The Tories have spent years looking down on the rest of us, but the edifice is crumbling
Whatever political dramas are erupting on a seemingly daily basis – with the flouncing off of the Brexit minister, Lord Frost, just the latest – most people are now exhausted. After repeated lurches from pessimism to optimism and back again, the pandemic will soon enter its third year. The fact that everything has suddenly been upturned at the time of year when we get up in the dark hardly helps. Neither does being led by people who disregard the same rules they want the rest of us to follow. I have been party to enough recent conversations involving rolling eyes and mentions of the clowns in power to know that this is now a big part of the public mood; the astonishing North Shropshire byelection saw it being expressed via the ballot box.
If the government has now lost a constituency where 60% of voters backed leave and the last Tory majority was 23,000, where are we? The answer, it seems to me, goes beyond politics and into people’s collective sense of wellbeing, or the lack of it. I am not sure whether human beings need strong leaders, but the idea that the people in charge ought to be responsible grownups seems pretty ingrained in most of us.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
