17 per cent of us are happy with our politicians – how is it that high?

If a new survey is to be believed, the people have certainly worked out that all is self-evidently not well. Doing anything about it, on the other hand, is a lot easier said than done

That nearly one in five people think UK politics is functional is a remarkable outcome (PA Wire)

So, who thinks British politics is working well? A breathtakingly high 17 per cent of the population, apparently.

According to a survey by the Policy Institute at King’s College London, this level of customer satisfaction places the UK right on a par with Russia, where large numbers of voters are currently being forcibly sent to their deaths carrying sleeping mats they’ve had to buy themselves.

Obviously, the first question is how on earth is it so high? That one in five people think UK politics is functional is a remarkable outcome. The underlying data does not reveal whether researchers accidentally placed one in five of their research calls to the same tea-drinking cartoon dog inside a burning house.

The figure of 17 per cent also ranks the UK well ahead of France, on 13 per cent, where people are rioting in the streets, and the USA on 12 per cent, where the former president has been charged with 34 criminal offences – which so far don’t even relate to his role in an attempted coup in which a police officer was killed.

It hardly needs to be stated that democracies only work if people believe in them, so it is a relief to see that the UK, generally speaking, is not tired of democracy itself; it’s just tired of how it’s working.

And it must be said, who can blame them? Five prime ministers in seven years, only one (or arguably two) of whom the people actually voted for.

It feels like every summer contains a Potemkin election for a new government, complete with hustings events and televised debates, but at the end of which the viewers realise the only people who actually get a say are a rapidly diminishing band of the very elderly, the vast majority of whom are personally responsible for all of the enormous problems the country faces.

Months and years of listening to their leaders openly lie has a corrosive effect. What do people expect the outcome to be, for the general health of the body politic, when a prime minister first claims there were no illegal parties in his actual house; then that there were but he didn’t know about them; and then that there were, and he attended them, but somehow without realising?

That he was kicked out should have restored a certain amount of faith, but things have hardly improved. We still have a government forced into futile delusion, in the desperate hope that enough people might be persuaded to exist in their land of make-believe.

At the weekend, schoolchildren spent whole nights on coaches at Dover, trying to go on school trips, while their worried parents watch on television as the home secretary tells absurd lies that absolutely nobody believes about why it’s happening. That it’s nothing to do with Brexit

As I type this, Scotland’s new first minister, who was elected last week (again by party members only), is on television giving a statement about the arrest of the former chairman of his party over allegations of financial impropriety (and who, naturally, is married to the last first minister, who suddenly stood down).

France, meanwhile, is into its seventh year of government by a president that almost everyone now openly loathes, but who they continue to hold their nose and vote for to keep the extremists out.

The USA is a two-party democracy in which one of the parties believes that the most recent election was corrupt, despite a complete lack of supporting evidence.

Only seventeen per cent of people thinking that their system of government actually works is not sustainable. So what can be done about it? That is a difficult question. One of the more interesting findings from the survey is that the British people have an ever-increasing respect for “expertise”. Well, perhaps not respect, quite so much, as longing.

Talking down expertise was, of course, crucial to Brexit. But it’s not just that. There is, you would think, a corrosive effect on having to watch, for long years, a politics which is increasingly populated by people who appear to be at best highly ambitious but otherwise mediocre narcissists, and at worse actual demonstrable idiots.

Is it any wonder that people are not reassured when they get to read all of Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages – a first-hand, real-time, almost Adrian Mole-esque account of an entirely unskilled geriatric undergraduate – trying to manage a once-in-a-generation pandemic, while (and this is not entirely his fault) clearly having no idea what he’s doing?

In the US, cabinet jobs are appointed, more often than not, to real experts. Congressional committees then approve these appointments. In the US, on several occasions, the finance department has been run by the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Here, everyone imagines the former treasurer, Rishi Sunak, to be effectively his equal because he’d managed a couple of years on the grad scheme. Whatever happened to him?

Oh, to have been in the meetings between the US and UK defence chiefs not so very long ago, in which one had spent the early 2000s as the supreme commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, while the other had been selling fireplaces in Stoke.

There is a filter that must be passed through to hold high office in the UK. One is to be broadly accepting of comparatively low pay. The prime minister earns about the same as a semi-competent middle office banker. In the two days since his death, Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor Nigel Lawson has been described as one of the last great “heavyweights”. This may be true, but it may also be thanks to his reforms, particularly with regard to the financial sector, that a career in politics is a lot less appealing to people of his intellect.

The other filter is to want to spend the weekends of your youth knocking on doors and putting leaflets through letterboxes; something which, for the most part, only very strange people are prepared to do. This does not appear to be the way to run a successful country in the 21st century, as the evidence makes very obvious indeed.

It is, to a certain extent, reassuring that things are becoming more boring; but it is also evidence of how bad things have got. Normal, sane people seem to be convinced that Sunak is some kind of visionary leader, citing the Windsor Framework, or the trans-Pacific trade deal (both of which are absolutely nothing more than a very minor amelioration for the damage of Brexit, for which he remains in favour).

That’s not entirely his fault. The people voted for Brexit, and so both main parties have little choice but to exist in economic fantasy land. The alternative is to blame the voters, and no one will vote for you then. But if the survey is to be believed, the people have certainly worked out that all is self-evidently not well. Doing anything about it, on the other hand, is a lot easier said than done.