One might think after such a severe drubbing the politicians at Westminster might get the message, but they and their media colleagues have failed to understand once more.

Instead, they blame the Prime Minister, suggesting that a change of the person at the top would somehow turn things round. Of course it won’t. The public have not voted against Sir Keir. They have voted against a tired government and system which has run out of money and ideas, leaving people in ever-greater distress and more divided than ever.

The Emperor Nero knew what was important to him. It was presenting himself to his people as a great performing artist. Although violins were not invented in his time, popular memory records him as fiddling while Rome burned. In that anchronism lies a grain of truth. Instead of governing he cared about his personal reputation in his own hobbies, and the fiddling story encapsulates what became of his real reputation with ordinary people. It is not the job of a government to entertain the crowd. It is the job of government to govern wisely.

On today’s PM Catherine West MP demanded the Cabinet reshuffled itself and demoted Sir Keir to another position appointing someone else as Prime Minister. I am unsure what constitutional precedent there could be for such a move, but her justification of this strange action was that the Government needs to fight Reform if it does not want to see them forming the next government. Sorry, Ms West, but you’ve clearly lost the plot. The people don’t want the government to fight Reform or anyone else. The people want the government to fix the country and the world, so far as it can. Politics is not a game or a competition. It’s not about beating the opposition. It’s about running the country.

We’ve seen too much jockeying and politicking and concentrating on unimportant cosmetic issues from the “Westminster bubble”. The real world doesn’t care. It makes great copy for journalists so they encourage it, but the media should not be setting the agenda. That’s just a sideshow and should be treated with contempt by serious politicians running a serious government. This is not a game.

The reason people are turning toward new parties is they address matters which actually matter to sections of the population, not necessarily well, but at least they purport to care about what parts of the population care about; national sovereignty, the EU, or the environment. None of them represents where most people would stand, I suspect, but at least they stand for something meaningful and relevent to the future of this country and the wider world. That is why the electorate turns to them; they have a view of the world to represent.

Come on, wake up! Stop fiddling and start caring about real issues and come up with a plan to put them right. Find out what real people want and the country really needs and find a mechanism to bring it to fruition and unite us in the cause. Oherwise although it’s not a game it will soon be game over.