I have taken a deep interest in British politics ever since I was a graduate student in London in the late 1970s. It was the winter of discontent with the statues in Leicester Square covered in uncollected rubbish up to their chins. Labour’s Jim Callaghan was the prime minister.

It was surely a point of no return, with the UK facing a sclerotic economy, a devaluing currency and intervention by the International Monetary Fund. The trade unions ruled the roost although living standards were seriously slipping.

Of course, an enormous amount has happened politically speaking over the past forty or so years and it’s been a source of great joy – OK, by and large – being an interested observer. But more recently, I have reached the point of relinquishing my close-to-obsessive attention to British politics because it is so damn depressing.

Of course, there have been some recent highlights and strange developments. How good was it when David Cameron, aristocratic fop and prime minister, was forced to bring on the Brexit referendum against his strongly remainer instincts? And to top it off, the sensible folk of Britain decided that their country should split from socialist Europe, much to the chagrin of the extremely well-paid financial spivs living in London.

(It is interesting in this context to recall the appalling green-obsessed then governor of the Bank of England, Canadian Mark Carney, inappropriately using an agency of the state to actively campaign against Brexit, including releasing completely dodgy research.)

It’s disheartening even to recall the tenure of Theresa May who took over from David Cameron. Her heart was never in the Brexit project and she made a complete hash of it. But the real legacy of her time in office was her full embrace of a legislated net-zero 2050 target, with all its bells and whistles.

In turn, this led to the reinvigorated Climate Change Committee attempting to interfere in the lives of hard-working Poms in the name of climate action and meeting arbitrary carbon budgets. To make things even worse, May, who has been hanging around like a bad smell, regards her climate policy as her finest achievement – pause for long groan.

Of course, the Boris era was a wild ride.  He deserves plenty of kudos for championing the Brexit cause; it was just a pity that he was so unengaged in actually making it happen. To this day, Britain is still a member of the European Court of Justice. Never a detail man, Boris’s negligence of bedding down the practical aspects of the UK’s divorce from the EU was a telling feature of his tenure.

But let me fast forward to the present and explain my sense of despair about the state of British politics. Having convinced a vast number of voters in the Red Wall seats north of London to vote Tory by appealing to their innate conservatism, the party has simply failed to follow up on this potentially never-to-be-repeated opportunity.

Immigration, patriotism, social values, affordable energy – these are the issues that could provide an ongoing source of electoral strength for the Tories. This is particularly the case on immigration, both illegal and legal. It’s clear that one of the reasons driving the Brexit vote was the dislike of the country’s inability to control its borders because of its membership of the EU.

It turns out that the UK has been perfectly capable of failing to control its borders entirely on its own. Not only is the arrival of young men on dinghies from across the Channel an almost daily occasion, the official rate of migration as measured by net overseas migration has barely budged since its pre-Brexit highs. The perception that asylum seekers get a better deal than struggling locals is political poison.

Let’s face it, the Rwanda ‘solution’ has come too late in the day and it would appear to have hairs all over it. (Australia is often mentioned as a model, but the truth is that both the Howard and Abbott governments were prepared to act quickly and decisively notwithstanding the moaning of the ‘progressive’ crowd.) The Tory party itself is deeply divided on Rwanda, from those who think the solution has not gone far enough to those who oppose it. And don’t get me on to the House of Lords.

The state of the British economy has also raised concerns for voters, particularly the emergence of significant inflation and a rising tax take. While the rate of unemployment is low by historical standards, it has been rising recently reflecting the flat economic conditions that prevail in many parts of the country. Like Australia, real household disposable incomes have been hammered in recent times.

While it is true that the current Tory Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has slightly walked back from the obsession of May and Boris about net zero 2050, his actual actions have been relatively trivial. EV sales will now not be enforced until 2035 rather than 2030. Why not dump the whole policy? What ever happened to consumer sovereignty? Sunak has issued a few new licences for gas drilling in the North Sea but any short-term impact will be slight.

As for the ridiculous idea of insisting on heat pumps to replace the efficient gas (and oil) heating that most British households use to heat their homes, the actual progress has been trivial. The whole exercise has demonstrated the incompetence of the bureaucrats advising on this policy as well as the stupidity of the politicians who accepted the advice.

Don’t even mention the NHS. What is it with the politicians’ devotion to an institution that is bloated with bureaucrats and delivers poor quality health care, particularly in certain parts of the country?

It’s pretty clear that Sunak will be smashed at the next election and the next prime minister of the UK will be Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer. When you can’t love the one you’re with, you vote for the other side. Not that Labour has any answers or will appeal to the vast numbers of citizens driven by love for family, flag and faith.

With first-past-the-post voting, large numbers of Tory parliamentarians will be out of a job and desperately seeking alternative employment. Were they to act rationally now, they would see the virtue of working in unison as a party and appeal to the conservative instincts of the voters that put them into power last time.

But I guess that’s just asking too much of this gaggle of MPs.

I’m sure psychiatrists would have a label for their behaviour. Maggie would be turning in her grave.