Western democracy has always been founded upon the principle of something called 'losers' consent'.

In simple terms, it means that defeated parties accept the result of a legitimate election, until they have the chance to reverse it at the ballot box.

Unfortunately, in recent years the idea that the will of the people is sacrosanct has gone out of the window — on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Britain, we have just been through one of the most divisive and destructive periods in our political history as embittered Remainers tried to Stop Brexit.

The vast majority of the so-called 'liberal elite' repeatedly refused to implement the result of the EU referendum, despite promising solemnly to honour it.

O.J. Corbyn is still hanging around like a bad smell, mouthing his usual deranged platitudes, says Richard Littlejohn

They spent three and a half years using every trick in the book — parliamentary, extra-parliamentary and judicial — to frustrate the democratically expressed decision of the British people.

It was the ultimate manifestation of the odious Peter Mandelson's hubristic boast, during the New Labour ascendancy, that 'the era of pure, representative democracy is coming to an end'.

They were the masters now.

Happily, that isn't how it worked out. When the people did finally get the chance to reassert their sovereignty in the December general election, they did so in spectacular fashion. We all know how well that turned out for the Remainer ultras.

Labour, which cynically betrayed its traditional supporters in the North and Midlands, paid the heaviest price, yet appears to have learned nothing.

O.J. Corbyn is still hanging around like a bad smell, mouthing his usual deranged platitudes. On the day Union Flags were being burned in Tehran by demonstrators chanting 'Death To Britain', he was at a rally in Trafalgar Square expressing solidarity with the theocratic dictatorship in Iran.

Meanwhile, the contest to elect his successor is cranking laboriously into gear, featuring a deeply unimpressive collection of third-rate candidates.

A nation yawns.

The front-runners are 'Sir' Keir Starmer, the Max Headroom lookalike who fashioned his party's disastrous, deceitful No Brexit policy, and Labour's answer to Mrs Merton, Rebecca Long-Bailey.

When the people did finally get the chance to reassert their sovereignty in the December general election, they did so in spectacular fashion, says Richard Littlejohn, in reference to Boris Johnson's dominant election win

Asked to mark Corbyn's performance in the election, which delivered Labour's worst result since 1935, Mrs Merton gave him ten out of ten.

Here we go Looby Loo!

Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, is the man who launched the vindictive, politically motivated witch-hunt against Sun newspaper journalists — which cost £30 million and resulted in zero convictions.

He also fashioned the 'always believe the victim' policy which emboldened Nonce Finder General Tom Watson and Scotland Yard to destroy the lives and reputations of blameless men falsely accused of 'historic' sex crimes.

Bringing up the rear are Lady Nugee, aka Emily Thornberry, last seen sneering at a white van man for flying the Cross of St George, and pretend prole Jess Phillips, a shameless self-publicist who enlivened the last Parliament by screaming like a fishwife at Boris Johnson.

One thing they all have in common is a tendency to exaggerate their alleged working-class backgrounds. They all seem to be as creative about their past lives as Fettes-educated Tony Blair.

Neither Nugee nor Starmer use their titles. If Starmer doesn't believe in political honours, why did he accept a knighthood in the first place?

Democrats have been trying to impeach Trump since before he was even inaugurated

He claims to be the son of a toolmaker. I covered a number of strikes by toolmakers in the Seventies, but don't remember Starmer Senior on the picket lines alongside Red Robbo at Longbridge.

That's probably because he owned his own successful manufacturing company in Surrey.

Phillips puts on the 'barefoot and pregnant' routine, but comes from a professional family. We're told her husband is an 'ex-lift engineer', but more recently he's worked in politics for his wife.

Similarly, Mrs Merton plays up her previous jobs in a pawn shop and a furniture factory, which is intended to disguise the fact that she's a lawyer who studied politics at university.

Needless to say, she's the official candidate of hard-Left Momentum, which is run by a bunch of wealthy ex-public school boys.

The field is completed by someone called Lisa Nandy, who most people thought was a popular chicken restaurant. Cheeky Nandy has received a thumbs up from two-time loser Neil Kinnock, who once campaigned to get Britain out of the EU and then spent the rest of his career with his snout in the Brussels trough.

Cheeky is said to be a Brexit realist, although she has ruled out doing a trade deal with Donald Trump because she doesn't like his climate change scepticism. Which brings us seamlessly to Washington, where the Democrats seem not to have been paying attention to the fate of their 'liberal' counterparts in Britain.

They are pressing ahead with a doomed impeachment process against Trump, on the basis of scant evidence — most of which would be inadmissable in a court of law.

Their solemn procession through the Capitol building on Wednesday was like a funeral cortege minus a corpse. It reminded me of John Bercow's ostentatious parades through the Palace of Westminster, pursued by flunkies.

The parallels with the shenanigans over Brexit are obvious. The Democrats have never accepted the result of the 2016 Presidential election and, like our own dear Remainers, have exhausted every avenue, legitimate or otherwise, in their frenzied attempts to overturn it.

Democrats have been trying to impeach Trump since before he was even inaugurated. Like Bercow and the Stop Brexit ultras they have paralysed Parliament in the demented pursuit of their prey.

But nothing they have thrown at him so far has stuck. This stunt won't stick either. Trump is the Teflon Don.

Meanwhile the real scandal is being swept under the carpet. When Joe Biden was the Obama administration's point man in Ukraine, his son, Hunter Biden, was paid $83,000 a month to act as a consultant to a Ukrainian energy company — despite having zero experience of the energy industry.

It's also claimed that Biden threatened to withhold U.S. aid unless Ukraine sacked the prosecutor investigating his son's links to the company.

Trump's 'crime' is said to be pressuring the Ukrainians to get to the bottom of this lucrative arrangement. Even if that's true, surely he was only doing his job.

Aren't the American people entitled to ask questions about why Biden's son was put on the payroll of a foreign company, despite being unqualified?

Meanwhile, like Labour, the Dems are trying to pick their next leader from an equally unimpressive field, led by Biden — who Trump calls Sleepy Joe — Barmy Bernie Sanders, a socialist Corbyn clone, and Elizabeth Warren.

Trump's best gag is saddling Warren with the nickname 'Pocahontas', on the grounds that — despite being as white as a loaf of Mother's Pride wrapped-and-sliced — on her application to Harvard she claimed to be a Red Indian, at a time when the university was seeking to hire more minorities.

The President eventually shamed her into taking a blood test which showed she was just one in 1,024th Native American.

For now, there are so many weirdos throwing their rings into the hat that the line-up at this week's Democratic debate looked like the cast of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

They are all suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, the Siamese twin of Brexit Derangement Syndrome.

Outside the navel-gazing Washington bubble, the impeachment process is gaining little traction.

All it will achieve is shoring up Trump's base and repelling voters — just as the Stop Brexit pantomime propelled Boris back into Number 10 with a massive majority.

In a democracy, the proper place to remove a President is at the ballot box, not in a bogus impeachment hearing. Americans will get the chance to pass their verdict on Trump in November.

The Democrats should take heed of what happened to the 'liberal elite' in Britain last month. Which bit of democracy don't they understand?

Until they accept the principle of 'losers' consent' they will go on being losers.