They live in a little bubble of their own without much reference to the real world.

He was chosen by the party in part because he had relatively high approval ratings, higher than the parties actually. Problem was they never wondered why, they never wondered if it might be because he was chancellor during the pandemic and was the face of the furlough scheme.

Perhaps people liked him because he’d never done anything really offensive, as far as they were aware, and had given them some money a while back. But none of that was because of any talent on his part. So inevitably when the public had to judge him on his own merits, and found out that he doesn’t have any, his popularity rating dropped.

This was an inevitable chain of events that a concussed hamster would not have had trouble predicting.