As I sit among the crowd at an event called “Strengthening the Rule of Law”, an over-loud PA system cuts in to tell us, “Nigel Farage will be signing shirts [for £60]”. Otherwise, his party looks like the Tory Party in Sunday dress: Barbour jackets; Union Flag suits; cocktail dresses; a Panama hat, worn by a man telling a story of how he once met Nelson Mandela. On the first day, the More in Common think tank launches its analysis of Reform’s support base. Their current ceiling is 42% of the vote; supporters are socially conservative but tend Left on wealth distribution and nationalization; most define politics as “broken”, and 59% of them do not believe Britain is a real democracy. New supporters are female, less radical and less online; those who have switched from both Labour and the Tories may switch back; potential supporters do not want the end of Net Zero, do not trust NHS reform, and fear Farage’s fondness for Donald Trump. Reform’s real dilemma is: as their coalition grows, their vulnerability grows with it. Voters want different things, and triumph is hard.

At “How to Reverse the Boriswave and Clean up the Other Parties’ Mess”, I watch the pollster James Frayne hurt his audience by telling them the truth. “Prepare for the first six months of a Reform government being a complete shambles,” he says. “Getting into government is hard enough, but actually being in government is more difficult.” He rebukes Reform’s dreamers and culture warriors: that is, much of the activist base here. “The party cannot rely on bullshit sound bites and ‘everything will be alright on a day,’ and ‘we’re just going to try hard, and we’ll face everybody down. We’ll fight people we don’t like’”. Reform must also, he says, “grow up out of this sort of tub-thumping stuff that sounds great somewhere like this” — he waves his arm at the room that sometimes hosts Crufts — “but when you get into government, the public will despise you within six months, unless you’re getting stuff done”.

I suspect it is no coincidence that Frayne is sharing a stage with Matthew Goodwin, the GB News presenter and tub-thumper who looks like an angry Lego man. Goodwin says the British state and the civil service — “let’s just say ‘the Blob’” — are going “to go to war with this movement. Including the Lords.” His gut instinct, he says, is that “they are just going to use every trick in the book to slow [Reform] down”. Expectation management will be essential, he says. But first win the battle, “where actually you do need a bit of tub thumping”.

Reform is not being propelled into government on a wave of joy, but on a wave of fear, and the fearful are combustible. Voters look to Farage on immigration, Frayne says, but they are nervous about a “perceived lack of competence, a perceived sense of extremism — less around Farage but around the margins of the party — [and] also a pervasive, to use a slightly and politically incorrect term, madness. There’s more than a whiff of eccentricity about the party.” It is true: Farage compares the UK to North Korea, which is absurd, and many activists are in costume, as if wearing their grievances. They love hats. But Reform is not the first political party to be held hostage by its own activists. It happened to Labour under Corbyn; his new project Your Party is the next installment. At heart, Reform have done the same: this is the vengeance of the Tories on themselves, though others will get hurt.

Frayne cites Liz Truss; her budget initially polled OK. “When it unraveled within five days the public were apoplectic, and they have been burned so badly that they now know that they need to look for detail.” The other parties don’t have the answer either: “If you put a microphone in front of Yvette Cooper’s face, it’s laughable. It’s clear that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. So, what we might end up with next time is a real sense [that] nobody can sort this stuff out, and at that point, it makes the next election very difficult to predict.” And the one after that, even harder. I used to think about Britain after a Boris Johnson government. Now I think about Britain after a Nigel Farage government.

Some in Reform, though, fear anything that feels like conventional politics — including detailed polling — because to collude with convention is to lose yourself in it. Zia Yusuf, head of Reform’s DOGE, and the party’s most prominent figure after Richard Tice, the deputy leader, and Farage himself, says: “Certainly, while I was chairman, we never commissioned a single focus group. Our focus group was talking to voters on the doorstep.” Yusuf talks about politics less as a national project than a personal journey, though this tendency is hardly singular to Reform. He walks his anecdotes from stage to stage, the cult of individualism on legs.

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Reform supporters talk about betrayal the way drug addicts talk about heroin because they have the same sickness they accuse the Left of: over-dramatization. Boris Johnson — who Dorries wants to join Reform to smash Labour — betrayed them. The Fabian Society, higher education, the civil service, the media, the judiciary, the RNLI, which plucks migrants from the sea, and the Labour Party all betrayed them; the Motability scheme and toothbrush coordinators in schools betrayed them; soon the House of Lords will betray them too. Nothing is sacred but their aggrievement.

