WHERE, when, did it all start to go wrong? Whatever happened to the real business of politics? There was a time when robust exchanges did not necessarily mean slanging matches. Instead it was about detail and knowing one’s brief to expose the weaknesses or injustices of an opponent’s policies and positions. Such things appear rare occurrences these days.

There was a time, too, when politicians by and large did what they were meant to do, and by that I mean represent the people who voted them into office. No more, it seems.

Yes, sure, politics have always been a rough-and-tumble affair. It doesn’t really matter where they are enacted. Washington, Westminster or Holyrood, it was never a calling for the shrinking violet or faint-hearted.

How many of us remember those times when a certain intellectual panache and eloquence was the order of the day when dressing down an opponent or policy?

I’m thinking, for example, of occasions such as when Labour former chancellor Denis Healey described debating Tory politician Geoffrey Howe as “like being savaged by a dead sheep” or his description of former Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott as having “the face of a man who clubs baby seals”.

Watching this week’s televised US presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden got me thinking as to when I last saw politicians who could trade political punches like civilised individuals. This rancorous and at times frankly puerile exchange did neither Trump nor Biden or their respective parties any favours.

Short-changed most of all were the American people, who saw on screen an almost microcosmic representation of all that troubles their great nation right now.

Here was Trump failing to condemn white supremacists and militias and instead putting some of the country’s gun-toting, paramilitary-style racists on alert with a plea for them to “stand back and stand by”.

I’m sure those far-right, anti-immigrant, all-male members of the Proud Boys were no doubt proud of their bullying president. Most thinking Americans, of course, were doubtless squirming at the sordidness of it all.

But Trump was not the only offender. Here too was “decent” Joe Biden reduced in his response to a series of banalities, telling Trump “keep yappin’, man,” or “will you shut up, man?”

For those supporters of the Democratic party candidate waiting hopefully for signs that American politics would get back to keeping them safe from Covid-19 or healing the racial and class tensions that have riven the country, it must have been a painful watch indeed.

But, hey, before we get all uppity regarding our cousins across the pond, pause and take a look in our own political backyard. Here, too, political discourse has largely been reduced to an argy-bargy full of heat and little light. As ever, the first casualty in all of this is truth.

Yes, I know that spin, manipulating or embellishing the truth, has long since been part of the political black arts, but what we see now goes far beyond any such simple definition.

In the UK, truth-bending turned into outright falsehood during the 2016 Leave campaign. The claim plastered across Boris Johnson’s tour bus that Brexit would save “£350 million a week” to fund the NHS set a precedent that porkies were no longer beyond the pale.

READ MORE: Presidential debate: Joe Biden and Donald Trump exchange insults in chaotic clash

AMONG some of the most telling moments of the UK’s last General Election was when TV audiences laughed openly at Johnson’s insistence that he believed “truth is important” in politics. Since then, as the country reels from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the outright lies and falsehoods have at times been staggering.

I mean just ask yourself when seriously was the last time you felt that our so-called “tribunes of the people” were looking out for anyone other than themselves? When was the last time, hand on, heart when you could look at a politician and say yes, he or she has our back?

As the Dominic Cummings lockdown fiasco starkly illustrated, more often than not we find ourselves in a country where it is one rule for the public and another for politicians. How telling it was then that, while accepting the Prime Minister’s senior aide went against the stay-at-home message that was repeated to the public at the height of the lockdown, many Tories focused their criticism on the “absolutely appalling” and “unedifying hounding” of Cummings and his family by the media.

The bottom line here is simple – there should be no ifs or buts about it, all politicians who break the rules must be held accountable.

Is it any wonder that trust in our elected officials, irrespective of their stripe, appears to be at an all-time low?

Any trust can only be rebuilt if parties, leaders and advisers recognise the need for integrity. The freedoms, and checks and balances, enshrined in our democracy as in other mature western political systems have been hard-won over generations and cannot be squandered by throwing political fair play out the window.

Public trust, too, can only be rebuilt when politicians stop engaging in vacuous shouting matches and start behaving like civilised, caring, committed individuals who have the interests of those who elected them at heart.

It’s easy to scoff at this week’s US presidential debate, but we should keep in mind that much of the UK’s political culture right now is frankly no less embarrassing than that on the other side of the Atlantic.

Politics in the UK has become a corrosive, disagreeable, uninformative form of tribalism. The time is long overdue for politicians of whatever party to cease the banal slanging matches and get back to scrutinising policies and finding solutions to problems and challenges.

Incompetence needs to be called out where it is evident, as does rank opportunism. Above all else, our tribunes of the people need to get back to being just that, serving those who elect them.

Just as tribalism needs to end so too proper, grown,up political discourse needs to take its place. Those of us who say they don’t “do” politics and who cringe at our politicians also need to think again.

The unedifying spectacle that passes for serious politics needs to be rejected and we the voters must ensure that’s exactly what happens when election time comes around.