DON’T QUOTA ME

Is there a single reputable argument in favour of positive discrimination? The fact that so many of our institutions are unrepresentative of the make-up of society is of course deplorable, but manipulating recruitment in order to create an artificial balance is no way to put this right. Nonetheless, there is talk once again of setting targets and imposing quotas in various fields in order to achieve notional parity. Spare us, I say.

Last week, the Prime Minister was in Sweden, pretending to be engaged by liberal ideas on equality of opportunity. What this is really about is that his advisers have told Cameron that the coalition is losing something called “the women’s vote”. You might think that enlightened opinion would doubt that there were any such absolute and manifest creature as “the women’s vote”, any more than there could be an interest as coherent as “the men’s vote”. Nevertheless, Cameron evidently thinks there is something in it. He has previously undertaken that his second government, if there is one, will number women in ministerial posts to the extent of one third.

When in opposition, Cameron toyed with the notion of selective all-women election shortlists, reckoning that this was “positive action, not positive discrimination”. Far be from me to suggest that any politician ever plays with words, but it’s hard to know where the difference lies between excluding men from a competitive exercise otherwise conducted on a level playing field and discriminating in favour of women.

Boys' club: the Commons – count the women members

Intriguingly, Ed Miliband has simultaneously set off in a different direction. His first shadow team, formed in 2010, was constructed by a method long favoured by the Labour Party: a vote among MPs. On this – and only on this – occasion, the members were obliged to elect six women. As a result of that combination of restrictions, Miliband was saddled with a front bench that was below par. I noted at the time that the great majority of them had surnames in the top half of the alphabet and essayed the theory that, with so many new members who were unfamiliar with the candidates, many ballot papers would have been exhausted before the voter had reached the names towards the end of the list.

Wisely, Miliband decided to divest himself of this faux democratic ritual and give himself the freedom that Labour leaders have always enjoyed when in government: the ability to construct a team according to his own assessment of merit. Accordingly, last October, he weeded out those shadow cabinet members who had performed poorly – including two of the token women, Ann McKechin and Meg Hillier – and brought in eminently able individuals who have duly shone, notably Chuka Umunna, Stephen Twigg and Rachel Reeves (all, you will have noticed, from the second half of the alphabet).

The last of these three is plainly a woman but one enjoying the great advantage of appointment on merit rather than on account of her sex. As it happens, the men in the list are, respectively, of mixed race and gay, but there is no sense that such considerations influenced Miliband’s choice. That each of these MPs might be said to represent an important sector of the community other than those who are white, heterosexual men is no doubt useful, but no one can argue that the Labour Party obliged Miliband to choose them for that reason. (Incidentally, the unmarried Umunna may be gay too, for aught I know, but he has not identified himself as such, whereas Twigg holds the distinction of being the first person elected to the British parliament who was out at the time of his election, which added yet more savour to his famous ousting of the sexually ambiguous Michael Portillo).

Returning to the Tories, Cameron has form in the gesture politics of making sympathetic noises about those who suffer discrimination. In a Guardian piece two years ago, he wrote that “too many people are denied the chance to escape poverty and build a better life for themselves and their family. Sadly, this is especially true for people in Britain’s black community”. The search is still on to unearth any scintilla of coalition policy that has helped a single black family out of poverty. No quotas there, it seems.

Boys' club: British troops

Last month, the New Statesman noticed that – oh my lor’ – all the national newspaper editors are white. It neglected to note at the same time that they are all (believed to be) heterosexual. And able-bodied. And – save for Tina Weaver at the Sunday Mirror and Dawn Neesom at the Daily Star – men. You might well think that Neesom’s rag is the most scurrilous of all British publications, if you didn’t think that of the Daily Mail which, as it happens, employs the highest proportion of women journalists on Fleet Street and attracts the highest proportion of women readers.

