Will the leftish parties unite to stop Nigel Farage from becoming PM?

It's time to start thinking about electoral pacts - though now it's near impossible to see how a bargain would be struck

- Andrew Rawnsley

As one of our prime ministers once said in a different context: The kaleidoscope has been shaken.The pieces are in flux. The political landscape, its colour scheme previously dominated by blue and red, now looks like a psychedelic abstract in the style of Jackson Pollock. In this brave new world of shattered traditional allegiances, Reform has led in every survey of opinion for more than six months and currently stands at 27 points in the poll of polls. Not bad for a popup party which has only been in existence for four years, but way below the levels of support which would fully justify Nigel Farage's brag that he is going to be the prime minister. Labour and the Tories are knocking around 17 to 18 points. At the 1951 general election, their combined vote share was so colossal it came to nearly 97%. Today the former giants of our politics are so diminished that they can rustle up the support of barely over a third of voters. The Lib Dems are in the low teens. The surge to the Greens since Zack Polanski became the party's leader has made them the first choice of voters under 35 and they sit at 14 points in the poll of polls.

That kind of multiparty divide will not startle you if you live in the Netherlands. This degree of fragmentation is familiar to many countries with proportional representation. Brexit Britain has weirdly ended up with a more European kind of politics. Which wouldn't be such a headache if we were not still saddled with a first-past-the-post voting system, which is less fit for purpose than ever. Election results become wildly unpredictable when five outfits are in contention - six in Scotland and Wales - and none of the UK-wide parties has the support of more than one in three people.