Old Reliable

Britain's vibrant political culture is still alive and vibrating, according to another of those pointless polls. A third of Britons "do not trust any politician at all"; while the Glorious Successor is trusted by twelve per cent, and Daveybloke and the London Haystack rate a fifth each. In an intelligent and well-informed society, this might be accounted for by the fact that Daveybloke is not in power and therefore has relatively few opportunities to show how untrustworthy he really is; while the London Haystack doesn't have the basic equipment for making promises (foresight, ethical faculty, language faculty, higher cerebral functions, etc.) and therefore can hardly be said to break any. In a society of Sun and Mail readers, unfortunately, we are left with little alternative but to assume that a fifth of respondents really do believe that Daveybloke and the London Haystack are more trustworthy than Gordon Brown. If confirmation were needed, fifty-three per cent of respondents said that the Queen was the public figure they trusted most. The Queen's most significant political function is to sit in Parliament once a year and read out a speech written by the party in power. The party in power is that of Gordon Brown.