Why the sad demise of Change UK should shame us all

'Look at your hands,' implored Change UK's Joan Ryan. Instead, we used them to cruelly destroy and discard her hopeful new party

If it’s true we get the politicians we deserve, we also can’t have the ones we don’t. Change UK, aka The Independent Group, aka The Independent Group for Change is no more – its members now laid waste by an electorate who didn’t see the point.

Are we so cruel? Surely only the coldest of hearts could scorn the Tiggers for wanting to escape their two tribes, a nightmarish immigration and Brexit-themed country club piss-up on one side and a seething long-drop festival toilet on the other. And they didn’t just cut and run; they stood their ground and started a tribe of their own, albeit one defined by its rejection of tribalism.

But the exhausted, miserable and abused journalists Change urgently needed to intrigue and charm didn’t need something new, or an object of sympathy. They needed something to laugh at, and that ended up being Change’s signature contribution.

The ever-changing name, Look At Your Hands, “take me to the counter to be toasted” – it was, for a brief while, a wonderful little spectacle of pure farce. At what might well be remembered as the nadir of modern politics, to keep tabs on the ups and (mostly) downs of Change UK was like sneaking out of a badly-performed Götterdämmerung to watch Curb Your Enthusiasm on your phone in the opera house loos.

The upshot was a tragic waste of potential. Some of that’s obviously down to the group itself – the ineptitude, the anodyne presentation, the failure to attract the promised wave of defections – but plenty can be chalked up to forces beyond its control.

Take parliament’s odd conventions of seating and speaking order. As the backbench scourge of the ERG, Anna Soubry was respected in most quarters as a tough-minded and conscientious warrior, the fundamentally decent Boudica of a truly awful parliament.

Having relegated herself to Change’s cramped little corner, she was suddenly treated like an ornery suburban neighbour up in arms about a disputed hedge. With everyone too exhausted to listen, she and her earnest comrades might as well not have bothered.

Then the Lib Dems and the Brexit Party won the European Parliament elections, and the landscape was redrawn overnight. It wasn’t to last, but suddenly everything felt different – a four, or five, or six-way fight, the end of two-party politics at a time when the two big parties deserved more than ever to be knocked out. What need was there for this lifeboat of lost souls whose theory of politics had been proven wrong?

And so half of them abruptly abandoned ship, mainly to join the Lib Dems in their dribs and drabs (much good that it did them in the end). Soubry et al’s decision to press on despite the split and the mortifying Change.org lawsuit was noble, but just as futile as everything that had gone before.

Even set against the brutal injustice meted out to the Lib Dems at the 12 December election, when they earned more than a million new votes yet lost a seat, the demise of Change is particularly poignant. It also tells us a lot about where we’re headed now and why.

A headline like “Change abandoned after wholesale rejection and ridicule” would more or less sum up not just what’s happened to the Tiggers, but the entire net result of an election that gave us the biggest Tory majority since the year I was born. Now we face five years watching the constitution, electoral map and most public institutions get battered, torn up or rolled back in favour of an elite we claim to loathe.

It may well turn out to be the most retrograde era that anyone under 50 has ever lived through. If (or when) the Tory-friendly boundary changes go through, it may never end. And as far as our daft and rigged system is concerned, we voted for it.

Margaret Mead is supposed to have said, ”Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Clearly she never tried to start her own small political party in an adversarial parliament elected via a first-past-the-post electoral system. We now know for sure that when it comes to politics, the UK – its elections, its parliament, its commentariat, even its voters – just has no time for the little guy.

Change UK, we were not worthy.