I know how Father Damo feels. The delinquent young priest in Father Ted arrives on Craggy Island, clocks the situation, and immediately starts leading poor Dougal astray – not from malice exactly but from something more honest: there is simply nothing here worth taking seriously. The mischief is not the point. The boredom is.

I am bored like that. Bored with petty socialists who have mistaken the slow annexation of every institution for a political philosophy. Bored with the men and women the business community keeps fielding against them – figures who wear the costume of conviction without the content, who mouth enterprise and reform and the national interest with the hollow fluency of people who have never believed a word of it and never expected to be asked. The stage is crowded. The drama is negligible.

At least last year we had a contest of ideas. Not from Sussan Ley or David Littleproud, of course, but from Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, from Andrew Hastie, and from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. cast member Matt Canavan. Andrew and Matt have since shown some lapses of judgement, on disarming Iran and on uniting the right respectively.

Even the world beyond Canberra has lost its power to compel attention. Serial celibate, Pope Leo XIV, aka Bobby Prevost, has looked in his archive and found inspiration for backing the wrong side. Apparently disarming a regime that only this year killed tens of thousands of its own people is the delusion of omnipotence. The solidarity of the kaftan wearers. You see why I am bored now?

I was looking forward to Artemis II. Some magnificent pictures of the blackness of space. Even the infinite heavens managed to underwhelm.

And yet the intensity of the times has to go somewhere.

A quite ordinary Irish chap, Graham Linehan, created Father Ted in the Nineties. In recent years he has been subjected to a campaign of professional destruction so disproportionate to anything he actually did that the word controversy seems almost quaint.

He became persistently critical of gender self-identification legislation. A West End production dropped him, writing partnerships dissolved, a Father Ted musical was cancelled. Last September, stepping off a plane at Heathrow, he was arrested for some tweets. No charges followed.

A sitcom writer was converted into a moral emergency, with five armed officers dispatched to meet him at the gate. One reaches for the word disproportionate, then remembers that somewhere in the apparatus of the Starmer government, someone found this entirely reasonable – and had sufficient access to the Metropolitan Police to let them know that Linehan was considered someone worth intimidating. That, in its way, is the more interesting fact.

The explanation lies further back than social media, further back than the identity politics of the 1990s, further back even than the organised left as most people understand it. It begins when the self is prised loose from the ordinary world and invited to sit in judgment upon it. Once that happens, common life loses its claim on us. Dissatisfaction with the everyday is no longer vanity or immaturity – it becomes evidence of seriousness. Identity ceases to be something quietly inhabited and becomes something that must be proclaimed, performed and vindicated. Politics, cheap and available, turns out to be a perfect vehicle.

This explains the peculiar social profile of the modern left. Its shock troops are not the poor. They are the comfortable and the credentialled – people who have every material reason for contentment and have converted that contentment into a sourceless grievance. They do not want bread. They want significance. They want the sensation of struggle without its costs, sacrifice without its losses, righteousness without the grinding inconvenience of actual virtue. They want, in short, a religion – and the left, having spent a century mocking religion, has spent the last thirty years becoming one. Even the pope is considering converting, or so it seems.

Joseph de Maistre, a counter-revolutionary watching the French Revolution in full beast mode, saw this coming: destroy the inherited structures of authority, faith and belonging, and you do not produce free and rational individuals. You produce a spiritual vacancy into which something far less stable will rush. The hunger for reverence does not disappear when the churches empty. It finds new objects. It finds, in due course, new heretics like Linehan.

In the Odyssey, the dead cannot speak until they have drunk blood. They drift and murmur, insubstantial, until life is given to them. Wilamowitz, who made his name insisting that the past must be recovered honestly rather than recruited to serve someone else’s teleology, observed that the spirits we summon demand the blood of our own hearts – that we animate the past with our own urgency and must eventually distinguish what we have added from what was there. The hard part is remembering which pulse is theirs and which is yours.

Modern Labor-Green politics has no such discipline. It supplies the blood in advance, extravagantly. A housing crisis is genuine enough, but it is intractable and unglamorous – planning permissions, construction costs, administrative grind, no martyrs, no denunciation. A moralised cultural dispute, by contrast, delivers revelation, solidarity, and the exquisite pleasure of watching someone be destroyed for insufficient compliance. The result is a politics that is genuinely alive – ferocious, even – in the way a fire is alive when you keep feeding it other people’s furniture and call it warmth.

Even at the summit the pattern holds. In Australia, Anthony Albanese presents the soft and slightly bewildered managerial face while the government’s real moral conviction – its crazed ideological current – runs through Penny Wong, who supplies the certainty, the direction, and the cold purposefulness the nominal leader has never possessed. In Britain, Sir Keir Starmer occupies the office while Ed Miliband, restored and burning with the zeal of a man history has mysteriously vindicated, drives the ideological current bequeathed by a father who chose his burial plot so as to be in sight of Marx’s gravestone. It is not an energy Starmer himself could generate on a good day with a running start. In both countries the elected leader is the popular front. Behind him stands the programmatic revolutionary, seeking reckoning with someone, anyone. The people who animate the left are not the ones the voters elect.

What leftist grievance cannot do, and has never done, is govern well. Governing means collision with a reality that does not reorganise itself around simple moral preferences. The modern left is not planning a terror. But then, it never does. That is rather the point.

It has retained the blood and lost the object. Father Damo, at least, knew he was just mucking about.