In 1874, Charles Russell boldly predicted that the world would end in 1914, and that he would ascend to heaven in the 1878 rapture.  He was forced to re-evaluate: the rapture was moved to 1881, then it became metaphorical.  He belatedly became open to the idea of the world ending in 1915, then 1918.  Sadly, he died two years early.

Laughable as this may be, the unhappy guessing-game of the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses no doubt chimes with supporters of Britain’s minor parties, who have been beavering away at this far longer – and less successfully – than he did.  Each election is the rapture where Labour and the Tories will be ripped apart, and each election the second coming melts away.

But why is this still a thing?  We get daily reminders of Tory impropriety – most recently Nadhim Zahawi’s tax nonsense and Boris’s BBC chairman loan fiasco – which have led to historic third-party by-election victories.  Labour hasn’t let up on scandals either, with former Sheffield Hallam MP Jared O’Mara recently accused of trying to defraud the taxpayers of £30,000 to fund his coke habits.  Why isn’t their sleaze sapping support to the Lib Dems, the Greens, and Reform?

Maybe this would be understandable if, beyond the scandals, the government was at least getting things done.  But no: the NHS, the border, education, the railways, the Union, inflation, gender politics and the government finances are all in disarray – all of which has been fertile third-party ground in the past.

In 1974, in the midst of the three-day week, Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberals won nearly 20 per cent of the vote.  In 1983 the Alliance won over one-quarter – even after Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands victory – due to catastrophic unemployment and Labour’s suicidal manifesto.  In 2005 the Lib Dems prospered in opposition to war in Iraq, and in 2015 UKIP won 13 per cent of the vote in a backlash to high immigration. 

Yet,  despite our current misery, minor parties aren’t cutting through.  Take Reform UK, whose hapless leader Richard Tice is trying to convince GB News viewers that the Conservatives are traitors.  He has a strong populist case: the government did nothing about the 46,000 illegal channel migrants last year, and raised the tax burden to a record high.  A right-wing alternative should easily win this.  Instead, Tory voters have flocked to Labour.

The Lib Dems look like a safer bet as they already have MPs and are unlikely to choose maniacs as candidates.  Yet fewer voters support them now than in 2019 – when they lost their leader’s seat – and might put them on par with their 2015 wipe-out come 2024.  The Greens are also doing badly; even at a time when nearly 60 per cent of young people feel the government is betraying them on climate, their support in the polls has halved since COP 26.

So, I’ll let you in on the secret: these parties don’t appeal to us because they offer us nothing.  They dare not go beyond the tired Blairism of our major parties.  The only differentiators they have are ill-thought-through gimmicks that Labour and the Conservatives avoid – unless they’re led by Liz Truss – because they know they actually have to govern.

The 2019 Lib Dem manifesto, a good indication of their current platform, is a perfect example of this – excluding their Brexit promises, which aged like milk when we actually left the EU.  It offered a 1p levy for health and social care, a policy stolen then ditched by the Tories, free childcare (an extension of a 2015 Cameron policy), 80 per cent renewable energy, a frequent flyer tax, more teachers, and so on and so on – all boring stuff.  It is pathetically timid. 

Their only interesting policies – the gimmicks – were cannabis legalisation and proportional representation.  The first of these is a joke – legal marijuana in the US has not prevented illegal activity, and just because alcohol is legal doesn’t mean it is sensible to legalise another unhealthy product – and proportional representation will just turn our politics into an Israeli-style nightmare.

The Greens and Reform have an identical problem, which I won’t bore you with other than mentioning that the former’s 2019 manifesto included nonsense about an £86 billion universal income programme and spending £100 billion per year reducing emissions, and the latter merely supports a Truss programme on steroids, with silliness like abolishing “vast swathes of unnecessary regulations”.

So, their poor performance is no surprise.  We can already get all the sensible ideas the minor parties have from the big ones, and have no truck with the magic solutions of the politically desperate.  Unless they find a credible platform, or some achievable, transformational idea (like Brexit was spuriously sold as by UKIP), then a Lib Dem, Green or Reform victory will remain the kind of news analysed by Spartacus Mills in The Day Today – comedic fantasy even less likely than John Major punching the Queen.