Ed Miliband, Nigel Farage and the age of cynical politics

Would you rather this country was led by a man who is out of touch, arrogant and smug or someone who is out of his depth, weak and out of touch? That, according to the voters themselves, is the choice they’ll have to make at the next election. It is an illustration of just how cynical and despairing people are about politics and politicians.

Margaret Thatcher may have been, as the bien-pensants put it, divisive. But she had her partisans as well as her detractors. It often seems like modern politicians only have the latter. Indeed, when the electorate of 2013 were asked what phrases they associated with Thatcher they replied ‘determined’, ‘ruthless’ and ‘stands up for Britain’.

Today, the politicians who prosper are the ones who go out of their way not to be like politicians. One political fixer who has sat through endless focus groups in the last two years calls this the Boris Johnson effect.