Politics: Which party will win the anti-politics vote?

One might think that the Cameroons would be desperate about a poll showing their leader’s personal approval rating to be the lowest it has ever been. But the Prime Minister’s negative rating, minus 27, looks positively healthy when compared to those of the other two party leaders: the same poll showed Ed Miliband at minus 41 and Nick Clegg at minus 53. We are now in an era when the public are dissatisfied with all political parties and their leaders. Ask them which of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband would make the best prime minister and 46 per cent of them say they just don’t know.

This is part of a broader sense of national alienation. Senior aides in Downing Street have been much struck by polling which shows that more than 40 per cent of Britons would emigrate if they could.

This feeling of disenchantment is only going to get worse. All the party machines now know how to do negative campaigning but none of them know how to inspire voters. As one senior Labour figure puts it, ‘We can sum up our attack on the Tories in three words — out of touch — but it takes us at least eight paragraphs to explain what we’re actually offering the public.’

In this anti-politics age, voters are predisposed not to like politicians. So it is a lot easier for a party to persuade the public that its opponents are incompetent and not to be trusted than to make a positive case for themselves. Indeed, after George Galloway’s victory in Bradford West, the internal Labour critique of their campaign was not that it lacked a message but that it had not done enough to attack Galloway.