A bit of an ape, but he still has more (weird) charisma than the current three leaders put together.

True but still not really suitable as PM.

Funny, I thought it was up to the constituents of whichever seat he stands in. No sense of entitlement there then.

Can someone explain to me the "safe seat" thing. I don't understand how some seat attract absolutely no contest to who will win them :S

It's simple demographics. There are constituencies in the UK that have returned MPs from the same political parties at every election for, well, generations in some cases. There are seats where you could put literally almost anyone on the ballot paper and as long as they have the correct party logo next to their name, people would vote for them.

Anyway, campaigning has now become so expensive and centralised - hugely expensive TV ads and pointless 'battle bus' tours for example - that the major parties are all picking and choosing their battles; hardly bothering at all in the 'safe seats' they probably won't win and throwing all their effort at the marginal seats where they might actually be able to change the outcome.

I live in a safe labour seat. At the last general election, I did not get one single candidate or constituency worker knocking on my door and I got one leaflet through the letterbox, from UKIP(!). The main parties basically didn't bother trying to convince me, as they all assumed labour would win anyway. There were stories of people in marginal constituencies coming home every day to a dozen leaflets on their doormat and barely being able to go shopping without running into some party bigwig.

Same story here. Its a Tory safe seat, and none of the other parties (after from UKIP) bother. Labour know they won’t win, so they field a weak candidate, and the LibDems do much the same. Effectively, there’s no point in voting here as the result is a foregone conclusion.

PR systems mostly return coalitions, and those don't seem to have many fans round here.

I think banning airdropped candidates might help. If candidates had to be registered say 5 years in the constituency before being allowed to run, they might be more bothered about the local issues and national campaigning would lose power.

I would dance if the UK were to have more coalition politics but, alas, I seem to be a statistical outlier.

I wouldn't. Nothing seems to get done with coalition governments. Better to have one party in power, let them do stuff, then judge them at the following election.