August is the month when those of us who spend most of the year fixated on Westminster let politics drift into our peripheral vision, which is how most people see it the rest of the time. It is the benefit I have come to appreciate most from a summer holiday – the shift in perspective that accompanies a more abstemious news diet. Constant grazing on the minutiae of ministerial statements is not normal.
That’s a slippery word, “normal”, and I use it here drenched in caveat. I’m not talking about median voters on economic charts or a midpoint between ideological extremes. Normal isn’t a demographic segment. It doesn’t mean mainstream. It isn’t the centre ground. It isn’t ardent or apathetic, although it could be both simultaneously, depending on the issue. Normal is politics as it appears to people who are busy doing something else.
