Forget – if you can – the lies of the past dozen years or so; the gross incompetence; the sheer human stupidity, even, of those who were supposed to be looking after the people’s best interests, in those years of political mayhem, international crisis, and pandemic. What gets me – and what I think lies behind a lot of this – is the trivialisation of British politics that Boris Johnson personified, but which of course – as I know as a historian – went back some years before him. (Probably to the 1890s.)

So it wasn’t entirely new. The crucial difference now however is that that opinion-makers – especially the ‘tabloid’ newspapers (including now the Telegraph), and of course the ‘social media’ – have realised, embraced and exploited this trivialisation, for their own political or personal ends. Serious politics is marginalised; elections reduced to a popularity show, or just a ‘game’, in the other papers and on social media; and policies or serious argument are scarcely featured at all. Instead it’s Ed Milliband with his bacon butty; Boris with his ‘bendy bananas’ (which he claimed the EU were plotting to ban) and new European regulations for condoms (to cater for the less well-endowed Italians) – which steal the headlines, appealing as they do because they’re ‘fun’. (Both the latter claims of course were untrue.) It could be that it was jokes like these, and his general image of clownish bonhomie, that won Johnson the 2019 Election. That; and having a ‘serious’ candidate standing against him. Whatever you may think of Corbyn, at least his policies were thought-out.

Do the trivialisers realise what they’re doing? Or do they genuinely believe in the trivia they churned out? In Boris’s case, I get the impression that it didn’t much matter to him. It was all just part of the game of politics, bearing about as much relation to truth and reality as would a clever speech for the Eton College debating society. (Eton is almost the quintessence of upper-class triviality.) For the more popular Press – ‘yellow’ or ‘gutter’ as it used to be called – the original decision to go trivial, a hundred-odd  years ago, was a marketing one, based on what was conceived to be a popular demand. The newspaper magnate Lord Harmsworth (a Tory, of course) held that the ‘lower’ classes were only interested in sex, sensation and sport (today we could add another ‘S’, Strictly), and so concentrated his new Daily Mail’s reportage on those three things. ‘Do not forget that you are writing for the meanest intelligences’, its reporters were instructed. They never have forgotten, in 130 years. Hence the trivial nature of today’s tabloid press.

That – the press – must be a reason behind much of this trivialisation. This sort of media is not found in every country; not in Sweden, for example, where even the evening papers – the closest equivalents to the British tabloids – have serious political reportage (albeit alongside those three S’s); and even issue ‘Culture’ or ‘Arts’ supplements. (Americans may recognise the genre more easily.) Maybe the problem really is that we Brits (and Americans) are more superficial than the Swedes, more jokey (my Swedish friends think so), more sport- and sex-obsessed, and less interested in real politics; in other words more trivial ourselves. In that case, the trivialisation must be our own fault. Otherwise they – the rich newspaper proprietors – are foisting it upon us. I don’t know.

Trivialisation may not lie at the root of Britain’s present political troubles. The aforementioned lies, incompetence and stupidity are probably more significant, and behind them, no doubt, the monster of ‘late-stage capitalism’ (those press magnates). But it must enable those troubles, to a significant extent.