HOW I SEE IT

Even his biggest fans would concede it was an awful start to the Prime Minister’s election warm-up in Yorkshire this week.

Boris Johnson’s big speech, set against a telegenic backdrop of Yorkshire police recruits, was a clunker, the faux-bumbling Boris routine falling dismally flat in front of an audience of mirthless senior Plods.

To cap it all, his declaration that he’d rather ‘be dead in a ditch’ than extend our membership of the EU was upstaged by a poor young copper keeling over behind him.

His opponents gleefully claimed this was all emblematic of a collapsing regime.

In fact, it was merely a vivid reminder that there are no certainties in politics.

Whenever this general election does come, nothing can be taken granted. normal rules no longer apply. no one, least of all the spin doctors, are in control of anything.

Having travelled to Wakefield to listen to the Prime Minister, I have been listening to the electorate, too. For it is areas such as West Yorkshire that will be key in the next election and, thus, Brexit.

And most people hereabouts view Parliament like a foreign country.

Opposition MPs primly take offence when Mr Johnson accuses Jeremy Corbyn of ‘surrendering’ to the EU or being ‘a big girl’s blouse’.

People in Yorkshire don’t seem bothered. They may not like Mr Johnson but they also believe that if you call the Prime Minister a ‘tinpot dictator’, you can’t whine when he hits back.

They do not regard this week’s Tory MP defector to the Lib Dems as a latter- day saint. Rather, they see a shifty politician abandoning one sinking ship for another.

They do not look upon the prorogation of Parliament as a ‘coup’, any more than they look upon the procedural scheming of the Brexit-blockers and tearful Tory rebels as a noble defence of parliamentary sovereignty.

Rather, they just see MPs on all sides behaving badly.

And I don’t find anyone who thinks a second EU referendum would be anything other than disastrous.

It’s not the usual moan: ‘Those politicians – they’re all the same/They all lie’ etc.

On Left and Right, among Remainers and Leavers, there is a rather more worrying mindset: MPs are merely pointless.

They might bang on sanctimoniously about ‘saving democracy’ but many voters have simply given up on it. As history shows us, that does not end well.

Take Anne and Mark Barber whom I meet in the centre of Wakefield. They run a cleaning machinery business, they both voted to Remain and they traditionally vote Tory.

‘We never wanted to leave the EU but let’s just get it done now. Whatever it takes. Deal or not,’ says Anne. ‘Finish Brexit and then worry about elections.’ T hey say that people regard Boris Johnson as a ‘clown’ but they don’t care as long as he gets this thing – which they never wanted – over the line.

‘It’s a pantomime, a nonsense. MPs – they’re just playing games,’ says estate agent Louisa Crook, a Lib Dem by inclination. Her husband, Michael, who runs a kitchen business, says he’d need ‘a gun to my head’ to vote for either Corbyn or Johnson – and he is a former Tory voter.

neither believes a general election will solve anything, let alone solve Brexit, and they’re unsure how they’ll vote.

Yet they are worried: ‘This is really serious for us and our businesses.’

This imponderable mess makes Theresa May’s snap election in 2017 look like child’s play. Back then, it was a largely binary vote: red or blue. Both the Conservatives and Labour were supposedly committed to implementing Brexit.

Ukip had all but vanished and the Lib