I won’t bore you with how unfathomably terrible I think the new cabinet is. Suffice to say, we now live in a post-merit world where people are rewarded not on their competence, but on how festering and morally septic their unguarded id has become.

So now we have Priti Fucking Patel as Home Secretary. A woman whose only other success is the degree of useful idiocy she has managed to achieve. And Michael Gove – the poor man’s Michael Gove – stands out like a single solid, healthy turd floating in an ocean of explosive diarrhea.

Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to bore you about. What I wanted to bore you about is an ancient secret that I’ve just discovered and nobody else apparently knows about. It is the secret of compromise.

The reason we have Boris – the reason we were always going to end up with Boris – is because there was no real opposition to stop him occurring. Labour have offered no meaningful obstacle from the outside and the Tory moderates haven’t put up much of a fight from the inside.

Which probably has Tory moderate and Labour supporters reading this going “what are you on about? They’re doing everything they can to oppose this nonsense!”. But, only, if you think about it… they aren’t. They are doing everything that want to do. Everything within their comfort zone, perhaps. But not everything that could and need to do.

Labour aren’t because a large part – but far from the entirety – of the party thinks Corbyn could be a great Prime Minister if only people understood his position better. There’s two problems with this.

First, he would need to properly articulate and then stick to some positions. Mumbling a lot of positions that are obviously noncommittal and designed to be walked back at the first possible moment is not a failing of the electorate to understand you. If anything, it is a profound success of the electorate in doing exactly that.

Second, it just isn’t true. Corbyn appeals to the far left and, to a lesser extent, the medium-left. The left that is still pretty pink in the middle, but doesn’t have any blood. Probably because it’s all vegan nowadays. But the idea that an electoral majority of this country can be won over to this mid-far left ideology is utterly farcical. I’m fairly left-leaning and the idea of Corbyn – or more importantly, the Leninist vampire cult around him – running this country is a horrible one.

But Labour activists and membership won’t accept this. The fact that Corbyn can’t even unite his own party, let alone the nation at large, is talked down as some sort of conspiracy. Instead of offering a compromise candidate who could actually win and advance their cause to some degree, they insist on everyone letting Len McClusky pat them down for loose change before bed each night.

So, no external opposition to stop the Tories. And internally, the Tory ‘rebels’ are oblivious to the irony of why they can’t get more done. An irony which, in this situation of all situations, should be deafening to even the already deaf. Because, unless they are willing to leave their party and deprive it of a majority, why should the leadership care? Brexit will happen the hardest of possible ways unless Boris and Co. genuinely believe their detractors will walk away and sink the whole thing.

How do I know this? Because that is their own strategy with Brexit. It is their language. It is how they operate. They won’t compromise unless forced to. And the only thing that will force them to is other people learning to compromise between themselves. Tory MPs leaving the party to which their only attachment is emotional; Labour giving up their messiah in exchange for someone who isn’t utterly repellent to everyone to the right of Fidel Castro.

The truth is, people don’t tend to change their minds much and when they do, most of them won’t do it based on facts or logic. They’ll do it based on feelings. Trying to win people over based on ideology is the work of decades of sustained cultural change at the very least. Doing that by outright attacking their current mascot – or even thinking that it is the mascot that you need to defeat – will never get the result you want.

If the far left could accept that the rest of the country doesn’t want their socialist revolution, they could have won the last election and none of this would have ever happened. Now things are more desperate than ever and, based on past form, I suspect them to double down on the denial and make an even bigger mess than they already have.

Until people remember that democracy is about finding a middle-ground that suits pretty much nobody but offends the most of them the least amount possible, we are stuffed. Because it isn’t about winning over people to your cause. It is about pushing for your cause to be represented within – not completely in control of – the body of governmental decision-making.

The only thing that happens when you do that is you turn the race into who can be the most extreme. And the problem with doing that is that the people who are the most extreme are, by definition, extremists. And thus we no longer have a functioning democracy and the ruins of the one we did have are about to be pillaged by talentless narcissists.

So can people please stop banging on about how No-Deal or Corbyn or whatever is what the country really wants and perhaps stop to find out what it is the country does really want? Even – and I can’t stress this enough – when it turns out that what the country really wants isn’t what they personally really want. Because compromise, like charity and bouts of norovirus, begins at home.