Tomorrow four judges will once again try to thwart the will of the people by passing judgement against a senior politician. No, I’m not talking about Brexit but about Strictly Come Dancing.

Last weekend, I came across the Strictly results show while looking for the live broadcast of Andy Murray’s triumph against Novak Djokovic and was amazed to see that man of substance, Ed Balls, still in the competition.

What’s more he has yet to feature in the dance off of the two lowest placed celebrities after the public vote, despite his embarrassing lack of dancing ability. Every week the judges place him at the bottom of the leaderboard and every week the public happily vote for him to stay in the competition.

I got the impression from the judges’ body language that when they eventually do get their chance and he is in the dance off, they won’t even bother looking at the other couple’s performance before bundling him out of the competition and off our screens.

I can only assume one of two things has happened. The less likely is that Labour HQ, desperate for any win this year, has sent out a three-line whip to all its members that like bling, cheese and kitsch, to vote for him. The more likely is that a sizeable part of the population enjoys watching a former Cabinet Minister and shadow chancellor making an absolute idiot of himself, week in week out. The anarchists are at work again, holding up two fingers at the establishment.

If this continues, we could see a non-dancer win the glittering ball, which would be the parody of parodies of a programme that has long since become a parody of itself.

Normally in a popularity competition a professional politician would expect to come last. They are the class that likes to think that it knows best what is best for the rest of us and have a long record for saying one thing one week and doing the exact opposite the next. But in Strictly Come Dancing, the judges are the establishment and Balls is the outsider, hence his unexpected popularity.

There is a strong undercurrent of resentment in today’s society to anyone who is in authority or who represents the status quo, fuelled by the effects of repeated austerity penny pinching and indifference to the downtrodden.

The establishment, which mostly lives in comfortable Middle England or the Home Counties, is aware that there are problems, but tends to regard them as confined to pockets such as Tower Hamlets where they can be handled by, in no particular order, the police, social workers and do-gooders.

That frees those with money and power to concentrate on the grave and serious task of “sorting out the country”, by which they mean promoting their own political careers. You only have to look at the queue of Brexiteers this summer doing their best to avoid doing what they had spent the previous few months telling the voters they wanted to do.

For too many years now, the politicians have regarded the public as someone to be comforted and generally told everything’s fine, rather like a mother with a small child frightened by a thunderstorm, who talks about thinking of a few of their favourite things and taking a spoonful of sugar.

But the public has long since worked out that they cannot trust what a politician says and are in no mood to be nannied. They are tired of being spun to. They see political sound bites and parliamentary statements as politicians playing to the gallery, rather like the four judges in Strictly Come Dancing with their extravagant poses and gestures and their over the top assessments of the dancers.

The audience doesn’t understand the technical basis of their judging and doesn’t care. Like the electorate it knows what it wants and is in no mood to be told what it wants. Ed Balls had better be prepared to make us cringe for a few weeks yet.