They want to send illegal immigrants to the Falkland Islands; they would ban public sector workers from striking because they think there will be a General Strike within two weeks of a Reform government; they want to abolish MPs’ expenses, and therefore MPs’ offices.

I listen to James Orr, a professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge, and a major intellectual figure in Reform. He looks like a Merchant Ivory hero and talks like a romantic. “With every Government scandal, Reform gets stronger,” he says. “With every Conservative hypocrisy, Reform gets stronger.” At some point, momentum may turn into hubris — only a third of voters think Reform will actually improve the country — but not yet.

I hear stories of hiring thousands of workers — a parallel civil service — but, four years from an election, they hesitate to commit to policy: it is always painful easing a dream into reality. Richard Tice is asked what three things he would do on his first day as Chancellor. Tice, who mimics Farage’s cadences these days, replies that he can’t know the state of government finances; the civil service — the Blob — is not helpful. Essentially, he doesn’t answer the question. Wait for the manifesto, and until then, blame the media.

But some, at least, are hungry for facts: you cannot expect people who want their country back to wait forever. Last year, I am told, members, “spoke of nothing but immigration”. This year, according to one political analyst, “not one mentions immigration”. He thinks Reform know they have won this argument. Now they are talking about “gilt yields, the national debt and welfare. Some people are getting a bit frustrated. ‘We like Nigel, but that [his speech] was all fluff, really. Where’s the plan?’” As far as I can see from the fringe, it is this: tax cuts will be paid for by cutting waste, not public services. Jam for everyone you like, then; no jam for those you don’t.

“They need,” one man tells me, “To flesh out their economic policies: to show their workings-out. Because there is an inconsistency.” He adds: “They cannot be all things to all people”.

“I don’t think the depth is there,” another man tells me. “This is not an intellectual party”.

Even so, the next day, the historian David Starkey and Jacob Rees-Mogg, both Tory exhibitionists, headline an event called “How Can Reform Succeed in Office?” They are here to counsel crowds with their wisdom: this is how bad things are. Starkey says, “The thing that really matters is to understand: we’re all conservatives. What [Tony] Blair did was fundamentally — to use a technical phrase — to fuck Britain up. Our job, ladies and gentlemen, in another technical phrase, is to unfuck Britain”.

It will not be easy. “My great fear,” Starkey says, “is, at the moment you are riding to victory. There is simply no doubt about this, but there’s a terrible danger.” Starkey’s melodrama stirs the room. The reason Keir Starmer won, he says, “was simply they [the electors] got tired of Jacob [Rees-Mogg]. It took 14 years to get tired of Jacob. Jacob is endlessly entertaining.” Rees-Mogg does not flinch. If Reform win, he says, “and a Nigel-led government does not succeed in changing things within six months,” he fears the nation will be, “so angry that we will then be in real, real trouble. There will be nowhere else for them to go.”

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The plan, Starkey says, is this: appoint five hundred new peers to the Lords. “We will have to neutralize the Lords, otherwise all of what we want to do will get lost in a Sargasso Sea of amendments”. I like his phrasing. Jean Rhys’s novel The Wide Sargasso Sea is about the first Mrs Rochester of Jane Eyre: the raving subconscious of every human being. “We have to be ready with both a blunderbuss and a scalpel. You need the big and the precise, and without that, we will lose.”

“What Reform has got to be is what Disraeli said,” he tells us. “‘The Conservative Party is a national party, or it is nothing’”. Starkey looks around at the sea of faces that look like Tories, and I think he is right: these are, at heart, just angry Tories. This is evidence of both a glut — in communication and entitlement — and an absence here: of compassion, and of hope. “I would hope,” Rees-Mogg says, “that everybody in the Conservative Party is as conservative as everybody in this room”.

“We’re not,” a man shouts at him, but Rees-Mogg laughs the heckle off, and it was the only fringe event which brought the people to their feet with cheers. Despite the pollsters and the Tory grandees attempting to finesse the brand, this is a race to the end: to a Britain none of us yet knows. I leave thinking that Reform is the Tory split over Brexit, reanimated yet again, and its bloodiest manifestation yet.

