Britain is a majority-nutter nation, and we mostly want to elect politicians with something of the nutter to them. Sorry, but that’s the reality.
As a voting body, our longest electoral affections have been reserved for the very biggest nutters. Thatcher and Blair: obvious nutters. Fast-forward to the present day, and Johnson. Nutter. The message of the 2016 referendum was the euphoric nutting of David Cameron (non-nutter). In fact, let me go out on a limb here and posit that the reason Jeremy Corbyn – full nutter – did better than expected against useless anti-nutter Theresa May in 2017 was simply because he WAS full nutter, and the electorate was at some level strangely drawn to that.
Arguably, then, the riskiest position of all is this conviction that a technocratic dream of adequacy rocks the UK’s electoral boat. It’s certainly pretty to think so. But hand on heart, I suspect that even when the nutter of the day has cocked it up, what the nutter-addicted people are always really crying out for is just another nutter, a different nutter, a new nutter to bathe us in nostalgia for whichever previous nutters we currently yearn for
This is why the LDs should dump Ed Davey when they can have a nutter leader like Layla Moran. To hoover up the nutter vote.