Can we now hail this general election as the strangest British contest in living memory? We have a prime minister who affected to go into the campaign full of vim and vigour, but now seems to recoil from the absolute basics of what electioneering entails. If your people shut journalists from a big regional website into a small room for fear they might video something as banal as a visit to a manufacturer of diving equipment – as Theresa May’s campaign apparently did in Cornwall this week – you are surely in a very odd place.

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The atmosphere is rendered stranger still by the sense of a completely foregone conclusion. Not in the sense of, say, 2001, when Tony Blair’s muted second triumph reflected a quiescent country sleepwalking through a long economic boom. Rather, there’s a profound tension between an uneasy, divided national mood and a prime minister and party seemingly gliding back to power. Britain does not, contrary to what May claimed at the outset, seem like it is coming together.

Yet this week’s local election results underline the prospect of an imminent landslide, and pollsters claim that she is the most popular party leader since the late 1970s. The reality? There is a look she repeatedly throws, midway between forced politeness and cold fear, that speaks of something rather different: a classically pyrrhic victory, in a country that has no collective clue where it is heading.

Last week I followed much the same route as May traversed a few days later, driving from the western tip of Cornwall to Bristol – from Brexitland to a redoubt of Remainia. Along the way, I met the odd staunch admirer of the prime minister, and a few people who said that Jeremy Corbyn had a vision worth believing in, if only his detractors and opponents would leave him alone. But for the most part I encountered three kinds of voter: disconnected, deceived and dismayed. All were united by a sense of national bemusement.

At the food bank in the Cornish town of Camborne – whose services are expanding fast – a steady stream of people had come to get the standard emergency parcel, not for the “complex reasons” claimed by May last weekend, but because they were skint and in danger of going hungry. One thirtysomething man told me he was employed at a local plastics manufacturer on a flexible-hours contract that often left him unable to buy enough food to feed his family. He was a case study in what Corbyn says is wrong with modern Britain. But despite having voted Labour all his adult life, this man said he was so unconvinced by the party’s new leader that he now considered himself undecided.

In terms of his flickering interest in politics, he was a rarity. Everyone else I spoke to there thought the election was a distant irrelevance. Their predicament barely intruded on the election, and the election did not intrude on them. Here, with distinct echoes of politics in the US, were the very people politicians are prone to kick around: people so wearied by their day-to-day lives that the idea the noise emanating from the TV might offer any convincing change seemed faintly laughable.

Elsewhere in the town, I met people engaged with politics inasmuch as they set great store by Brexit, but who were pretty much unable to explain why they had supported the leave side last year; where they felt the process of leaving the EU was now going; or what this latest vote was all about. That isn’t to say that millions of remain supporters – me included – did not vote the way they did out of a mix of tribal affinity and emotion. But there is a difference: our side was essentially about continuity, whereas theirs now threatens unprecedented disruption, and possible national calamity.

Yes, there are plenty of voters who backed leave out of understandable fury and frustration. But, as evidenced by radio phone-ins and TV discussion shows, there are also many people who spout lines that have long since curdled into cliche, blithely saying they were sick of being bossed around by Brussels – while being unable to give a single example. And at that point, the absurdity of it all turns critical. When I was out with the Lib Dems on a handsome new-build development in Yeovil, one man answered the door and told the canvassers that he had heard there was no reason why Britain should not be out of the EU already, with or without what he kept calling “article 52”.

An hour up the A37, in Bristol, the polarities were reversed. The local pressure group Bristol for Europe – whose mission, however kamikaze-like it might seem, is to resist any kind of Brexit, hard or soft – had set up a street stall outside a Waitrose in Tory-held Bristol North West. Every five minutes or so, someone would look admiringly at their flags and banners and take a badge, or agree to be put on their mailing list.

For the most part these were people with deep liberal-left instincts, now seemingly without a political home. Labour was talked about with a kind of mournful dismay. Mention of the Lib Dems was met with noncommittal shrugs, as if you might just about bring yourself to back them, knowing it was little more than a futile protest vote. In their own way, these adrift remainers seemed almost as lost as the people at the food bank.

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What’s this all about? Politics is crying out for a realignment that shows no sign of materialising. Sooner or later, perhaps, Brexit will reveal itself as being disastrous, and the country might be shaken to its senses. But more than anything, we are living through a case study in the often dire consequences of referendums that force people to swing behind simple answers to complicated questions.

And we are now having to put up with the result: a politics that keeps trying to resolve the irresolvable consequences of what has happened, like a child trying to mend a broken toy on Boxing Day. Meanwhile, the crisis of political legitimacy that so spectacularly exploded last June goes on, but quietly. Turnout in this general election, I would imagine, will be not much higher than 60%, and the idea that anything has been resolved will have evaporated by the afternoon of 9 June.

In that sense, perhaps, we have a leader who suits the moment, nervously pinballing from one stop to the next, with apparently no idea of where she is going or why – and no more able to explain what is happening than anyone else. Truly, a Britannia for our times.