ANOTHER election, another upset for convention as voters eschew the ruling parties and pundits are left scratching their heads trying to understand what’s going on. Last year it was Brexit and Donald Trump. This weekend it was France. Next month it’ll be our turn.

I remember the ‘good old days’ – election nights of the 60s and 70s with Robert McKenzie’s famous ‘swingometer’ predicting the final result with unerring accuracy, even with only a few totals in.

Life was so much simpler then. After the General Election in 1924, British voters faced a simple choice – Labour or Conservative. But, in more recent years, as each party has pursued the ‘middle ground’ and targeted the relative handful of floating voters that decide an election, politics has become bland, virtually abandoned to a small coterie of career politicians leaving voters increasingly disillusioned… …Paving the way nicely for the rise of the political maverick – self-proclaimed political outsiders (invariably members of a privileged elite) who are adept at playing on the fears of those who feel ignored, disenfranchised and abandoned by traditional politics.

Outrageous and bizarre objects of fascination, they play the mass media at their own game turning Oscar Wilde’s social observation: ‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about’ into a political strategy.

My 11-year-old son takes a keen interest in the world. He listens to the news, asks questions about what is happening, and is beginning to form an opinion about how the world should be organised. Like most young people, he is an idealist, refreshingly untainted by the cynicism of his elders (his father in particular…) But I fear for the world in which he is growing up. A couple of years ago on a cycle excursion around Salzburg we passed a rather beautiful country house used as a set in The Sound of Music. “It’s part of the university now,” explained our guide. “Students come from all over the world to study here.”

My son surveyed it in awe across the shimmering lake. “Daddy,” he asked, “Could I go to University in Salzburg?” “Yes!” I replied enthusiastically, thinking that a degree anywhere in the world would now be cheaper than one in England. But two years on, that opportunity has dwindled. Britain is winding up the drawbridge on Europe. My son will become a citizen of Little Britain rather than a citizen of Europe and the World. In my lifetime I have been privileged to see walls come down and the world get smaller. So very sad that my son is growing up in a world where walls are being built, the biggest bomb yet is being deployed and a pre-emptive nuclear strike is a subject under discussion. Maybe bland wasn’t so bad after all…