What happens next? Will Andy Burnham win the Makerfield byelection? Will Keir Starmer fight on? Will Wes Streeting run? After that, can Reform win the next general election? Is the Green bounce real? The politics-as-sports predictions rumble on. One newspaper editor texted me the other day asking who would be prime minister come Christmas, apparently because I was on his “clever list”. “Dunno” I said. “You’re off the list,” he replied.

My fear is that whoever is prime minister by the end of the year, a lot of attention will have been distracted from the underlying problem. Voters are not just giving up on this government, but on democracy itself. This weary, cold scepticism comes through in the polls, the focus groups, and it’s in the look in the electorate’s eyes. Politicians know it and it’s making the country ungovernable.

In all the analysis about why it’s so hard to govern, this key point is being missed: you can’t lead a country that has no faith in you. It’s like a toxic workplace that isn’t psychologically safe. “Culture eats strategy for lunch”, they say. You can’t do the difficult things that need to be done unless people trust you. You will fail.

This is the doom loop we are crippled by: people don’t trust the government, so the government can’t deliver, so trust is further eroded. And these cycles of failure are speeding up. The polls turn to ever more wildcard alternatives because really, could they be worse? Yes. This is what democratic backsliding looks like. It is a democratic emergency.

I don’t see........

© The Guardian