The point here is that weighting the game so that more people who are not able-bodied, white, family men get their hands on power does not necessarily make the world a nicer place. As it happens, the right has a better track record in advancing so-called minority candidates than does the left. The only woman Prime Minister Britain has ever elected was a Tory and the most divisive, anti-progressive leader in a century. George W Bush, the most foolish, negligent and blinkered US President of my lifetime, never appointed a Secretary of State who was a white man – and indeed called up one who wasn’t a man of any colour. Ed Miliband is Labour’s first Jewish leader, after the Tories have been led by two Jews, including one (Disraeli), though a Christian convert, who was Prime Minister as long ago as the 1870s. The Liberals were also led by a Jew some eighty years ago: Herbert Samuel.

Determining whether party leaders are or were gay is more problematic. The two Prime Ministers of recent vintage about whom most anecdotes swirl are Edward Heath and Anthony Eden. Heath was what used to be known as “a confirmed bachelor”, which was understood to mean either gay or asexual. It may well be that he was the latter, but it has been claimed – by an avowedly gay Tory who knew him – that police warned Heath off cottaging when he was first being considered for a government post.

Eden, once described by Rab Butler as “half mad baronet, half beautiful woman”, was ever a dandy. He favoured the Homburg, a once fashionable trilby variation, that became popularly known as an Anthony Eden. His younger son Nicholas, who served as a minister under Thatcher, was openly gay and the first British parliamentarian to die of Aids. As for the father, I have a friend who once knew Eden’s former valet and who reports that this man told her most unambiguous stories of his master’s habits.

Boys' club: American clerics

In another part of the forest, last year’s Davies Report proposed quotas for business to increase female representation on boards. Imposing quotas has been a success in Scandinavian countries in the numerical sense – two in five Norwegian board members are women these days compared with some three in twenty in Britain. But is there any discernible difference – let alone improvement – in the efficacy of Norwegian business? That surely is the only test.

Both parliament and the city – along with the military, the judiciary, the police and most professional sports – are, at heart, clubs for blokes. If you’re not a white, heterosexual, able-bodied, anti-progressive man, you will most likely feel uncomfortable, ignored, mistrusted, discounted, patronised and even threatened if you have the temerity to try to penetrate and thrive in these fields. As a gay man, I have never understood why anyone other than a Neanderthal would want to enter such brutal places, fuelled as they are by competitive, locker-room banter and ill-disguised misogyny in particular and misanthropy in general.

There is another male preserve that perpetrates a different kind of exclusiveness. A report commissioned by the Church of England last summer recommended “proportional intentionality” – discrimination by another name – to encourage ethnic minorities into the church both as worshippers and as aspirants to ministry. Throughout the leadership of Rowan Williams, his flock has been torn asunder over the admissibility or otherwise of women and openly gay people. The church – both Anglican and Catholic – is a boys’ club for a kind of chap different from those who typify business and football and other male bastions. The priesthood is dominated by self- and women-hating gay man.

It seems to me to be futile to try to reform these male preserves by imposing upon them entrance restrictions other than those that their nature dictates. The soi-disant jokes that men make about being obliged to rub shoulders with black lesbian dwarves give voice to a deep-seated resentment at supposed do-gooders attempting to frog-march ancient understandings into misguided reform.

One of the lessons of history is that social change secured and lasting is rarely achieved by accepting crumbs from the tables of the established. Rather, it is won by the courage and determination of those who most benefit from the change fighting for it and winning it, if necessary over the bodies of their martyrs. The likes of Emily Davidson, Steve Biko and Harvey Milk died for living causes that eventually bore fruit.

Positive discrimination is anyway of dubious legality. A white, straight, able-bodied man would be perfectly entitled to go to law if he could make a case that he had been passed over for a post in favour of someone whose credentials were only superior to his own because of membership of a particular grouping. But here’s another thing. Might it not be that women and gay men and non-whites and those in some way restricted in physical or mental capacity have More Important Things To Do than acting as fodder for political parties or sitting in judgment over felons or killing people in some far off country or bestowing Eucharist on half-a-dozen bored parishioners in an unheated mausoleum on a Sunday morning or standing on a football touchline looking at the unruly fans and hoping not to be hit by a random projectile? What sort of people are they who want to join these worlds anyway?

