A lot has been said about the divide between politics and the public. A lot of this has to do with corruption and broken promises, but to a large extend the public themselves are also to blame. They neither know what they want, nor do they care to actually find out what parties stand for before they cast their vote.
The public are to an extent limited by the conditions they operate in, and increasingly it feels like society has been internet-ised... and not in a good way. Driven by outrage, clickbait, short attention spans, mass disinformation if not outright dishonesty. As you note, it beggars belief that a the chief author of what is widely recognised as the worst policy Britain has enacted in decades is currently heading the polls. It's very febrile, vibes-driven.
An issue with democracy is always going to be entrusting selection of governance to people who may have a poor insight into governance; some protection over the quality of information for the public seems sensible. Just at the moment, I feel what we're actually going for is the infopocalypse: a world where increasingly little becomes reliably knowable at every level of society: even things like scientific output that is supposed to be reviewed and verified will increasingly be overrun by fraud and bullshit.
And honestly, I think this is also
deliberate. Some is information warfare from external sources. But I think the elites are nearly always ambivalent about democracy, because the thing about being elite is thinking people should listen to you, not vice versa. Some like Peter Thiel openly expresses their hostility (and his scion is currently VP of the USA). The eliets look at the people and fear being taxed, regulated, their monopolies and cartels being broken up, they resent being expected to appear before Congress and answer for their behaviour. Of course they like the idea they can just pay a corrupt president a few million in protection money, and he'll make sure that they are looked after. It's even cheaper and more predictable than a major court case.
And then you have a look at China - it's the future. Not necessarily in whether it ends up the most powerful country on Earth (although it probably will) but that it represents a state that mostly successfully controls information flow to benefit and perpetuate itself, to direct the people to the will of its rulers. That's where we're going, maybe in a different shape, but going nonetheless.
