If there is a commodity every politician would love to be able to bottle, it must surely be the "feel-good factor", that sense of wellbeing that Voltaire lampooned so effectively in Candide with the philosophy of Dr Pangloss: "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds". Ironically, it is our confrontational political system that helps to ensure that, like the end of the rainbow, that blessed state of universal satisfaction remains elusive.

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Any party in opposition devotes itself to playing on the discontents of sections of the population in order to rubbish the claimed achievements of the party in power. They know that they can rely for emotional backing and votes on the much more substantial “feel-bad factor”. Thus, for example, education and the NHS will remain contentious subjects as long as there are people with unhappy experiences of hospitals and schools. It was President Hoover who observed pessimistically, but I believe correctly, that consumer-led capitalist democracy produces “constantly moving happiness machines” controlled by their autocratic desires and expectations.

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