Today, that gulf, that absence, that void is so grave that even the Labour Party is so far to the right of Joe Biden that it doesn’t resemble a modern liberal party in any sense whatsoever. It’s out there peddling the same sordid Big Lies that Britain’s conservatives are, this once great, noble, historic institution, this mighty force, once, for progress, not just in Britain, but around the globe, because, well, nobody can tell the truth in Britain anymore. Not enough of it, and not much of it. Not about anything. The stuff above? The Great Depression lev…

It’s suicidal. Somebody is going to have to tell Brits the truth, at some point, and be a political party that stands for a closer, saner relationship with Europe, right down to rejoining the EU. Think about it for a second, because many Brits, who now think Brexit was a terrible mistake, clearly have. In the fantasyland of Brexiteers, “trade deals” would replace being part of the EU. The hard truth is that nobody and nothing in the world can. Let me say it again. Nobody and nothing in the world can replace the EU.

We tend to forget that the “news” is merely a sub-category of the entertainment industry and as such its job it to attract our attention for a few monetizable moments. The job of the news is not to provide us with a reliable and accurate view of the world beyond our doorstep. Aside from propaganda-producing organizations such as the Russian media and Fox News, all legitimate news organizations are in the business of competing with every form of entertainment for precious eyeballs. This is why even supposedly “serious” news outlets such as the BBC are nowadays nearly worthless. Today, a dynamic exists in which Western news organizations cluster around an agreed narrative (so as not to confuse audiences with potentially conflicting opinions and thereby alienate them) and then simply repeat that narrative until such time as this no longer works. Any awkward facts are simply omitted. Western news organizations don’t need to invent infantile lies but instead simply omit anything that would risk disturbing the simplistic tale being told to Western audiences. There’s no master plan; simply a desire to remain competitive and thereby keep the paychecks coming in.

So don’t smile, don’t laugh, be worried. British politics looks set to get still worse.

The Conservatives urgently need a theme. Rishi Sunak is not a man for themes. He’s a man embodying smooth managerialism in a party that no longer values those things in the way it once did. He looks like a man out of time.

Leave won the referendum 52:48. From the way that Leavers have conducted themselves ever since, you’d have thought that they had won 70:30. At no point have Leavers made even the vaguest attempt to reach out to defeated opponents and persuade them that they had a place in their vision of the future. Abraham Lincoln supposedly once said: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” This is not a thought that has ever crossed the mind of any Leaver.