Would you want Nigel Farage to marry your daughter?

The opposite of attraction is repulsion. Political commentary gives too little attention to a party’s (or leader’s) capacity to repel. Attractiveness to some may itself inspire disgust in others, simultaneously lifting support yet imposing a ceiling upon how high.

Here’s a quiz. Our last five elections have seen Labour and the Conservatives slugging it out for primacy, each election leaving one of them the loser. It is upon the losers that I wish to focus. Here, from those five results, are the raw (rounded) totals of votes cast, nationwide, for the loser in each case. I want you to guess which party leader lost which election, so I’ve ranked the totals in decreasing order of magnitude so you can’t tell which loser garnered which of the following five harvests: 12.9 million, 10.3 million, 9.3 million, 8.8 million and 8.6 million.

The general elections are: 2005 (Blair vs Howard); 2010 (Brown vs Cameron); 2015 (Cameron vs Miliband); 2017 (May vs Corbyn); 2019 (Johnson vs Corbyn).