifestos for the election on 8 June have now been presented - and they confirm that the electorate is offered a choice unlike any it has faced since 1945 / By Julia Langdon

When I was young and green and had just started writing about politics, I stumbled accidentally across the essential truth about election manifestos through my ignorance of otter hunting.
I was working for the Labour Party newspaper, Labour Weekly, which had been given responsibility for publishing a document portentously entitled “Labour’s Programme for Britain”, and I was proofreading what would become the winning manifesto for the forthcoming election. And there it was: a commitment for the next Labour government to ban “fox-hunting, hare-coursing and otter hunting”.