The Conservatives, in their infinite wisdom, took their time. They always do. Their last performance in office—an elaborate farce of incompetence and hubris—earned them nothing but contempt. And yet, the public didn’t elect them for what they did, but for what they might yet do, as if politicians were fortune-tellers rather than careerists with expense accounts.
That is the great tragicomedy of democracy: the electorate imagines that politicians have read the entrails and will now act in accordance with the common good, while politicians are too busy keeping their promises to the patrons who financed the show. Two worlds—one of naïve faith, the other of cynical transaction—that never meet except in moments of scandal.
Most voters never notice. They nurse their hope like a dying candle in a drafty room, refusing to admit the flame has long since gone out. But there is always a residue—the disenchanted remainder who withdraw from the theatre entirely. Politicians shrug at their absence, because abstainers don’t pay the bills and don’t decide the jobs.
Until, of course, someone comes along who sees power not in the faithful, but in the faithless—the sullen mass who have turned their backs on the ballot box. Whoever wakes them could ride that storm to victory. Let us pray it won’t be the wrong person who stirs them, because history has shown again and again: it usually is.