In a field more congenial to me – the theatre – there is yet another piece of nonsensical positive discrimination. It goes by the mendacious title of “colour-blind casting”. This is the woolly-minded liberal instinct that brings you black actors as Henry V and Henry VI though not, so far and as far as I know, Shylock or Richard III.

Adrian Lester as Henry V

In what parallel universe should I be required to be colour-blind? How can I pretend that Adrian Lester and David Oyelowo, fine actors as they both are, somehow forego their colour because they are playing English kings who were undeniably white? If they had been black – a startling occurrence at this stage in English history (though it would be idle to hold your breath for anybody not white to ascend the English throne in the future) – would not Shakespeare have alluded to it in his text? And isn’t it actually profoundly demeaning to the actors that I should collaborate in a game that pretends that they are not black? If you would account my objection racist, I would respectfully ask if you truly understand the term.

If casting in the theatre were truly colour-blind, we would see a white actor play Othello. Such a thing has not been “permissible” in twenty years. (It still happens in Otello because the demands on the operatic voice are overriding). Fair enough that so-called “blacking up” – as Olivier and (just about the last to do it) Paul Scofield did – is recognised as unworthy. But colour-blindness surely means that, if a white English king whose reality is well chronicled may be played black, then the fictional and racially indistinct Moor – a slippery term at best – can be played white and let the dialogue tell the story.

Uniquely, in my experience, there was once a multiracial production of a new play in which a white actor played the patriarch of an Indian family. Unfortunately, because it was necessary to keep before the audience the notion that the man was indeed Indian, the actor played it with a cod Hindi accent. It’s hard to see how this could be characterised as preferable to casting an Indian actor.

The real issue here is not about “allowing” black actors to play the classic repertoire. It is about the signal failure of the companies that fall back on the phoney option of colour-blind casting to take the trouble to explore the rich theatrical heritage of Africa, the West Indies, South America and Asia and indeed to commission new work from significant numbers of non-white playwrights and, come to that, women playwrights. The theatre is almost as much a boys’ club – certainly as far as writing and directing and running theatres is concerned – as the air force or the bar.

And that, I conclude, is the real problem with positive discrimination. It fights the wrong battle with the wrong weapons. It gives those who engage these battles a satisfying but false sense that they have gallantly taken on the forces of reaction. The real war is very much bigger and more fundamental.

DEFERENCE CUTS

Of course, it’s all the fault of the 1960s. For the century and a half before that revolutionary decade, the “great and the good” were treated with all the deference to which they considered themselves entitled. In the longer view, I suppose, the scornful, the satirical and the downright scabrous have been more often in the ascendancy: one thinks of Swift, Pope and Defoe in the first half of the 18th century, Gillray and Rowlandson in the second half. Apart from the freedom that they may make of unbridled linguistic usage, the humorists, impersonators and caricaturists of the present age draw no more blood than did their afore-named predecessors.

In between times, geese were generally not said boo to and certainly not offered any sauce to gander at. In 1951, as a general election got under way, the BBC politely asked the shadow Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, if he would care to submit himself to an interview before an outside broadcast camera. Eden gamely said that he would but made it clear that the only interrogator he would tolerate was Leslie Mitchell, the Corporation’s senior harmless lightweight.

Leslie Mitchell, a safe pair of hands

Mitchell duly squared up to the soon-to-be Foreign Secretary (and, given Churchill’s relative frailty, effectively manager of the government) with this opening salvo: “Well now, Mr Eden, with your very considerable experience of foreign affairs, it's quite obvious that I should start by asking you something about the international situation today. Or perhaps you would prefer to talk about home? Which is it to be?” It seems a mighty chasm between that pat-ball and the take-no-prisoner cross-examinations of Sir Robin Day and Jeremy Paxman.

The Mitchell approach, with all its complaisant clubman undertones, was swept away by the swiftly accumulating developments of the 1960s, particularly those unleashed by Hugh Carleton Greene’s leadership of the BBC and crystalized in That Was the Week That Was on the box and Private Eye in print. The pendulum swung from one extreme to the other and remained fixed on “yah boo” from that day to this.

