Is Britain really so angry and bored that we'll let a sociopath PM do whatever the hell he wants?

Over the past few weeks, you’ve often heard a valuable new feature on news programmes, one that helps us understand modern Britain.

A presenter says: “What do common simple folk who live off tinned carrots think of it all? We sent one of our junior reporters to a place up north that we’ve only heard of because it’s in the fourth division of the football league, to see what local people say in a funny accent.” Then you hear a series of pensioners shout: “Ee, I like Boris, he may be a sociopath and evil to t’ core but at least he’s getting on with it, not like thee.”

And you can see the appeal of the idea we should just get on with it, rather than faff about, worrying about government reports that we’ll be living off boiled caterpillars until we’re taken over by Taiwan.

It’s the same when someone burgles your house. You don’t want them to keep you waiting all day by assessing your belongings. Just shove everything in a bag and GET ON WITH ROBBING ME.

Part of this despair must come from sensing we’re only spectators, with no role in shaping any of this, except trying to make sense of the daily madness. So each day we hear: “Today is likely to be critical, as a cross-party group of MPs table an antelope bill, which will reclassify Brexit as a creature of the forest. This will enable the Speaker to allow a fourth sitting of Benn/Letwin/Henry VIII Act in which an extension must be applied for if MPs shout ‘Are we antelopes? Aye’ to a Dub Reggae beat.”

Then there’s a discussion about how it will be very tight because some Labour MPs are planning to rebel by drowning out the debate with hardcore drum and bass to respect the wishes of their constituents, and you fall into a trance and wish it was all over.

And this is Johnson’s selling point. He gets on with it, because he’s not like those other stodgy politicians. He’s not bound by elitist codes, such as the one that suggests if you print something as a fact in huge letters it ought to be vaguely factual.

For too long we’ve put up with politicians who make pathetic attempts to cover up their lies, and at last we’ve got one who lies and doesn’t bother trying to cover it up.

Unlike the shifty types who have been in charge, sneakily arranging for contracts and honours to be awarded to friends, he just hands public money for businesses to people with no particular business but who do invite him round to look at their dancing pole. He didn’t ask Jennifer Arcuri to fill in lots of forms and show drawings of the dancing pole, he just got on with it.

Instead of fussing about, he’s won support from Donald Trump, who’s willing to just get on with a trade deal that must include selling off parts of the NHS to US companies. For years we’ve been waiting to pay £200 a day to stay in the Nike cardiac ward after a heart attack, and at last we can JUST DO IT, as long as Johnson can get his way, and not be obstructed by politicians who allowed our country to be run by foreigners.

It’s a wonderful technique he’s mastered, to be from the highest strata of the establishment, determined to swipe everything for the establishment, and appear anti-establishment. It’s like the Pope managing to get elected as leader of the DUP, because, at last, here is someone who is truly sick of Catholics.

For example, he had to send a letter he said he would never sign, to apply for an extension he said he would rather “die in a ditch” than seek. But instead of this being a humiliation, he fooled people into thinking he was still a cheeky urchin because he didn’t sign the thing.

This didn’t mean anything, as the letter counts whether he signed it or not. But even as a stunt, it lacked imagination. If he was really anti-establishment, he’d have signed the letter in rabbit droppings, nailed onto the back of a packet of Coco Pops. Or he’d have asked Priti Patel and Jacob Rees-Mogg to send an Instagram clip of them performing the letter in interpretive dance.

There is obviously a deep division in Britain, not just about Brexit, but about what sort of society we should create; whether it should encourage immigration, ask the wealthiest to pay to look after the vulnerable, not sell arms to psychopaths, and take some trouble not to fry the planet, or not bother with any of that because everything is the fault of someone or other who’s on benefits and probably foreign.

The one thing almost everyone is agreed on is that the old way of running things did leave millions of people poor, unstable and neglected, and has to be changed.

But Brexit is the issue around which this argument has revolved. So in general, those in favour of a more liberal world are on one side of the Brexit debate, and those who oppose it support the other.

To add to the confusion, Jeremy Corbyn appears to prefer to try and ignore the contest everyone is talking about, and concentrate on the subjects he’d rather discuss, such as schools and hospitals.

The trouble is, this is like being a judge at Crufts, and when asked who you think should win, saying: “I prefer cats.”

And the Liberal Democrats’ main objective is to be as foul as possible about Jeremy Corbyn. Boris Johnson could threaten to drop a nuclear bomb on Wiltshire, and when Jo Swinson was asked for a statement, she’d say: “Jeremy Corbyn stinks like a polecat.”

But if somehow Johnson wins an election, he’ll turn to Jacob Rees-Mogg and say “the idiots have fallen for it” in Latin. Then he’ll get on with it. And then we’ll all be in trouble.