“How did you go bankrupt?” asks a character in the Ernest Hemingway novel The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways”, comes the reply: “Gradually, and then suddenly.”
On Thursday the people of Peterborough go to the polls. Will they be bookending two weeks in which our two-party system suddenly went bankrupt? The Brexit Party is odds on to win the by-election. They could be surmounting the first-past-the-post barrier just as Labour did 100 years ago.
The Tory/Labour duopoly has, of course, been written off many times and always seems to endure. But nothing, as Echo and the Bunnymen sang, lasts forever. Are we at a momentous political tipping point?
