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A man has offered to restore democracy by denying you a right to decide and replacing it with rallies.

Two other men are competing, quite openly about the best way of bankrupting us. The Opposition is in semi-retirement, people are torturing maths, 5,000 people were pictured throwing one hand up in an arena and THIS IS NOT OK.

We all know the world has been a little chaotic for a while. Perhaps you've forgotten the financial crisis of 2008, and predictions it would lead, as economic crunches always do, to anti-migrant rhetoric and the Far Right.

It took a decade to happen after the Great Depression, and it's been a decade since the Great Recession. Politicians who realised simultaneously that numbers matter, and that they didn't understand numbers, abandoned truth and plumped for being liked instead.

It's not a politician's job to be liked. It's their job to be despised, while making things work properly - the same as National Rail.

If you saw people saluting the railways and demanding the 7.55am arrive on time or they'd reform Dad's Army and sack the Palace of Westminster, you'd assume they were ill. Yet regiments of such people are happily forgoing the right to vote on any of this stuff, on the basis voting means they'd have to do maths.

(Image: Getty Images)

If there were a way to draw all these threads together, it probably needs a columnist with a grasp of quantum string theory to explain it. Let's just call it The Absolute F***ing State Of Things, and then take it one tragically-dumb piece at a time.

Item one is the Brexit Party, a self-billed democratic grass-roots movement which just announced 100 candidates for Parliament that it's not going to tell you about. One is allegedly a fork-lift driver, another looks like he's already an MEP, but seeing as they're all going to be unnamed for as long as it takes for social media to be scrubbed of their sins, we cannot be sure.

What we do know, aside from the fact it's actually a company whose democracy is limited to its 5 shareholders, is that it does not offer its followers any membership rights. And yesterday it announced the annual conference, traditionally the place members tell the leadership what policies they want, will be replaced with rallies where the leadership will tell people what to believe.

It is not the fact there are supporters of this sort of politics that is surprising. There always have been. It's that they have so much space in which to multiply, because the rest of politics is so bemusedly bad.

(Image: Christopher Furlong)

Item two, then, is the ongoing Tory entrail-munching in which a party at less than 20% in the polls with a minority government thinks its future relies on doing a thing the majority of the country no longer wants. Boris Johnson is doing a wonderful impression of being an absolute pig, while Jeremy Hunt is what you would get if you shaved Sergei from the Compare the Meerkat adverts and hanged him with his tie.

Both of these men are suggesting renegotiating in 3 months the thing they couldn't agree on after 3 years, in order to leave on October 31, while conducting these talks with a European Commission that won't be formed until November 4. Neither of them are admitting they'll have to put Theresa's thrice-rejected deal back to Parliament, and hope their tiny majority will back it this time.

Hunt has talked about "looking business in the eye" while telling it to go bust, Johnson has suggested the Tory party can survive only by destroying the economy, and mention has been made of detailed plans about what to do without a plan.

They have thrown around so many tax breaks, unfunded promises and fictional stimuli they would make the golden goose weep for the loss of sanity, if she weren't already popping oranges and wrapping herself in foil over the demise of the Labour Party.

(Image: REUTERS)

So bad has the Opposition become that, when asked to consider throwing out someone who is of no political use and great public embarrassment, officials said yes, a committee said no, MPs threatened to do it themselves and Keith Vaz lost a vote of no confidence with himself.

The anti-racist party now appears more racist than the racist ones. The leader of the most pro-EU party gave Remainer-packed Glastonbury a swerve and let Sir David Attenborough headline in the Magic Grandad slot instead.

If you need to firm up your feelings about Jeremy Corbyn, imagine if he was in that toe-curling G20 discussion about social justice with Christine Lagarde, Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron and Ivanka Trump. Would he make more or less sense than Barbie's fascist twin?

This, then, is the void into which we have plummeted. Maths-free, democracy-lite, and as the literal icing on the cake there are people queuing - yes, QUEUING - up to tell you that 1.5m of hail, in Mexico, in June , is not a freak weather occurrence.

Do not blame Brexit for this, nor Trump. They are merely symptoms of that self-doubt and anger which was planted in 2008 and has yet to bloom. You may be upset about the migration of Syrians fleeing ISIS, Africans drowning as they run from failed states, or the bodies of Oscar and Valeria Ramirez floating upside down in the Rio Grande after two months waiting for America to remember it was supposed to be great, but it is nothing compared to the migration we will see if climate change does not change back.

The good guys don't lose because they're just too good. They lose when they forget to argue with the bad guys. And the bad guys are about to get all the red meat they want.

While liberals have sat on their self-satisfied, LGBTQ-compliant arses, lesbians are beaten on buses. Women are indicted for killing their unborn babies because a third party shot them in the abdomen. Star Wars actors are aggressively vetted on their way to fan conventions. Doctors are criticised for wanting to save lives rather than do paperwork that has nothing to do with doctoring, while the civil service, the sane, logistical continuity that we all rely on to keep the system running even when there's a crisis, thinks the biggest problem it might face is an old man taking naps.

The most important thing you need to know about maths is that 1+1 = 2. And the most important thing to remember about people is that the multiplying stupid always causes trouble.

But let's end on an optimistic note. You may not be able to choose the next PM, but you will be able to pick a different one before Christmas.

So don't pick a stupid, racist one who can't do maths.

And don't, for the love of Pete, attend a rally and put one hand up in the air EVEN IF someone's asked who wants chips.