In ancient Athens, democracy meant government by the people, but the word demos had a resonance of the common people, what some might see as the rabble or riff-raff. In a similar way, the term “the people” might include William Hague and Lady Gaga, but it has a more specific reference to people who don’t usually count, the extras or background artists of human life, individuals who fall outside the official social framework. Mick Lynch is more authentically part of the people than Stephen Fry, but not because he’s “uneducated”. Jeremy Corbyn is “educated” but part of the people. (In the 19th century, “uneducated” meant often enough “didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge”.) In the New Testament narrative of the birth of Jesus, the angels are countless, the people are counted (there’s a census under way), and the shepherds don’t count. [1. Sticklers for historical accuracy might be interested to know that there wasn’t actually a census going on when Jesus was born, since if there was we would have heard about it from other sources. It’s simply a narrative device for getting the Messiah born in Bethlehem, the royal city, as opposed to Nazareth, a scruffy little rural backwater.]

Things are defined partly by what they exclude. All the individuals, or a nation taken together, constitute the population, but you arrive at the idea of the people by subtracting from this unwieldy mass. Some of them — slaves or “aliens” for example — may live in the country but not be citizens. What other people don’t belong to the people? Intellectuals, for a start. The intelligentsia has no loyalty to any particular place or set of national institutions. Because the mind can roam restlessly over the globe without local constraints, these cosmopolitan figures are thought to constitute a threat to both piety and patriotism. They represent what has been called “the view from nowhere”, and such bloodless abstractions are far removed from the living, breathing reality of the common folk.

This is why the phrase “conservative intellectual” has a mildly oxymoronic ring to it. Conservatives are enamoured of the local and parochial, of family, region and nation, whereas intellectuals are supposed to subject all that to a critique governed by reason rather than affection, logic rather than partisanship, universal principles rather than local allegiances. People who seem to come from nowhere in particular have a sinister, slightly alien quality about them, which accounts for the spooky music of the TV programme Mastermind. The music of University Challenge, by contrast, is a jolly little jingle, but this is because students aren’t exactly intellectuals, in fact sometimes not even intellectuals in the making, and in any case nobody finds them creepy.

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The stereotypical intellectual, then, is really a Jacobin: cerebral, emotionally anaemic, eager to impose his abstract schemes on the messiness of human reality. Both Swift and Shakespeare were aware that ideas which have come unstuck from reality have a touch of madness and violence about them, and the great “English” antagonist of this deranged condition was Edmund Burke (he was of course Irish). In the English empiricist tradition, ideas must be rooted in the senses in order to be real. This is one reason why the novelist Anthony Trollope has always been popular among the British middle classes (Harold Macmillan once remarked that every man should go to bed with a Trollope), yet hasn’t an idea in his head. Once the Jacobins had passed into history, the stereotypical intellectual became the Marxist. The emotional anaemia of these outlandish creatures, not least their lack of humor, is clear enough to everyone who reads them.

Can aristocrats be part of the people? In one sense obviously not, since populism is nothing if not anti-elitist. In this respect, an essentially Right-wing ideology overlaps with a Left-wing one. Yet, successful elites aren’t those which maintain an aloof distance from ordinary people, but those which seek to sink their roots into the common soil and draw their energy from this source. The cultivated landowner admires the honest-to-goodness peasant. Hence the Wooster/Jeeves syndrome so central to English culture. Master and man must keep a certain respectful distance, to be sure, but beneath this they maintain a bond almost as intimate as that between man and wife. My Cambridge tutor had a civilized distaste for clichés but referred to his gardener as “the salt of the earth”. In The Idea of a Christian Society, T.S. Eliot tries to reconcile the minority culture of patricians like himself with the broader life of the nation. The poet W.B. Yeats saw shrewdly that if the Anglo-Irish landowning class to which he pledged his allegiance had managed to assume political leadership of the people, they might not have ended up having their grand houses burnt to the ground or being wheeled around Bournemouth in bath chairs.

