Do more people read the Evening Standard in Tunbridge Wells than in Battersea? That’s what former Guardian journalist and Battersea MP Martin Linton reckons.

What Linton meant by his throwaway comment is that it’s read by commuters. And commuters, especially rail commuters, are political trash. They generate their economic value in a place that gives them no political voice. They spend most of their money there. But they sleep a train ride away. It’s a measure of how disconnected politics are from people’s lives that these simple facts defy our electoral system and our media. Instead politicians romanticise communities and localities. MPs are more embedded in geography than the Lords they supplanted.