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At what point, as you consider the prime minister’s shortcomings more in sorrow than in anger, as you size up likely successors and try to wonder, idly, whose wallpaper we’re on in Downing Street, do you start to think that you, the electorate, are the problem? If Keir Starmer falls on his sword, we’ll be on to our sixth prime minister in seven years. “The first five guys were just the wrong five guys” starts to sound like the kind of thing Liza Minnelli would say, called upon to account for a life of torch songs. It’s the kind of thing Italy would say. Doesn’t there come a point in every electorate’s life that it has to splash some cold water on its face?

I think this is more or less where the grownups are landing, on the question of our present turmoil. Starmer is reportedly readying his MPs to vote down any prospective sleaze inquiry, which should be pretty straightforward, given the size of his majority. Finally, the guy discovers what his landslide is for: preventing a parliamentary process identical to the one he himself used to bring the last guy down. Sorry, the last guy but two. Seriously, people, if we reject all this, we make ourselves ungovernable, consign ourselves to the civic equivalent of a life on the shelf, always questing after some fresh bureaucrats, only to tear them apart when things get ugly.

It’s weird to be thinking about Brenda “Not another one! Oh for God’s sake!” from Bristol again. In the all-time classic of the vox pop genre, the voter was reacting to news of another snap election – but not Boris Johnson’s, in 2019, nor the post-Truss Tory leadership election, but Theresa May’s, in 2017. In many ways it feels like yesterday – the same creeping sense that politics wasn’t about democracy at all, but rather, a weird circus of levers pulled to remind us of democracy, while it shored up the power of the weak. There was also the same fog of contradiction: how could Westminster be so dramatic and so eventful, and yet so boring and so arid?

It’s considered a bit vulgar to mention it, but that’s been our politics since the day after Brexit, though many of the shocks since have not been Brexit’s fault. Did Dominic Cummings create Covid? You can see him punting to take the credit if he thought it would seal his reputation for multidimensional chess – but no, he did not. Nobody from Reform or any of its previous iterations persuaded Putin to invade Ukraine.

The through-line is nothing so literal: 2016 merely marked the point at which politicians ceased to even try dealing with the world as it was. Dog behaviourists call it one-trial learning – burn your nose on a barbecue one time and you stay away from it. Stand in front of an electorate, say “This is going to make you all poorer, with no discernible benefit”, and lose, one time, and you stop saying what’s real – en masse! It’s pretty extraordinary, the synchronisation, but then “group” is the one kind of think Westminster has always been good at.

In place of concrete plans from a world that exists, there’s been a carousel of promises whose only difference is their phrasing. They’ll level up, they’ll create a Britain Britons deserve. You want your life to be better, and they want that too. Thus it will be better, because they mean it this time. Things will improve because of the growth they create, and even the stupidest of them know that modern governments can’t just conjure that, while the smartest of them know that governments have never been able to. We thought we’d grown out of the grand fantasy that everyone’s problems are some foreigner’s fault – but, on the contrary, fellow electors, we need to grow up more, if we’re ever going to be mature enough for these politics of ours.

The people saying Brexit was a terrible mistake, and one that needs to be reversed – Neil Kinnock at a Best for Britain event; the Labour MP for Battersea, Marsha de Cordova – sound like, well, if “fantasists” is too strong, let’s go with “dreamers”. But that’s the only way politics is ever going to grow up, unfortunately – by describing reality as it is.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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