Eden in interview with Mitchell: everything in the garden was lovely

Fast forward, then, and we find the hapless Ed Miliband unmercifully pilloried for giving the same answer to every question in a television interview, recorded by ITV but pooled for general use, that would appear in that night’s news on every outlet. You can watch the tape on this link:
http://bit.ly/lzqs4S
I should have thought it was perfectly obvious that Miliband’s performance had a clear purpose to it and not a purpose that he would feel the need to explain because he would have no reason to expect that this tape would be released in order to mock him. The mockery that has indeed been heaped upon him demonstrates some resonance about the state of the culture.

Here, for instance, is Damian Thompson in The Daily Telegraph: “Not since George Brown used to go on television smashed out of his wits has a Labour politician made such a hash of things … he gave the same answer six times, irrespective of the question. His voice was robotic, his eyes glazed … At any moment, you expected a hypnotist to step forward, snap his fingers, and say: ‘You’re back in the room now, Ed’. For the Tories, truly this is the gift that keeps on giving”.

Incidentally and as a matter of record, George Brown did not “used to go on television smashed out of his wits”. He went on television clearly (and in the circumstances forgivably) affected by drink just the once, on the night of Labour’s triumph at the 1964 general election. I watched his appearance at the time and can vouchsafe that he was very far from out of his wits. Damian Thompson – who, in case you were wondering, is a Tory (and one of William Hague’s gay protégées but that’s a story for another day) – was two at the time. He attended something called Presentation College in Reading so you might think he would know something about presentation. Let me take the trouble to explain to him – and to any of my readers puzzled by Miliband’s “interview” – what was going on here.

Anyone who ever looks up from their iPad or their burger and chips will have noticed that very little coverage of politics in the media in the last – oh – thirty years is concerned with what politicians actually say. Considerably more is devoted to what reporters and other commentators (some of those themselves politicians) say about them. The only times that politicians’ own words are given due space and time are when they have said something disobliging, revelatory, erroneous, apologetic or unguarded. Or – and this is germane to the case under review – when the rules oblige the bulletins to give equal space to opposition as well as to government and the opposition has made a clear statement of policy.

Ed in interview: "I vill say this only once"

This swing away from what politicians wish to say (“perhaps you would prefer to talk about home”) to what reporters and commentators wish to say is a central part of the process of the media’s wholly successful attempt to arrogate to itself the setting of the political agenda, indeed of the whole agenda of public discourse.

Not surprisingly, politicians have sought means to combat this, not least in the employment of media advisors. These advisors came up with a nifty device, the sound-bite. This device – a succinct, free-standing summary of a position – was gratefully seized upon by the media, particularly the broadcast media, as a means of appearing to satisfy – or at least to include – actual politicians in their own disquisitions. For a long time, politicians felt that they could rely upon the media to spot and pick up on these sound-bites, as long as they were prominently voiced. Alas, that is no longer the case. The news media are so competitive with each other and so desperate to hold audiences against the ever-increasing distractions from new media that they try to insist upon exclusive tasters of what a politician has to say (you’ll have noticed how often you see someone giving a speech mutely while the reporter comments and then suddenly making whatever main point the speech had to deliver in a one-to-one interview).

Smart politicians, anxious (as the jargon has it) “to get their message across”, seek to control how they are heard with even more brutal techniques. One such was precisely what Miliband was up to. He agreed to a pooled interview and then declined to say anything except his prepared sound-bite, giving the broadcasters no option but to transmit what Miliband wanted rather than some (to his mind) secondary, irrelevant or perhaps less well expressed alternative. The device worked on the night. Miliband’s position, cogently stated, appeared on every news bulletin.

That should have been that. However, the interviewer was evidently a neophyte who had never encountered this phenomenon before, though several leading politicians have used it, including George Osborne and Alistair Darling. “His interviewer, Damon Green, was freaked out, as he later confessed” according to Damian Thompson. In an entirely underhand move, Green or some other ITV person released the complete tape to YouTube where, without context, Miliband’s performance was bound to seem curious.

