It was pretty much a given that standards in pubic life would take a hiatus when Boris Johnson took office. But when that building has hosted Tony Blair and John Major, it’s a little bit precious to be speaking as though any of this was unprecedented. Hypocrisy goes with the territory.

But those who are bleating on about it should probably take a time out to consider why they’ve failed to depose the PM. For a time, just before Christmas, it looked like they might succeed, but every day they push it now, the more it begins to irritate and bore the general public to the point where the balance of sympathy ends up on Johnson’s side.

There’s also that small matter of what they seek to replace him with. Johnson isn’t the crisis. The deeper political crisis is that we have the likes of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel and no matter how bad they get, no matter how useless they are, they are always preferable to the available alternatives.

We seem somehow to have drifted into the politics of extreme oppositism. The Tories (notionally) want to secure the borders, thus Labour wants open borders. The Tories want to end lockdowns so Labour wants to double down. Labour have a talent for positioning themselves in the least popular position on everything from Covid to transgender rights. When it comes to Net Zero, Labour would go harder and faster on all the worst aspects of this Tory flagship policy. Everything is performative, nothing is evaluated.

For a long time now the Tories have been able to get away with saying “at least we’re not Labour”, and though in recent months that has been far less persuasive, it will still be a deciding factor at the next election. And it’s why the Tories will win – albeit with a reduced majority. By all rights they should lose on the basis of their performance, but Labour will save their bacon. Labour manages a unique blend of gormlessness, obnoxiousness and grubbiness that the Tories at their worst could never match.

Moreover, there aren’t any alternatives to Boris Johnson in the Tory party either. There are certainly less frivolous and outwardly more sensible people, but one notices the centrist tendency is even worse than Johnson on Net Zero, more inclined to slavishly do the bidding of spreadsheet pushers, and apparently very eager to have us back at war with someone. None of which is better than the shambles we presently endure.

At this point, we might as well accept that this carnival of sub-mediocrity is the best our system, as is presently constituted, can produce. This is as good as it gets without a major overhaul – which we won’t get, not least because the people who propose systemic reform are among the worst people in politics. See Lucas, Caroline. The supposedly good and decent people (as opposed to Boris Johnson) are the narcissistic virtue signallers who scramble on to every passing bandwagon – whose politics are closer to Stroud than Doncaster.

As is so often the case the real opposition can be found on the Tory benches. If the insanity of Net Zero is to be brought down, then it will be the usual bunch of backstabbing bastards, but as with Brexit, the majority of parliament is out of synch with the public. That’s why we sill need a UKIP to make them afraid for their jobs and remind them who they work for. They didn’t get the message last time, and we have to keep reminding them.

When it comes to it, these people aren’t capable of thinking outside their own dismal little boxes. The push for electric cars says everything about how they think. It never occurs to them that productive people need readily available long distance mobility, and perhaps don’t have a drive way or private charging station. Nor do homeowners have the spare cash to downgrade to a heat pump or subsidise windmills. MPs just charge the heating bills for their second homes to their expenses.

Their attitudes to immigration are similar in that the immigrants they know are all from well-to-do internationalist families, and not the machete weilding child groomers they witlessly unleash on Wigan and Leicester – maintaining the fiction that Dover invaders are refugees. In their eyes the problem isn’t that we’re importing scroungers and rapists – it’s that we’re allowed to talk about it – which they will soon fix with their Online Safety Bill.

On that score there isn’t much of a difference between Labour and the Tories. We can be reasonably assured that the deadbeat middle class Tory clone hoping to replace David Amess will adopt socially convenient positions on everything from Net Zero to immigration. It says a lot that MPs these days are so politically similar that there is no ideological barrier to crossing the floor.

Like it or not, this is the system we’re stuck with until the public breaks from traditional voting habits, and that may never happen. But UKIP proved that change is possible through small and persistent actions. We don’t have to win seats to call the shots. We just have to make a decent dent. And that is possible if you decide to be part of the solution.