A Cambridge student in 2015 is one of the most privileged human beings on the planet. There really is no escaping this fact. We attend the greatest university in the world in one of the richest countries in the world, flush with government money and donor largesse. We accept this, even if we feel rather guilty about it from time to time.

There are other perks, too, perks less obvious to those who don’t follow politics. Tomorrow is the day of the general election. It will be the first general election that most of us have ever voted in and the only election I have covered for Varsity. One of the greatest privileges of my time at this university has been to be a part, in my own small way, of the most vibrant political process in the country.

Just look at the two main parties here. The incumbent Liberal Democrat MP, Julian Huppert, is a man who can swing 14 percentage points in a poll just through the mention of his name; the Labour Club have run an astonishingly good campaign in tight conditions, outplaying, outcanvassing and outsmarting their rivals at every turn. This election will be the tightest Cambridge has ever seen, and deservedly so.

And the rest? The Greens have had a rough time of it this year, fending off their candidate’s occasionally peculiar pronouncements, but their most visible students have been a consistently effective voice at the political events and on social media. Meanwhile, as Varsity’s own Sarah Sheard discovered in January, the Conservatives have now mutated into a full-time social club and part-time campaign: junking their beleaguered candidate (over something she never even said) just gives them more time to drink port and eat cheese and dress up like the overgrown children they are. UKIP, for their part, don’t even have a student group in Cambridge. This constituency, for better or for worse, belongs to the forces of the left and centre in 2015.

This is normally the point at which the political editor outlines his endorsement among the parties, tells you which of the candidates is best and demands that you go out and vote for them. But that would be wrong: twenty-four hours before the polls open, I have yet to decide how I’m going to vote.

And that’s OK. Cambridge is the most privileged constituency in the country because it’s so difficult to make up one’s mind. A win for Julian Huppert, Daniel Zeichner, Rupert Read or even Patrick O’Flynn would be a win for Cambridge. One must, unfortunately, exclude Chamali Fernando from this assessment, as her increasingly erratic behaviour during the campaign leads to an inescapable conclusion that she would be a liability if elected, despite her highly encouraging views on global environmental policy. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend a vote for Ms Fernando, and that is a real shame.

This has been a dirty campaign on many levels. Several people associated with the Liberal Democrats attempted to rig the Varsity poll, and Julian Huppert has now seen two bouts of legal trouble since Parliament was dissolved.  At the same time, Labour’s student campaign have been hard-nosed and cynical: they have openly twisted Julian Huppert’s voting record with the distinctly dodgy Huppert Check website, publicised shoddy, biased material from Stonewall, and taken an opportunistic and frankly rather shady stance on sexual harassment and trigger warnings.

Leave all that filth aside for a moment –  it happens everywhere – what makes Cambridge unique, to my mind, is that every one of these four candidates cares deeply about this constituency and about their beliefs. It is also a constituency where the four best candidates really do diverge, where there really is a choice for all of us.

Julian Huppert is not a traitor. He’s a man of real passion and real vibrancy, who has been an extraordinarily good MP for this unique constituency and an important voice in government, in Parliament and in the Home Affairs Select Committee. To try to reduce his performance to some mathematical average of the number of times he’s obeyed his own whip is pathetic.

Daniel Zeichner is not an “identikit” candidate. He’s a thoughtful and clever guy nearing the end of his career, with no ambitions other than to do his best for Cambridge. To accuse him of being a Labour marionette is to insult him and his team. He’s really come into his own during the campaign, and his caricature on Lib Dem leaflets as a silhouetted nobody is deeply unpleasant and utterly without basis in reality.

Rupert Read is not a lunatic. He’s eccentric, certainly, but behind that eccentricity is a bold transport policy, a plan to take real action on the roads, railways and cycle paths that crisscross through Cambridge, carrying some of the greatest minds in the world. To parody him as some mad ultrasocialist is to ignore the subtleties and to be taken in by hyperbole.

And Patrick O’Flynn is not a racist. He’s not a students’ candidate, certainly, but he is the intellectual powerhouse of UKIP. He is, admittedly, extremely unlikely to win, but a hard-right neofascist he is not. UKIP’s name is mud here, but O’Flynn is the best of the party (followed closely by the redoubtable Diane James of Eastleigh). A vote for him is not a vote for extremism, no matter what anyone tells you.

Hopefully you’re now in the same position as me: agonisingly uncertain about what box to put your mark in tomorrow. It is not a nice feeling, but please recognise just how lucky you are to have so many good choices. More than that, it makes me immeasurably sad that no matter who wins tomorrow, most of the brave, committed activists I have met here have to lose, and that a majority of the student voters will come away disappointed.

I am in my last year here, and I don’t think I will ever again be faced with such an impressive field of candidates, such a committed body of activists or such an engaged electorate. Take comfort in indecision: it indicates only that you live in a democracy.

Go to your polling station.

Make up your mind.

And vote. 

@rtrnicholl