Populism, then, can trade on the little man’s admiration for the great man. In the case of Nazi populism, the great man in question was of course Adolf Hitler. But Hitler was also a little man, morally as well as physically. No more commonplace incarnation of the destiny of the nation smirches the pages of history. The Spirit of the people shouldn’t have floppy hair and speak in a hoarse rasp. It was as though Jesus Christ had appeared on earth with a badly fitting wig and a wooden leg. As far as size goes, Nigel Farage has a similar advantage to the Führer. So the little man — the thrifty, industrious, aspiring member of the petty bourgeoisie, to whom both populism and fascism make their appeal — could look up to the Leader while at the same time finding in him a reflection of his own banality.

By pitting the people against the elite, populism aims to achieve an important political goal; but it does so only at the price of running into self-contradiction. It hopes to homogenize the people, and in doing so to suppress a number of vital conflicts within this supposedly unified body. Grotesque disparities of wealth, power, respect and recognition are brazenly papered over. Merchant bankers and garbage collectors share a common front against conventional liberal politics. The contradiction is that denouncing the elite also involves denouncing the faceless corporations on which populism ultimately depends. Despite their much-flaunted radicalism, populist politicians are no more eager to challenge the material interests underpinning the Western way of life than is the liberal metropolitan establishment they despise. The CEO of Tesco is part of the elite, but populists show a marked reluctance to send him packing. Deporting George Monbiot strikes them as a more attractive proposition.

In populist eyes, the people is self-identical — a single organism free of divisions or potentially subversive differences. Individuals may squabble over this or that, but the people itself is never wrong. The voice of the people is the voice of God, as Jacob Rees-Mogg remarked (in Latin, no less). His tongue was, of course, lodged firmly in his cheek: populists believe in the people, but this isn’t the same as having faith in what actual men and women do and believe, such as chucking Rees-Mogg out in a general election.

Far from being self-identical, however, the people is always incomplete. In order to be itself, it needs an Other, whether you call it Jews, immigrants, Arabs, illegals or some other theatrically demonized bunch of aliens. You need to be reminded of who you are by contemplating the fearful sight of who you are not. Where would Farage and his cronies be without a regular supply of small boats?

Sometime towards the end of the 18th century, Europe was gripped by a peculiarly bad idea. The idea was that every ethnic group had a right to its own political state, a notion which lies at the heart of Romantic nationalism. One nation, one Reich. For democrats, people have the right of self-determination; for populist nationalists, the people, ethnically defined, have this right. The distinction turns on the definite article. Ethnicity had been introduced into the argument about whether we should be ruled by ourselves or others. People, in all their conflicts of ideas and clashes of interests, had been transformed into a homogenous entity by virtue of being Poles or Slovenes. This proved from time to time an effective way of shaking off colonial oppression, but in some circles it also made being a Pole or a Slovene more important than anything else about you.

And this proved highly convenient for those governing powers who didn’t want men and women to go around describing themselves as socialists or feminists, Christians or Hindus, traditionalists or modernists. The problem was that if you looked far back enough, ethnic identities tended to disappear. Everyone turned out to be an outsider, interloper, carpetbagger, migrant or blow-in. Exile seemed natural to the human condition. No piece of land was the intrinsic possession of a specific tribe. Like Robinson Crusoe, what you find when you land on an apparently unoccupied island is a human footprint.

We learn just how stiff in Meet the Rees-Moggs — arriving onscreen next week — as strangers shout aggressively at the infamous politician as he crosses the road or buys his daily chocolate éclair from Greggs. In return, they invariably get a polite “thank you!” and an awkward little wave. In the run-up to July’s General Election, someone writes “POSH TWAT” in marker pen on a Vote Conservative sign outside his mother’s house. With insistent amusement, Rees-Mogg jokes to his family that the culprit must be “very easy to spot”: “an angry socialist giant who has a very vulgar knowledge of language”.

The man seems absolutely determined not to take anything personally, ever. And his loyal wife Helena is equally stoic, sporting the sort of highborn expressionlessness and barely moving mouth that the lower classes can only hope to achieve with Botox. “Other careers are available,” she murmurs to two of the couple’s six children after warning them about their father’s impending election defeat, after 14 years as an MP. Later, she tells the camera resolutely: “As Churchill said, KBO.”

But just why do people detest her husband so much? In the past, protestors have thrown bottles at him. Random passers-by have told his children that their father is a “horrible person” and that “lots of people hate him”. For the second year running, he appears on The New European “shit list” — out this week — dedicated to rooting out “the sneaky, the snobbish, and the snide”. Indeed, the new TV series is predicated on the idea that Rees-Mogg is “one of the most divisive politicians in Britain”, as stated in the title sequence.

