First an admission. As an alleged election expert with nearly 50 of the things notched on my bedpost I should be pretty good at picking a result. While this was the case for many years, I was wrong about our federal election, wrong about Brexit, wrong about the Queensland election and wrong about the rise and rise of Donald Trump.

Senility is a possible explanation, but I suspect it’s something rather more ominous, because every election expert I can think of got these wrong too. As Buffalo Springfield warbled so plaintively, ‘There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear …’ For yes, things seem to be changing, orthodoxy and the notion of collective consensus are being slowly dismissed—and it’s much bigger than politics.