Perhaps it’s not surprising that so many of us find aspects of politics difficult to understand. Even in a black-and-white subject like arithmetic, the fact that there is a correct answer means that there is an infinitely large number of incorrect answers, so we’re always more likely to be wrong than right.

Politics isn’t like arithmetic; the calculations depend on subtle and shifting interpretations, predictions that are impossible to make, and worst of all, the whims of large numbers of people. Just as there are lots more ways of being wrong than there ever are of being right, however, there are several different ways of failing to understand politics.

The ones that we can dismiss, or at any rate, can’t blame someone else for too much, are those where it is your own fault. In this category, into which politicians are just as likely to fall as the rest of us, are things such as not knowing the cost of a pint of milk, what the average salary is (MPs are astonishingly guilty of that), or how much we spend on foreign aid.

Some are more readily excusable, because they’re counter-intuitive. It’s very difficult, for example, to persuade people that the amount of wealth is not fixed, and that when one party gains from a transaction it doesn’t mean the other one loses.

Then there’s not paying enough attention: a lot of people said, as if it were a revelation, that Dominic Cummings, in his interview the other week, looked as if he was trying to destroy the party he’d been working for. This is hardly the “Gotcha!” they seem to think, since he’s often declared his contempt for the Conservative party. It’s like discovering that Jeremy Corbyn would rather see Cuba’s tyrannical Marxist government do well, and the USA’s democratic one do badly. It may be deplorable, but it’s not a secret.

Then there’s the thing where we take a position: we’re for or against fox-hunting, say, or nationalisation of the railways, and we can’t see why anyone would disagree. This is a tendency we all have, and it has very little to do even with the question of whether – as on very rare occasions may be the case – there’s a right answer, and it’s the one we happen to support. Mostly we understand that views differ, even if we can’t for the lives of us see why, but it’s true that some people literally find it impossible to see why people would back other positions.

That is a serious failing, because it leads not merely to intolerance, but often to characterising your opponents as malignant or evil. But it is idiotic to think that all Tories hate the poor, that all SNP voters hate the English, or that all Labour voters want to recreate the USSR.

But of all the political misunderstandings, the one that’s hardest to comprehend is when a party seems to be acting in a way that ought to alienate its own supporters, and yet continues to thrive.

At the moment, lots of people dislike the UK government. Naturally, the Corbynite hard Left does, because it’s a Tory one (even though, because of the pandemic, its economic policy has turned out to be more Left-wing than Mr Corbyn’s manifesto proposals). Naturally, pro-independence voters do, because it opposes independence. And naturally, a lot of libertarians – a group that in recent decades has included many who regarded the Conservatives as the least objectionable choice – do, because its policies have been notably illiberal. Bizarrely, a lot of other people wound up by the pandemic complain that the government isn’t being illiberal enough, but one suspects that they already dislike them for other reasons, and are just using this as another excuse to complain.

Then there’s the purely personal view of Boris Johnson: liar, charlatan, clown, and all the rest of it. All politicians get this sort of thing, but the Prime Minister to an unusual degree. Whether his own character defects merit this reaction is largely irrelevant; similar complaints and worse could have been accurately made of Churchill or Gladstone. But those who take this view seem baffled to read, as they do every week, that the Conservatives are eight or nine points ahead in the polls, and Mr Johnson is far and away the most popular party leader.

The point on which I find the Government’s position difficult to understand, however, is far more basic: what, actually, is that position? What does it stand for? Why would people who might normally at least consider voting Conservative – either because they are conservative, or reactionary, or because they are libertarian, or believers in classical liberalism on the radical Whig model, to which a significant section of the party has subscribed in recent decades – vote for this current incarnation?

It has, after all, thrown all the usual Tory fiscal restraints out the window. It has introduced authoritarian restrictions on liberties, but – immigration aside – not the ones that would usually appeal to those of a reactionary temperament. Most of the things on which it seems keenest – a radical, coercive and very expensive green agenda, strict regulations on lifestyle choices such as diet, wild spending on grand projects like HS2, and backing large, monopolistic corporations (as opposed to small businesses and the free market) – could have been designed to irritate natural conservatives. Official papers being required to go to the shops or the football is the literal opposite of bread and circuses.

Not every government has a vision for change of the sort that characterised, for example, Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair’s (not that they were entirely consistent or successful, even in their own terms). Perhaps the public prefers a sort of Butskellism, or technocratic managerialism. But I can’t help thinking that, if the government doesn’t start taking a view on what it wants, there’s no reason why anyone should understand why it might be worth voting for it.

At the moment, its popularity – even if it baffles its opponents – is probably due to the slack it has been cut because it is dealing with an emergency, the fact that the Labour party remains ineffectual and unpopular, the PM having managed to get some sort of resolution to Brexit, and his peculiar personal charisma. I cannot see that those will remain strong draws forever.

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