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Yet the first two programmes do nothing much to explain the animosity. Instead we get a Great British Bake Off-style portrait of an amusingly donnish oddball, complete with an arch-sounding pizzicato soundtrack in case we didn’t already get the point. In the interactions we see between Rees-Mogg and others, it’s as if half his mind is whirling away on some other thing entirely. When Jacob was first courting Helena, she tells us, she couldn’t think of much else. He, meanwhile, was gazing lovingly into his wife-to-be’s eyes and seeing her ancestor Thomas Wentworth the 1st Earl of Strafford, by far and away his favourite adviser to King Charles I.

We also get to see Catholic Jacob in his own private chapel, rhyming “Mass” with “arse” and showing off his reliquary, which includes a bit of Thomas More’s hair shirt. There’s a scene with the whole family dressed in black tie at the dinner table, three small boys included. And then there’s Jacob inadvertently giving the lie to Conservative fears about what’s bound to happen under a nanny state, as his own ever-indulgent nanny Veronica lets him off from eating his vegetables. Now ancient, she is filmed ministering to young Alfred, Anselm, and Sixtus the sixth and last — each of them approaching the Platonic form of the adorably naughty schoolboy — while the elder three Rees-Moggs are off at boarding school.

The puzzling question remains. It can’t just be all the money, the stately home, or the languid drawling that people object to, nor even the rampantly Right-wing views; such things are hardly scarce in the Tory party at large. One determined critic in the first episode says that Rees-Mogg “seems to despise people who are poorer than him”. Yet, on the contrary, all the evidence of the documentary suggests he approaches everyone, rich or poor — including, for that matter, his own wife and children — in exactly the same way. Namely: as if he is forcing himself into social interactions for the sake of some higher purpose.

Another explanation for the degree of opprobrium to such a relentlessly mild and amiable man is the perception that the whole Honourable-Member-for-the-18th-Century act is a put on. Perhaps revealing a little too clearly their own snobbishness, writers at The New European this week called Rees-Mogg a “fake aristo”. Likewise, in 2017, Polly Toynbee wrote that he was “about as authentic as that Downton Abbey shot where they left a plastic bottle on the mantlepiece”. In Nancy Mitfordesque vein, The Guardian columnist continued: “The double-breasted posh-speak, Latin tags and ludicrous names for his six children are all pastiche panache, a country house charade.”

But again, I don’t think so — or at least, not if you believe Michael Ashcroft in his admittedly sympathetic biography Jacob’s Ladder. For one, though Rees-Mogg is indeed not an aristocrat nor ever claimed to be, sexist Toynbee seems to be ignoring the clear influence of his impeccably pedigreed wife upon the family lifestyle (full name Helena Anne Beatrix Wentworth Fitzwilliam de Chair). For another, schoolfriend after schoolfriend lines up to tell Ashcroft that, as a youth, Jacob was just as fogeyish, money-obsessed, and downright strange as he is now.

Says one old pal, recalling eight-year old Jacob: “He used to sit behind me and read The Financial Times.” As an 11-year-old shareholder, young Rees-Mogg attended the Lonhro AGM, quizzing directors from the floor about their plans to buy The Observer. At Eton, he declared the dropping of the tailcoat requirement on very hot days an “unnecessary slacking of regulations”, refusing to follow the trend. And a friend recounts that, at Oxford, he “was bullied unmercifully by people who took the piss out of him because he was such an anomaly, even among his own class”.

Futilely contesting the seat of Central Fife for the Tories in the 1997 General Election, including several former coal mining towns in which unemployment was rife, Rees-Mogg was viewed as a “figure of complete ridicule” according to onlookers but remained unbowed. “I’ve worn a suit every day since I was 14,” he told The Scotsman. “I’m not about to change now.” He also told reporters, without any apparent sense of foreboding, that Veronica the nanny would be coming up North to help him campaign.

No, I think the real reason people hate Rees-Mogg is not that he is fake, but quite the opposite: he is authentic, clear-eyed and apparently unashamed about who he is and what he believes. Ironically, while “bringing your whole self to work” is something we’re all supposed to be doing these days, the example of Rees-Mogg shows us the pitfalls when someone actually does it.

