Political cynicism may eventually throw up something even nastier than Kilroy-Silk

Basically, these June elections are only about one thing: a massive vote of no confidence in the political class. It looks likely that the European election results, not to be announced until Sunday night, will throw up an astonishing statistic: half the voters have now abandoned the two mainstream parties.

This figure is pregnant with meaning. Go back 60 years to the second world war and its long, benign aftermath. There was then a profound connection between rulers and ruled. Both Labour and Tory parties had memberships of well over one million. Politicians formed part of civic society, and shared the same values and notions as the British people. Study the language and structure of political debate of the time. It was serious, measured, alive and — above all — grown-up. Politicians negotiated face to face with the voters on the doorstep, on the stump, at well-attended public meetings, through scrupulously reported speeches, recorded at length even in popular newspapers. It was barely meaningful then to talk, as we usefully can today, of a special ‘political class’. Politicians were organically linked into society: Parliament included farmers, businessmen, miners, labourers, craftsmen, soldiers moulded by the recent experience of war. The postwar generation of politicians had more in common with their constituents than they did with each other.

Now the reverse is the case. Politicians at Westminster have become a narrow, sectional interest group, like tobacco manufacturers, the disabled or the ‘farming lobby’. They speak a special private language of their own. Even the choice of words, grammar and construction of sentences in modern political discourse have parted company dramatically with ordinary written or spoken speech.