And what would you do if you were a working-class Labour voter from the 1960s who believed passionately in left-wing politics, and just as passionately in Britain? What if you were one of the passionately anti-European Union Bennites and you now find yourself in the euro-federalist Labour Party?

Which brings me back to the other question. What do you remain loyal to?

People remain loyal to institutions that have been loyal to them. It is a reciprocal arrangement. Our Queen's popularity is not a fluke. It is an expression of loyalty from the people to a sovereign who has been loyal to them. 

In our political life, with record low levels of membership of political parties, the public sense that politics is stuffed with loyalists who do not understand the reciprocity of the arrangement is profound. "They're just out for themselves" and "None of them believes in anything" were, depressingly, two of the most commonly uttered phrases of this election.

The new Parliament must recognise that respect and loyalty will be won only in the same manner in which, during the last Parliament, they were lost. But if fewer and fewer of us feel tribal about party politics, then it is most fully because we recognise that in recent years these parties have been disloyal to the country.

The Brown government boasted in its final days that it had created 1.7 million new jobs since New Labour came to power in 1997. More than 1.64 million of those jobs went not to the people of this country, but to foreign-born workers. It was the emblematic act of a government which degraded the relationship of trust between the executive and the people and downgraded the bond of duty between one and the other.

It is a relationship that need not have been wrecked for good. But if we are going to get through the next few turbulent years, the political parties must realise that in a fragile political landscape they will all face opposition. They could do with recognising that this is not always a negative. In an era when politicians appear to have abandoned the people, criticism of the parties is not just a right, it is a duty. And they would do well to remember that it is often the expression of people brim-full with loyalty, but loyalty to the deeper things which a shallow political age so unwisely cast aside.