Not for him, hints of apologetic embarrassment about the reactionary principles he would prefer not to hold. He is calmly candid about them, without even a defiant compensatory swagger à la Truss or Jenrick. And nor do we get the self-conscious attempts of other politicians to make themselves seem “relatable” and “human”: Keir Starmer tentatively holding a pint for a photo shoot; Ed Davey “officially stepping into Christmas mode” by jumping about like a lunatic on TikTok.

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To this, you might reasonably object that the man is now in a reality TV series, isn’t he? But even that seems true to bone-deep form. Ashcroft also relates how, aged 14, young Jacob featured in an ITV children’s programme, talking about his stocks and shares and “wearing a double-breasted camel coloured coat with a ‘Vote Maggie’ badge on it”. Or as fellow Etonian, the actor Dominic West put it:“[Jacob] has never changed… he’s a showbiz tart.”

What Rees-Mogg’s example convincingly tells us is that, at base, the high-minded demand to be authentic — to show “the real you”, to act in accordance with your “true self”, and so on — is only a covert inducement to display a particular kind of approved persona, carefully calibrated to socially acceptable mores, and then manifested with a convincing impression of sincerity and self-deprecation. The supposed value of making your inner core match your outer behaviour tends to be completely abandoned as soon as it is suspected that the core in question might be rotten. In Rees-Mogg’s case — whatever the rights and wrongs of his politics — it seems to me that the case for the prosecution of his character has yet to be proved.

Equally, for decades academics have been telling us that the distinction between “normal” and “weird” is a politically pernicious one, and in fact disrupting or “queering” social norms is good, actually. Yet they seem to get feet of clay when faced with someone prone to wearing top hats, using words like “floccinaucinihilipilification” in ordinary speech, and declaring that for religious reasons he is against abortion, even in the case of incest or rape. For what could be queerer than that these days?

Viewed in this light, perhaps what people really hate about Jacob Rees-Mogg is what people hate about eccentrics generally: that he won’t give in to pressure to conform even a little bit, as the cowardly rest of us do. All the brickbats flying his way make absolutely no difference. Angry socialist giants in Somerset might as well put away their marker pens.

“False consciousness” gets a lot of bad press these days, and you can see why: it’s a foundational concept of Marxist-Leninist communism, originally formulated by Friedrich Engels, and it can easily be seen as a way of blaming the idiot proles for not knowing what’s best for them and voting for the wrong lot. There is something a bit grim about telling working-class people — or black people, or gay people, or women, et cetera — that the only reason they voted the way they did is because they are idiots who got duped.

It’s much easier, and probably more vote-winning, to go the other way, and declare that you “trust the British people”. Figures as diametrically opposed as Jacob Rees-Mogg and People’s Vote UK have both used that phrase in recent months: we trust the British people (and the answer they already gave us); we trust the British people (so let’s ask them again). The electorate is always right; in some formulations, they are guardians of a quasi-mystical knowledge and wisdom, and can see through the lies and machinations of duplicitous politicians to the deep truths beneath.

It’s probably a bit simplistic to boil this all down to “can the electorate be wrong?”, but that’s what I’m going to do. And I’d say of course they can — be wrong, and be deceived. They are not holy repositories of the ancient truths. It’s just that there’s another, equally important, sense, in which they are necessarily and tautologically right, and that fact needs to be acknowledged too.

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There are two important ways in which the electorate could be “wrong”: they could vote against their own interests, and they could vote in ways that are morally faulty. It seems obvious that both of those things are possible. According to YouGov, 33% of all richer “ABC1” voters voted Labour, 43% Tory; 33% of poorer “C2DE” voters voted Labour, 48% Tory. Sure, not all C2DE voters or all ABC1 voters are alike, and there were divisions by age, ethnicity and sex as well. But for every Labour voter, there will almost certainly have been a Tory voter whose material and financial interests would have been near-identical. One of them must have been making the worse choice, from a purely selfish point of view.

The other way is if they can vote immorally. And again, of course they can, assuming that we agree that morality exists in some form. There was no referendum on slavery in 1800, but if there had been, most British voters might well have voted to maintain it. In that hypothetical referendum, most of us would say that the British electorate was unambiguously morally wrong.

