It’s the one most striking paradox about 21st century democracy. The moment a politician starts to lose their grip on power, they lose their grip full-stop. Invariably, this heralds a bullish attempt to unpick the legitimacy of those who had exercised their democratic choice

Of course, the very same rogues had employed fakery and charlatanic manouevres to float to the top in the first instance, but they will never let that spoil a good story.

Take Trump, who is alleging electoral fiddles in the states he has lost, the ones that are yet to be called, but inexplicably not in the ones he has won. Well, seemingly incompatible for any credible fraud discourse, but not to those well-accustomed to political ‘cake’.

Closer to home, ‘Career’ Starmer has just piled onto the orange guy for this bluster blood vessel boloney (how this constitutes political opposition in the UK, who knows?) and has spooged up a little gemmaceous globule of political pre-cum. Yes, in Parliament, the Beige Eminence recited tonelessly from his papers to a near-comatose and empty front bench, ‘it is not for a candidate to decide which votes do and do not count’.

And so swiftly airbrushed out his own disastrous tenure as the Shadow Brexit Secretary who bust a nut to derail the majority will of a popular vote.

Of course, the Brexit post-mortem thrived on this premise. Among favoured fables for the fatuous fob-off facade were that the votes of the young were more important than those of the old and that those who voted for Brexit did not understand what they were voting for.

The wholesale paraphrasing of others’ personal thought processes betrayed not only the voting public but gold-medal arrogance. It also disregarded what democracy is all about. Flawed that it may be, everybody gets the chance to make their arguments, everybody gets to vote, and all the votes are equal.

Whingeing after the event is pure kindergarten, but lest we forget; these blaggards deny the principles of democracy in order to get achieve and maintain power and sulk when is doesn’t pan out. These games have arguably played out since the year dot, but now the arch-charlatans don’t even bother to pretend. Trump has not deigned to present the facts of voter fraud, and not because it’s all bollocks. He well knows that the masses are no longer interested in facts, so he is unconstrained in terms of his rhetoric and its content. A large section of the populace just acts on the basis of what they feel. It’s what makes the post-fact world so hazardous for us all.

Hey, you can be sure that this time around, we are not going see concession speeches of the quality and humility of those offered by George H.W. Bush or John McCain. Just like you never saw one after the Brexit poll. In the new world, when a vote gets lost, the vanquished do all they can to burn the joint down. There might be riots, certainly courts, and maybe even armed militia.

The voting public, whatever transpires, is punished through an insidious form of administrative terrorism that frustrates, stifles, and blocks progress. Never more has that needed to end than now in the midst of a pending economic meltdown.

Trump is just the highest-profile exponent of the decay, but it’s everywhere.

We need to fact up.