It’s impossible to add anything meaningful to all that’s been said in the last few days about the terrible events in Manchester; impossible to say anything but not impossible to do anything.

One of the relatively minor consequences of the bombing, minor compared with the loss of 22 lives, was the temporary suspension of the election campaign.

The Jihadists behind the outrage will regard this as one more gain, for these fanatics regard democracy as “sinful”.

Elections are forbidden, they say. People should not have the right to govern themselves, only the Almighty should govern, with his “will” being interpreted by his representatives on earth, in other words them!

In contrast, I am reminded of how the former Labour MP Chris Mullin, whose diaries became best-sellers, described elections.

He saw them as him having to make a job application.

He would say to the voters, appoint me your representative at Westminster and I will do my best.

If you don’t think I’ve done well enough, then you can sack me next time round.

That’s as good a definition of democracy as I’ve yet to come across.

So it’s vital that as the campaign re-starts we make sure that the democratic process is not further undermined.

While the issue of security is now bound to assume a greater importance, we should not lose sight of the other aspects of the campaign that had begun to emerge.

Before the bombing, what had been a very dull campaign dominated by monotone sound-bites delivered to tame audiences, with the publication of the party manifestos suddenly sprang into life.

Pundits often say that elections are essentially a choice between hope and fear – the hope that things will get better, pitched against the fear that they might get worse.

But as the parties launched their manifestos something began to emerge that was taking the aforementioned pundits by surprise.

It had been assumed that the “hope” would be captured by the Tory promises of the sunlit Brexit uplands that Theresa May was leading us to, and the “fear” would be that of Jeremy Corbyn’s so-called “coalition of chaos”.

Instead, what the polls were beginning to show before the bombing, was that the hope was instead being captured by Labour’s policies of taking rail, water and the Post Office back into public ownership, abolishing tuition fees, cracking down on tax evasion and so on.

Whilst the fear was not of Jeremy Corbyn but of the Conservatives’ so-called triple whammy which, Labour claimed, would hit the old hard in terms of reduced pensions, means-tested winter fuel allowances and what was dubbed the dementia tax.

All of which was compounded by Mrs May disobeying the first rule of hole diggers – when in hole stop digging – by proclaiming that her U-turn on the dementia tax was not a U-turn at all.

However, the Conservatives are not the world’s longest surviving, and most successful, political party for nothing.

They are adept at campaigning and it can be expected that in the wake of Manchester they will be trying to make the campaign more about Jeremy Corbyn and in particular his past support for the IRA and less about their own policy proposals.

But whatever the remaining two weeks of the campaign hold in store, two things are clear.

First, those who say they never vote because there is no real difference between the two main parties, and who might have had a case in the past, are now being offered a clear choice.

And second, if, as a result of the events in Manchester, fewer people turn out to vote than was anticipated, then that will be claimed as a victory by those who see destroying our democracy as an important part of their “mission”.

So, no matter how you choose to vote on June 8 make sure that you do and by so doing you will be standing in solidarity with the victims of the bombing, their families, the people of Manchester and our democracy.

That, surely, is something worth voting for.

Ivor Gaber is professor of journalism at the University of Sussex and a former political correspondent at Westminster.