Damian – Omen II

Green may be a greenhorn but Thompson is not. There are only two possible readings of Thompson’s shock-horror account. Either he genuinely doesn’t know how broadcast news operates which, for a man who has been in the business nearly thirty years, is itself quite a scandal (what does he do all day?). Or he knows perfectly well but is trying to do the leader of the party he opposes a piece of no good in the eyes of readers who cannot be expected to divine why such an apparently odd interview should have taken place. I incline to the latter explanation, if only to spare Thompson’s blushes.

The Telegraph’s agenda is one thing. That professional broadcasters who consider themselves progressive (people like Chris Addison and Armando Iannucci) should join in a Twitter harangue that seeks to characterise Miliband as if he is in some degree autistic is perfectly horrible. I appreciate that I am in a category numbering fewer than double figures in believing that Ed Miliband is a good, thoughtful, shrewd and smart leader of the Labour Party and – here’s the clincher – that there is no one else remotely close to leading who could or would do better. I don’t agree with all his positions or policies. Far from it: I oppose him on public service worker strikes, on his failure to make regulation of the banks and radical tightening of the tax system a crusade, and on Libya. But nobody in the Labour ranks is voicing that sort of opposition so I don’t see the advantage of damaging Labour by damaging its leader.

What is so depressing about this ridiculous episode is that, as with Gordon Brown’s overheard remarks about Gillian Duffy, the morality of the media and its use of its privileged access is not questioned, even by experienced and progressive commentators. My regular readers may remember that I advised Brown to hit back at Sky News for breaching his confidentiality by subterfuge rather than to hold his head in his hands in a BBC studio as though he were at fault. I hope Miliband will wake up and take Damon Green to task for his ignorant and illicit release of the tape. But I fear that even politicians have been seduced into believing that the media is so powerful it can do whatever it wishes. After all, it has taken the revelations about hacking into the already dead Milly Dowler’s phone for the criminal behaviour of Murdoch’s underlings really to get people angry.

Johann: there's a tirade in town

Another story about media morality gave the same Damian Thompson another stick with which to beat the left. Johann Hari, a columnist on The Independent, “confessed” to having imported extracts from their writings into interviews with various thinkers and, as it were, passing these quotes off as if given to him on the day. Hari justified this by arguing that the written thoughts were better expressed than the spoken ones and that several fellow journalists had told him that the practice was common.

Leave it to Damian Thompson to invent the world in which Hari operates: “Student radicals re-tweet his tirades against Tories, bankers, Catholics, Americans etc before rolling out of bed at noon”. This is so unworthy. A radical student re-tweeter of my acquaintance – how many of those does Thompson actually know? – regularly rolls out of bed at 11:45, sometimes even earlier.

As it happens, I follow Hari on Twitter, though not in The Independent, and I must have slept through all his tirades (can you do a tirade in 140 characters?). What I most recall of his tweets is his admiration for Grace Dent and Clive James, two writers who (as may be verified in earlier postings) I abominate. I submit that admiring Dent and James hardly constitutes a threat to the established order.

Thompson accuses Hari of being “happy to tell lies” and indeed the headline of his piece picks up that notion: “Writers who tell lies for a ‘greater truth’.” On Twitter, where the traffic is very far from universally supportive of Hari, I have seen him accused of “plagiarism” and “theft”. None of these accusations has any merit. Hari has certainly been naïve. He has probably been encouraged to work above his pay scale. But what he has been doing is merely to try to make his journalism as readable and authoritative as possible. Though I never went so far as to substitute written material for spoken in print interviews that I conducted, I certainly subbed and tidied up the spoken quotes that I included because verbatim transcript of speech usually read inelegantly at best, incoherently at worst.

In sum, I suggest that Hari could have conducted himself, both in the interviews that led to the outcry and in the outcry itself a touch more shrewdly. But to pillory him is absurd. Compared with the Neanderthals at News International and the crude propagandists at The Telegraph, Hari’s sins are pettifogging.

