I seem to have got myself into a bit of a pickle this week over comments I made at the Edinburgh international book festival on Sunday. The Times took my answer to a question about Brexit and made it sound like an attack on Jeremy Corbyn, laying my general criticisms of the Labour party squarely at his feet. I was portrayed as a “previously loyal supporter” of Corbyn who now felt that he was a 20th-century Labour man, unable to reach the parts of the electorate needed to build an effective political force.

Needless to say, I spent much of the day fire-fighting on social media, explaining that no, I had not given an interview to the Murdoch press and yes, I am still a supporter of Corbyn. Unfortunately my message failed to reach the editorial departments of the Mail, Express and Metro, who went ahead and ran the story without my corrections. After 12 hours of trying to contain the fuss, I decided to switch off my phone and watch the cycling in Rio.

The festival event had been a lot of fun. I talked about my lyrics, played a few songs and took questions from the chair and audience, expressing my opinion that Brexit is just the latest in a series of unexpected electoral results that have happened since the 2008 financial crash. The British people appear to have lost faith in the ability of Westminster to solve their problems. The first sign of this shift was the failure of the electorate to give any single party a mandate in 2010.

Although the Scottish referendum of 2014 was won by the unionists, the wave of support for independence didn’t seem to ring any alarm bells in Westminster. Politicians appeared unconcerned that so many people were looking elsewhere for solutions to their problems. The Scottish Labour party made a terrible mistake during the campaign, taking its support for granted, failing to see that devolution had changed the terms of the debate and indulging in the kind of tribalist attacks on the SNP that had yielded results in previous decades.

At the 2015 general election, it was the Liberal Democrats who were punished for taking voters for granted. In places such as the west country, the Lib Dems had been seen by many as a palatable anti-Conservative vote; putting the Tories into power destroyed that illusion. Their catastrophic loss of dozens of seats in places where they were the only viable opponents to the Conservatives had the effect of giving David Cameron a tiny majority. Westminster breathed a huge sigh of relief. Normal service had resumed.

Labour party members and supporters voted overwhelmingly for someone who challenged the Westminster consensus

The Labour party was so convinced that things were back to normal that it took the extraordinary step of inviting supporters as well as members to vote in the election to replace Ed Miliband as leader. So certain was it that centrist candidates would win handsomely that it kindly lent its votes to a no-hope leftwing challenger, just to give the impression of choice. Taken for granted for many years, Labour party members and supporters voted overwhelmingly for someone who challenged the Westminster consensus, a decision that inspired thousands more to join the party.

The final act of complacency came from Cameron, who took it for granted that a referendum on our membership of the European Union would produce a pro-remain vote so resounding that it would silence his critics on the Tory backbenches. Instead, those voters who felt ignored by Westminster for years took the opportunity to voice their anger.

Overnight, a problem that had been brewing for years became glaringly apparent: the centre had lost control of the agenda. As panic set in, the Labour party at Westminster rebelled against its own membership, seeking to overturn the biggest mandate ever achieved by a Labour leader. And the Tories, unwilling in this febrile atmosphere to trust their own supporters, swiftly engineered the coronation of a new prime minister. Ignoring the fact that the majority of their members had voted to leave the EU, they installed a leader from the remain campaign.

Taken together, these electoral results represent an attempt by citizens to take back control from Westminster, where an inflexible voting system and the centralisation of policy-making has left people feeling that their voices are unheard, especially in England, where there has been no devolution of power from the centre. Voters are looking beyond the three-party centrist model that has dominated national politics for the past 70 years, making it difficult to produce policies that attract support across the UK.

Yet barely a week goes by without one of the Labour rebels demanding that the party “get back to winning ways”, as if years of disconnection can be simply resolved by pulling the old levers that worked so well in the 20th century: triangulation not principle; decisions guided by focus groups not members; policies pitched solely to marginal swing seats rather than to the country as a whole and the party’s core supporters taken for granted.

Outlining this argument in Edinburgh was what got me into trouble in the Times, when I wondered out loud whether Corbyn fully understood the forces that had swept him to power. A parliamentarian for 33 years, does he recognise that the institution itself needs reform before a new political consensus can be built? I’m not being disloyal when I ask Corbyn for his views on fair votes, federalisation and progressive alliances. I’m just encouraging him to make the leap into 21st-century politics.