I met up with a friend over the weekend who has been offered an endowed Professorship at one the UK’s “Great Universities”. He’s a scientist and the post is at the top of his particular proclivity. He is 80 per cent certain of rejecting the Chair and is presently on track to leave Britain for an emerging Asian University, where he has been offered a higher salary.

More important, my friend ( I shall call him Roberts, although that’s not his name) is making his decision on the basis that the country in which this University is set has just increased its budgetary investment in University research by some 25 per cent. His new post is blessed with a significantly uprated research budget.

Dr Roberts is at the cutting edge of scientific research in a specialist field in which he and his UK team are world leaders. He has three major world-wide trials of products still in train – trials that are conducted and led from this country.

The reason Dr Roberts is almost certain to reject the offer of the most prestigious University Chair in his field in this country is that it now comes with no guarantee of  any research budget.

Dr Roberts’ final decision will be considerably influenced by Chancellor George Osborne’s “Spending Review” this Wednesday. If the University research funding budget is slashed, he’ll definitely be leaving. If, by chance, Mr Osborne has heeded calls to protect it, he will look again at the options for staying.

Whilst this is not the only determining factor, it is a very significant one for him. He tells me that the “research culture” at British universities is under siege, and that although there are uncertainties in the country to which he is likely to leave, they are outweighed by the prospect of being able to go on to the next level of research to which he needs now to move.

Dr Roberts tells me that what he is likely to do is to move his family to Asia, and to commute for a time to Britain to complete his trials for which he still has funding. He will do this in a way that will guarantee that he stays in Britain for under  90 days a year , so as not to attract UK tax.

When his trials end in 2013, his links with UK research will end. Dr Roberts is 45-years-old, with a very significant international reputation. His research, if successful – and the signs are excellent – will lead to considerable job creation in the long term, jobs which are in danger of being exported along with Roberts’ considerable scientific skills.

The UK can ill afford the loss of the skills of men and women like my friend Roberts. Is anyone in the Treasury thinking about Roberts and the implications of his loss to an emerging Asian University?

Old people will die in their own excrement neglected by the local authorities in which they live. Police numbers will be slashed; universities will be forced to turn away able students; the road system will go unrepaired; recycling and refuse collection will be slashed. Welcome to the post election world, described with great clarity during our Channel 4 prime time 90 minute investigation last night of ‘What they wont tell us’. 

Three former cabinet ministers, permanent secretaries, economists and public policy experts described the consequences of the 20 per cent cuts required in public services together with the tax rises required to pay down the nation’s overdraft over the next decade.

The collective dishonesty with the electorate about what really faces the country after 6 May, together with political trust smashed by the expenses scandal, renders this one of the most unpredictable UK general elections of all time.

That’s why the norms by which opinion poll projections have been made, may themselves be shattered.

All opinion polls are ‘weighted’ to take account of assorted factors that might influence the raw findings. But this time round those factors are themselves far harder to identify with any certainty. The TV debates, the expenses scandal, the overall despair with politics are hard to measure or gauge.

The contest is depicted in terms of ‘swings’ toward or away from political parties. But the debates have facilitated a genuine three cornered fight – demanding a multi dimensional swingometer that does more than swing between left and right.

My own forays into assorted constituencies over the past six weeks has suggested to me that there is less of a national pattern than we have seen before. Precisely because of the presence of – or the sacking/resignation of – candidates tainted by the expenses scandal in individual constituency, there are vast differences between one local contest and another. The ensuing selection process by all parties has proved problematical too.

The result is the ‘election of the fractured swing’. The electorate is in a disillusioned and undecided mood – according to these polls. I cannot remember a phenomenon in which those opting to vote for what the pollsters call ‘others’ has been so large – 10 per cent or more. UKIP, BNP, Greens and the rest are added to by Sinn Fein, Plaid Cymru, UUP, UU, SNP, and a myriad Rantzenesque independents.

In these circumstances, even a party that wins a slender majority will have no great mandate. The electorate has discovered the antidemocratic nature of our voting system. Given the scale of what faces the country – those 20 per cent cuts in public services and worse – it is hard to see how anything less than some kind of coalition will ever wield the authority to confront so massive a social and economic challenge. Even then, under whose leadership?