THE 2015 general election campaign didn’t start well.

When seven political leaders debated on TV on Maundy Thursday evening, the Sun declared that Ed Miliband’s performance had lost the election.

This wasn’t the view of most polls taken afterwards, but the reality was probably that the paper’s front page was dreamt up some while before the debate took place.

The Telegraph, in theory a more serious paper, has followed a similar line. On Easter Saturday it ran a front-page story that SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon had privately told the French Ambassador that she preferred Cameron to Miliband.

Whatever one thinks of Sturgeon’s politics — she denied the story and the Telegraph had not troubled to check with her — it had something of the feel of a political smear, perhaps organised from somewhere inside the machinery of the state.

No doubt in the time left we’ll see more of this.

EP Thompson labelled, after William Cobbett, general elections to the pre-1832 unreformed Parliament as being part of “Old Corruption.”

There were constituencies with very few electors — rotten boroughs — that could be bought and much of the government worked on principles of sinecure and personal advancement rather than any idea of service.

A series of Acts in the 19th and 20th centuries shut down such openly corrupt politics.

We may argue that recent scandals over cash for parliamentary questions, MPs’ expenses, the influence of lobbyists and illegal methods used by some papers to pursue stories that suited their own agenda mean that such a politics is not entirely dead.

Indeed a new book edited by David Whyte — How Corrupt is Britain? — makes the point.

It is unlikely that the individual constituency contests that take place on May 7 will be bought directly by anyone or subject to openly corrupt influences.

Thompson didn’t think that meant that there wasn’t still a sense of political corruption around general elections and he referred back to Cobbett again to identify what this could be.

“The thing” was not just capitalism but the ways in which capital managed to exert its influence over the way society ran.

In the Poverty of Theory, Thompson noted that “Old Corruption has passed away” but another “predatory complex occupies the state.”

Thompson identified this as the link between the state and private industry via private finance, “control over major media communication” and above all its “capacity to dictate the conditions within which a Labour government must operate … with its vast influence reaching into the Civil Service, the professions and into the trade union and labour movement itself.”

The issue of course is exactly how much of an effect this has.

Ultimately Old Corruption was not strong enough to prevent the 1832 Reform Act — although it took a near revolution to bring that about — and its eventual demise.

As we have seen in the 2015 election campaign so far, “the thing” has real power. Giving significant coverage to the bigotry of Ukip, pushing Labour harder than the Tories to answer policy questions, and just making up stories saying the Tories are certain to win, weeks before anyone has even cast a vote.

What “the thing” can’t do however is control, at least completely and effectively, activism at the grassroots.

So, for example, anti-austerity sentiment looks likely to drive a large SNP vote in Scotland, while the Greens and to some extent left of Labour groups such as Tusc and Left Unity can rely on mobilising support on the ground that “the thing” cannot hope to entirely influence, let alone control.