Thanks to the febrile state of the Conservative party, Westminster politics seems to be locked into the trajectory of a rapidly deflating balloon. Policies and big ideas zoom into the foreground and just as quickly recede; ministerial careers rise and fall in only a few years. The only constants seem to be a perpetual sense of crisis and the feeling that, no matter how bad it gets, Tory government remains Britain’s default position. Amid recession, mounting poverty and the prospect of a sterling crisis, almost no one ever mentions a glaring system failure: the fact that we are routinely governed by people with only the flimsiest of electoral mandates, if they have one at all.
The relevant numbers are stark. Three years ago, Boris Johnson led the Conservative party to a “landslide” election victory and 80-seat Commons majority with the support of 29% of the electorate. As if he then had power beyond any restraint, he set about trying to lay waste to anything that got in his way. When his misrule became too much even for his own party, he was replaced by Liz Truss, swept into office by 81,326 votes from Tory members, representing a titanic 0.17% of all voters.
