Can you blame people for hating Westminster? My pride in our democracy is sustained by avoiding the reality of its workings. After listening to Yesterday in Parliament – with its planted questions, faux anger and whipped votes; the student union antics of prime minister’s questions; the shambles of the recent EU crime “debate” – I plunge into a dark canyon of doubt. I slump over my toast and Marmite and breathe deeply. I question the entire trajectory of post-Lockean modern western political progress. It’s that ugly.

Ukip has fed on this hatred. Everyone has a rise-of-Ukip theory. Mine, unsurprisingly, reaches back into the early history of our constitution. Parliament emerged to remind the government of the wishes and needs of its subjects. It restrained the excesses of the executive branch. The king. His army. His customs officials. His provincial henchmen. The executive, to its intense annoyance, needed our cash to build palaces, gather artillery trains, impress foreign princes and pay for continental painters to brighten the recesses of their living quarters. We provided this in taxes, but alongside our contributions we insisted that we also sent our representatives to London to keep an eye on how it was spent.

In fact we insisted quite strenuously. Wars were fought. Kings were killed, expelled and humiliated. So much so that something weird happened, and the legislature seized control of the executive branch. Now David Cameron is effectively the head of the executive: it is his government, not the Queen’s. Yet he is also, curiously, an MP with responsibilities to make that government accountable to his constituents.

Today MPs aspire to join the government, not restrain it. Their career progression, bizarrely, entirely depends on voting exactly as they are told by the government, or the government in waiting. Future generations will shake their heads in utter disbelief, just as we do when we look back at Walpole’s edifice of Old Corruption.

The terrible blurring of the legislative and executive functions of our politicians is the breach through which Ukip is galloping. Ukippers are never going to be in government. They are professional troublemakers. Which is exactly what their constituents want in the legislature. They have no policies. But they have a rough outlook, a gut feeling about the world. This makes them, in one sense, ideal constituency MPs.

Parties have corroded our view of politics. The British electoral system is essentially an extremely inefficient way of selecting an executive branch. Whipping makes a mockery of the idea of local representation. Miliband, Cameron and their kind find the politics of the executive branch more interesting than ensuring high-speed broadband reaches their constituents. Stomping around Washington, holding summits, bombing Islamic State … bestriding the narrow earth.

All this is understandable. We need good people in government, but they should not be the same ones who sit in parliament. Ukippers are able to strike the posture of outsiders because in one key sense they are. They will never run the UK. They do not therefore need policies about Palestine or pathogens. But they can reasonably pretend to their constituents that they will keep a bloody close eye on those that do: an attractive pitch at a time of economic malaise.

From seat to seat their candidates can woo constituents with broad platitudes and reassure them about their general political posture: along the Thames estuary, Thatcherite in tooth and claw; in the north, old Labour. Ukip, oddly, looks a bit like a well-funded umbrella group for independents.

People want a legislature that works for them, not the government. Those of us in the broad centre of the political spectrum need to change our democracy, or others will.