Wednesday 8th April

There is a political snowball which needed a mighty shove, but has now started moving, rolling over and over, slowly gathering pace, picking up debris and fresh snow as it begins to roll down the hill.   It has been obvious for years really, though most of us were happy not to see it.  There has been an increasingly large proportion of the electorate who do not vote, or have stopped voting or who no longer vote the way they always have, or the way their parents did.  At first it was simply moving over to the opposition, whichever that was, then they dabbled with the LibDems, who for a while sounded as if they might actually be different.  Now the snowball has coalesced on UKIP, and the unlikely but eminently likeable face of Nigel Farage, who looks and sounds like a second world war spiv, a car salesman, a smoker, a drinker, probably a gambler, in short the opposite of all the politically correct metro-sexual smart-suited leaders of the other parties.  And he smiles and laughs at difficult questions and insists he isn’t a politician at all.  In fact he is that extraordinary beast – a non-political charismatic leader of a political movement which threatens to push all the other parties aside, or at least to bump them along, shake them out of their complacency a bit, and he is certainly doing that.  I bet all the three leaders are dreading losing any of their MPs and facing a by-election at the moment.

Of course we will have to wait a bit and see whether the snowball gathers pace and keeps on careening down the hill sweeping all in front of it, or if the sun of reason begins to melt it and it ends up a damp squib, just a pile of slush with a fallen carrot and lumps of coal as the only sign of its once greatness.