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Reform’s success in last week’s local elections has been attributed to many causes. Labour’s abolition of the winter fuel payment for pensioners. The hollowing out of the Conservative party’s campaigning base. Nigel Farage’s mastery of social media. But if you want an emblem of why voters turned their back on the political establishment let me give you Goat Man. In one ward in Runcorn, the seat Labour lost to Reform by just six votes, residents found that no one would listen when a neighbour filled his derelict house with goats and burned the animals’ manure in his garden. Despite repeated appeals to authority, no action was taken. If the council had dealt with this flagrant, unsanitary, anti-social behaviour, one campaigner told me, Labour might just have scraped those extra six votes.

Goat Man’s particular style of contempt for public order may not be widely emulated, but every neighbourhood has its examples of anti-social behaviour going unaddressed. My local nemeses are the car thieves. I watch them from my London balcony as they make their way down the road, smashing through side windows and grabbing whatever they like. The first few times I called the police but nothing happened. No squad cars ever arrived and it took more than 20 minutes to get through to a call handler. I wrote to my local councillor but she passed me back to the police, who told me: ‘We do not work the nights often.’ I’ve shouted at the car thieves and once chased them down the street but I’m worried I’ll make myself a target – I’ve seen too many machete attack videos – so now I stand mutely watching because there isn’t much else I can do.