William Porteous brings you his thoughts on the local election landscape

I’m writing this before the fact and you’ll be reading it after the fact. Folks, it’s local elections and that can only mean one things: it’s the time when potholes become more exciting than Rick Wakeman’s capes and The Cribs new album combined.

Democracy becomes a buzz word and suddenly we’re in the middle of spin mania as Labour make even more ground on the Tory soft vote. How exciting; thrilling even?

It’s like Father Christmas has stumbled down the stairs drunk six months too early, dragging the exhausted figure of the Easter Bunny with him.

Our democracy is more stuck in the water than Father Christmas on Boxing Day, fresh out of angel dust to get his slay moving. Sorry to burst the bubble I worked half heartedly at to create for you. If you are the type of person that thinks your vote counts, then, all I can say is, you’re wrong.

I see quite a few signs hither and thither dotted around the country lanes of Norfolk and Suffolk and, thankfully, they’re nearly all for the Green Party. Of course, this won’t result in anything more than a minuscule shift in the Green share, but it’s good to see nonetheless.

I don’t think this country is ready for the enormous shift required to have long and lasting change on an environmental level, but it’s sweet.

It’s sort of like when your granny makes an effort to listen to your music when you were a child. “The Prodigy, darling? It sounds a little too upbeat for me.”

Thanks to our lovingly creaky David Attenborough, people will listen more willingly to Caroline Lucas and the Greens because they’re sort of being slowly pulled around to the idea that the planet is slowly dying.

The only problem is that real change can’t happen in this country because (wait for the slow, ironic, blubbery drum role) the first-past-the-post system favours the status quo.

It also favours our core British values: ignore it and hope it all goes away; and please stand quietly in that queue.

To have a more democratically fair electoral system is too much democracy for most people to swallow. “My grandad didn’t fight the Nazis so we could have too much democracy,” cries somebody at the back of the room.

Proportional representation is a terrifying prospect for most people simply because it means having to use up some of the bandwidth that they’ve put aside for shopping online or moaning about gender realignment.

The reality is that people want to be subservient to something they can’t fully grasp because, if they did grasp it, you’d have a collective physiological landslide like Del Boy falling through the bar.

I can hear some people crying out in a dry lamentable tone: “It’s so much democracy though. Voting for more than one party or person? It sounds like something Hitler would want me to do if Hitler wanted to mess with my head. Let’s just keep voting for King Charles and Greggs.”

The coronation is a pretty good example of what I’m stumbling towards. Don’t ‘cancel’ me for this but isn’t it all a bit nauseating?

How much are these endless bank holidays costing us, followed by an impossibly fiscally stratosferic coronation? Are there not more pertinent avenues we could be putting these vast sums of money into?

If you think about it for a moment and let the mind-blowing levels of democracy seep into your eyes for just a second, it’s quite alarming.

I’m suggesting that the coronation we’re having tomorrow is all very lovely and pretty but only if every high street in the land wasn’t struggling; if every community wasn’t, in some way or other, utterly on its knees.

I’m not saying the economy isn’t helped out by Americans coming over and taking pictures of royal things and buying fridge magnets but can’t we approach the royal family and its vast land ownership and wealth a little more like our outdated self-serving voting system? We need a little more inquest and less blind adoration.

I’m bang up for old Charlie giving loads of attention to climate change and he’s done amazing things with the Prince’s Trust, but let’s hope he and his troubled family focus more on the few issues that aren’t given vital oxygen.

Before I go, can I just further add how missed Megan will be tomorrow. I think underneath all the Hollywood drama there’s a human being there that was probably treated a little poorly. However, if there is a sudden change of plans and she does decide to come to the big day, I hope Jeremy Clarkson stops her at the airport with a fresh bucket of horse poo.

Who wouldn’t pay to see that? Jezza, in his oversized 90s blazer, fuming and frothing trying his hardest not to spit out some tripe, and Megan trying not to notice as a group of tourists fall over themselves for selfies with her.

We’re such a funny lot aren’t we? We care so much about being a fully functioning democracy that we forget people are allowed to do and say what they like, more or less.

I do think, however, we should spend less time worrying about the Royal Family and get our heads down and think about the outright atrophied state of our voting system.

We don’t really want more of the same do we? Sorry, yes we do. I keep forgetting which country I’m in.