Want to be leader? Who cares?

Now there's nothing newsworthy there. And leaving aside the threat to disembowel Jeremy Corbyn it's not mean spirited. But I know what you're thinking. Imagine if an ambitious backbencher down in Oz, announced their leadership intentions at a time of leadership instability. Tony Jones' head would explode, Leigh Sales would be donning war paint and the Insiders crowd (which has all the representativeness of a Mississippi bridge club) would interrupt live coverage of the Queen's funeral.

Pathetic isn't it but sadly it is what our political 'journos' (ugh!) have reduced our otherwise fine democracy to.

And there are insidious consequences to all this. Non-responsive hyper-bland politics creates its equal and opposite effect. Trump and Hanson, both of whom are unfit to lead, have emerged as the confident, plain-speaking defenders of the ignored and maligned. It doesn't matter what they're promising, it is enough that they speak in regular language and give voice to the concerns of their voters.

Modern politicians in the Clinton, Cameron and Turnbull mould are bland, standardised, make no jokes, and show no humour. Bizarrely this hyper-risk avoidance is intended to be beneficial for the politician who engages in it. In reality, they are only avoiding the appearance of looking human. But their media strategists, rather like a doctor in the 1940s advising that Camel cigarettes were good for a patient's health, must be advising them that the effects are not negative.

Christopher Hitchens said that the trick to Bill Clinton's surviving scandals and indiscretions was the complete inability of his opponents to do him damage, 'if he doesn't hurt he doesn't suffer'. The stock-standard politicians, who have been systematically weakened, cower from the first signs of political difficulty and problems that need attention keep getting postponed. But politics doesn't stand still.

The present generation of (ugh!) 'journos' has created the lightweights it constantly beats up on, the side effect of which is the politically incorrect Trump's and Hanson's. Now that the by-products of their experiment have escaped the lab we can see how useless conventional political journalism has been at uncovering what is important to the voters. But that's our problem, not theirs.