David Dimbleby always cheers, as if Sunderland's returning officer has won an Olympic sprint final, when what he has recorded is the mass abstention and passive despair of the unrepresented. There are Panglosses on the Left as well as the Right. The refusal to participate isn't a sign that workers' revolution is round the corner. And although I think the electorate is on the whole a little more decent than Philip Gould believes, I doubt if there are millions of secret bleeding hearts out there either. The poll-driven parties aren't completely foolish.
Hate sells better than sex, as every tabloid editor knows.
There is a market for the endless 'crusades on crime' and assaults on asylum-seekers and civil liberties. I guess the goods aren't shifting with their former speed because we' ve had almost a decade of screams for toughness from assorted Howards, Straws and Widdecombes and their respective claques in Fleet Street. It's been a long and wearying time since Tony Blair began the gesture-politics arms race when he exploited the murder of Jamie Bulger. Perhaps they are also beginning to wonder about the focus-group organisers' claim that they are the engineers of democracy who objectively record public desire and recommend pragmatic policies which Blair and Hague can sell to the masses. Yet when the market research tells stories which upset business interests, the populist leaders of the two main parties somehow find the inner strength and sheer bloody guts to be very unpopular indeed.