Mal Fletcher comments on the recent European elections

The Prime Minister jetted off to Brussels to try to prevent a federalist candidate from getting the EU's top job. For many voters, though, he doesn't seem to have the stomach to really take on an EU which has become bloated, over-powerful and self-important.

Whilst there was doubtless an element of protest voting in Sunday's election results, it is disingenuous to suggest that people were simply ticking the first box they could find that said 'none of the above'.

Many may have been protesting, but they were not lurching. The shift is premeditated, though less on the basis of any new-found party affiliation - arguably, people vote less and less on institutional grounds - than on alignment with ideas on specific issues.

Some newspaper political editors seem to struggle to find the right form of words for a shift they surely saw coming and for which they had ample time to prepare.

Perhaps the choice of headlines reflects that newspaper elites are too cosy with their political counterparts, or at least too much like them in terms of the context of their experience.

Both are either geographically or at least culturally located within middle class cosmopolitan enclaves in major urban centres. As such they may be, by virtue of income levels and other markers of social experience, far removed from the on-the-ground concerns and fears of the average voter.

In the political sphere, it is this perceived willful elitism that I think most concerns the voters who are ready to abandon traditional parties.

Slowly and belatedly, various party officials are waking up to this. Ed Miliband's aides are now pledging that their leader will do more to reach out to people who feel 'left behind by our economy and let down by our politics.'

In recent times, people of all political persuasions have begun to ask the following questions, in one form or another, with justification: 'How can Oxford PPE graduates, who become MPs or staffers on both sides of politics, understand my everyday concerns? Especially when they move seamlessly from university into politics without any work experience beyond politics?'

Often, in their rise up the ladder, politicians are accompanied by like-minded political junkies who become professional lobbyists. So, the people who govern and those who most frequently seek to curry their favour and engage their interest have inherited and are living within an insulating political bubble.

Ed Miliband's minders played into this general perception of politics-without-a-common-touch when they allowed photographers to snap their leader battling - to the death, it seemed - a humble sandwhich.

Eating a large sandwich can be a messy affair for anybody. However, the photos quickly went viral online and added to the notion that one of Britain's foremost political leaders, while waxing lyrical on the minutiae of policy, can't handle something as mundane as everyday lunch food.

In the same week, while making the cost-of-living his cause celebre, the Labour leader showed that he has little grasp of how much it costs for normal folks to fill their grocery baskets.

Of course, anyone can have a particularly bad week, but Mr. Miliband was already considered by many voters - including Labour supporters - to be a bit too policy-wonkish to be a credible and well-rounded national leader. These events would have done little to overturn this perception.