And of course they can be deceived into being wrong, whether by the billionaire press or the lying politicians. For the record I think the actual impact of the media on voting habits is gigantically overstated. But it is still real.

But there is another sense in which the voters cannot be wrong, and that is an algorithmic one. The basic idea is that their votes are inputted into a big machine called British Democracy, they whirr around inside it, passing through little gates called “constituencies” and “first past the post” and “majority”, and they return an output of “Tory government” (usually).

By analogy: if you watch a game of football, one team can have lots of chances, all the possession, play the best football, generally be better. You could say they deserve to win, in one sense; “on the balance of play”, it would be the “wrong” outcome for them to lose. But if they fail to score and the other team nicks a grim own-goal at their only corner of the game in the 87th minute, then they will lose. The algorithm for determining the winning team is: Let A equal goals for Team A; let B equal goals for Team B; if A>B then Team A is the winner. That output can only be “wrong” if there is literal cheating; Calciopoli, that sort of thing.

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Similarly, the outcome of a democratic vote can only be “wrong” if there is literal vote-tampering or other illegal behaviour. There have been accusations of such — the Tories worry about vote-stuffing, Labour about Cambridge Analytica — but I think they’re largely silly, and certainly not enough to have significantly changed this month’s thrashing.

If the electoral system returns something that doesn’t look “fair”, such as Donald Trump or George W. Bush winning the electoral college despite losing the popular vote, or the Tories getting one MP per 37,000 votes and the Lib Dems getting one seat per 350,000, then that’s just what the algorithm returns. It may be that you can convince people to rewrite the algorithm, but — under the system — it’s the correct output. It is tautologically true that what the electorate elects is elected.

Arguing over what is “fair” or “deserved” is a lot more fun than arguing over the outcome, obviously, because it’s subjective and thus can be argued about forever. That’s why football phone-ins are full of people saying that the better team lost or that VAR got it wrong, rather than arguing that in fact the score was 2-1 not 0-1 and everyone else has simply misread the numbers. Hence the great big row we’re having now, and articles like this one.

Where does all this get us? Well: obviously, voters can be “wrong”. There’s a whole subset of the electorate called “low-information voters”. God knows I don’t blame them; keeping up with political news is boring, is hard work, and does very limited good in the world. But still, I don’t imagine they do much better than chance at working out what the “right” vote would be. Once you throw in media misinformation — deliberate or otherwise — it would honestly surprise me if a large majority of voters got it “right” by any single metric you happen to choose. I would be totally unsurprised to learn that I got it “wrong”. And voters can be immoral, because, you know, people.

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By James Bloodworth

But they are still the inputs to the algorithm that you have to work with. This is the sense in which they cannot be wrong, and complaining that they have false consciousness or have voted against their interests or are all “entitled, embittered, sneering nasty selfish racist foul fuckwits” is missing the point. It’s like complaining that the goals are too small or the pitch is too wide. You have the electorate you have.

Again, imagine an 1800 referendum on slavery. If you had tried to win such a referendum by saying “we ought to impose laws mandating equal-opportunity hiring practices and push for black people to be proportionally represented”, you would have been laughed at. It might, though, have been possible to win by saying something that, to modern ears, is obviously and hideously racist — perhaps that black people and white people can never live “on terms of social and political equality”, as Abraham Lincoln would say a few decades later, but that they should not be enslaved.

That is not the best moral outcome, but it is better than the available alternative; the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. By comparison, I would personally vote for a party that offered 100% open borders and zero restrictions on immigration. I think that would be the best thing for humanity in general. But it is obviously unacceptable to the electorate, so I look for the party with the least draconian immigration stance and — all else being equal — I vote for that. I think the voters are wrong, but they’re the voters we have.

Labour may be right that large parts of the electorate voted against their interests; or that large parts of the electorate are racist or homophobic, howsoever defined. It may be that a perfectly moral electorate, or one that knew exactly what its interests were, would have voted Labour in a huge landslide, with only Arron Banks, Mike Ashley and the ghost of Bernard Manning voting for the Tories. Maybe they’re not out of touch; maybe it is, indeed, the voters who are wrong.

But at the moment those are the voters we have. Call it “false consciousness” or whatever you like, but arguing that you have the wrong sort of voter is precisely as silly as stopping mid-match to demand that you should be allowed to use your hands.