Are all political parties destined to fail?

We seem to be entering another era of political party expansion. There’s Laurence Fox’s new party, not to mention the quiet, faint resurgence of the Brexit Party that is likely to become louder soon enough. The peculiar thing about this is that all political parties are fairly terrible, and most of the great British public not only knows that but uses this knowledge as the backdrop to every political calculation they will make throughout their lives.

I myself have been a member of a political party; I was a Lib Dem for about a decade. This was an odd move as I am far from a joiner of anything. Yet I’m a liberal, and as the party seemed to be going in a direction I could relate to, I hopped on board. I liked the coalition government – still do – and felt very much like a Lib Dem until sometime in 2016.