There is a particular indignity in being told your politics is broken by a visiting American, and a further one in largely agreeing with him. Two in three voters here backed Vance's diagnosis, an admission that arrives less as controversy than as consensus, which in its way is the more damning verdict on Westminster.
The pattern beneath the number does the real telling. Younger and middle-aged voters were near-unanimous, the under-45s piling in behind the "broken" verdict almost without dissent, while the 55-64s were the one group to genuinely wrestle with it, splitting close to down the middle. Women who registered a view were markedly more convinced than men, who divided far more evenly among themselves.
The result lands squarely on the fault line Vance himself drew: a decade of revolving-door premiers, an energy and cost-of-living squeeze, and a political class widely judged to have failed the people it governs. That the sharpest agreement comes from those with the least memory of pre-2016 stability suggests this is less nostalgia than a verdict on the only politics they have ever known.
If there is a consolation for Westminster, it is only that the dissenters were concentrated among men in late middle age, the group with the longest view of what "unbroken" might once have looked like.
2 Opinions
Not as broken as American politics where they vote in a corrupt rapist and hide the Epstein files
We need a government who are pro business. These Marxists are not.