Waddawewant?

Joking aside I think everybody now accepts that Ed Miliband simply cannot become the British Prime Minister. I mean, come on, even his own have turned against him and with business leaders now wading in it seems the Miliband expeditionary force is never going to discover the true source of the bile. He stood against his brother, he wants ‘real socialism’, he says he hasn’t taken drugs but has ‘read about it’ but like a raddled addict he orbits rather than manages to touch down in the world ordinary people live in, yet he still claims to champion the man in the street. Add to that the fact that Brian Cox won’t let him use Tony Blair’s election theme song and I’d say Ed is a busted flush. Oh and he still looks like a melted waxwork.

On the other hand David Cameron, for all that in comparison with Ed he looks a far more credible statesman, exudes an oily, smug sense of entitlement that jars with anybody who gets their hands dirty for a living and many more besides. Cameron could take the cure, have a frontal lobotomy and swear on the red flag that he would renationalise everything, re-empower the unions, double the NHS budget and burn Margaret Thatcher in effigy and still couldn’t hope to wrestle more than a handful of votes from the very same Labour supporters who recoil in horror from the thought of electing Miliband.

I like Nigel Farage. I do; I could see him being great company and I hugely agree with much of what he appears to genuinely stand for. But some of the company he keeps means that without winning over the entrenched and embittered socialists who have lost their appetite for rudderless Labour his chance of ever gaining more than a limited minority is slim. Even given their alarming lurch towards the lumbering left, given our first-past-the-post system and the perverse electoral boundaries it's doubtful we'll see a Ukip-heavy Parliament any time soon.

In the interests of fairness, I am far too kind to say what everybody really thinks about smelly, hippy, fruit-loop fantasist, space-alien weirdo Natalie Benefit.

So what do we want? We just mourned Churchill, again, but would he even get as far as the Commons today? Gladstone, Disraeli, Attlee? What would they make of the type of person who gets into office via Marx at mummy’s knee, PPE degrees and internships and has never spent a day in what the rest of us would call a proper job? There appears to be no solid appetite for rumbustious, tub-thumpers and leaders with solid and unswerving convictions. Politics of late appears to have been dominated – if that is the word – by made-men who base policy on the curious and fickle preferences of carefully selected focus groups and bend with the wind when it comes to courting popularity.

Some animals are more equal than others

The more I think of it, between the contempt of government for the will of the masses and the contempt of Brussels for the rights of sovereign countries we may as well not bother having a government at all. But if we must, and for all the difference it would make, why not put intellectual titan Keith Chegwin in the Speaker’s chair and pit one Chuckle brother against the other from the opposing benches? To me, to you…