Are our feelings towards politics apathy or inertia?

My husband, with a dependable appetite for chestnuts, says he would be the ideal person to start an Apathy party. There is, it is true, a great lack of appetite for politics at the moment, yet people are annoyed to find they cannot ignore it. It is unwelcome and insistent, like toothache.

References have been made recently to William Whitelaw complaining of Labour under Harold Wilson ‘going round the country stirring up apathy’. A variety of circumstances is given for this remark. Some, including Ian Aitken, Whitelaw’s biographer, writing after his death in 1999, attached it to the election campaign of 1970, which Heath unexpectedly won. The late Frank Johnson, normally a careful journalist, placed this Willie-ism in ‘the 1976 Common Market referendum’. The referendum was in 1975; so perhaps 1976 was a misprint. I accept the version of history given by Alan Watkins in A Short Walk Down Fleet Street, which dates it to the second election of 1974, when he had the task of writing about television coverage of the campaign for the Evening Standard.