LEFT WRITE WRONG

Lately I have been conducting a bracing debate with a fellow blogger, Panopticon, on his lively site at www.thinkhard.org. We have been considering politics or, more specifically, politicians. Panopticon is a hardened sceptic. I will not go so far as to say that he is a cynic. But he is convinced that anyone who chooses to seek a role in the political arena is, to some degree, a control freak wishing to interfere in people’s lives and arrangements. I summarize no further; it is not for me to (mis)represent his arguments; indeed, he is of course most welcome to restate them and develop them himself in this forum.

Inevitably, in the heat of a dialectical situation, I have occasionally been tempted to overstate my case, either for the sake of provocation or to (imagine that I) clinch an argument. I do not in reality support unstintingly the notion that professional politicians as a breed stand for probity and altruism in all things. Politics is clearly a subtle and treacherous mistress and those who pursue her favours may be easily persuaded to begin to forget about duties, principles, scruples, even old friendships.

Over the weekend, the death was announced of Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar. I doubt that I will ever find myself supporting the Conservative Party, however reactionary the advancing years encourage me to be, but thoughtful old school Tories – whether aristocratic, Eton-educated baronets like Sir Ian Gilmour (as we remember him) or more humbly-born toilers like John Biffen who died a few weeks before – kept the decent-cove tendency alive while Thatcher was busy turning it into “the nasty party”.

Politicians like Biffen and Gilmour clearly did see a political career as a life dedicated to public service. Indeed, both were surely held back from advancement by their refusal to say ‘yes’ when they thought ‘no’ and to trim their views for expediency, fashion or support from above or below that might otherwise be withheld. If Gilmour was the person most responsible for reconciling his leader to the rise to power of Robert Mugabe, he can hardly be blamed for failing to anticipate that the first president of Zimbabwe would metamorphose into an old-fashioned tyrant of the worst kind. Mugabe’s supporters at the turn of the 1980s were far more numerous on the left and they failed equally.

Parliamentary politics is a tough and unforgiving trade. If you insist, like that ever-recalcitrant Labour backbencher Bob Marshall-Andrews, on being as sceptical about your own party’s leadership as is Panopticon about all political leaders, you cannot expect ever to be valued or trusted by that leadership or indeed by most of your fellow MPs who understand, often to their own discomfort, that there are bullets that must be swallowed when you agree to belong to a particular grouping.

Marshall-Andrews sits on one of the tiniest of electoral majorities and he cannot be surprised if the party managers feel that they would rather lose his seat (temporarily) at the next election, whenever it comes, so that he may be replaced by a candidate more congenial to the party that he claims to represent. I would feel a lot more sympathetic to Marshall-Andrews’ stance if he were less like an earlier member unanswerably skewered by Churchill as “a sophistical rhetorician inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity”, in other words a pompous windbag delighted by the sound of his own voice.

But I want to address here a different point. Most of us who reside – happily for us – beyond the narrow purview of the Westminster village have to study the daily doings of parliamentary politicians through the distorting glass of the media. Now nobody wants us to go back to the days when Leslie Mitchell, representing the BBC, could begin his 1951 pre-election interview with the shadow Foreign Secretary: “Well now, Mr Eden, with your very considerable experience of foreign affairs, it’s quite obvious that I should start by asking you something about the international situation today – or perhaps you would prefer to talk about home. Which is it to be?” (The entire interview had been rehearsed and Anthony Eden learned all his answers like an actor). Since at least the 1960s, when deference began its comprehensive retreat, the politicians and the reporters, commentators, leader-writers and pundits have struggled against each other, seeking to “set the agenda” for the political discussion of the moment.

The media puts great store by its assumed role as the people’s tribune but I cannot help believing that the agenda the media seeks to set – whether Newsnight and The Guardian on the one hand or The Daily Star and Planet Rock radio bulletins (if there are such things) on the other – is increasingly trivial, sensationalist and hence (if paradoxically) anti-political. Last week’s media coverage of the Liberal Democrat Party Conference was not just dominated by but positively overwhelmed by pointless, gratuitous speculation on whether Sir Menzies Campbell was going to survive as party leader. It didn’t matter how many times delegates at all levels of the party declared that it wasn’t an issue, the reporters and news scripters returned to it each day as if the airing it had received the previous day had never happened.

It is already proving to be a similar story this week at the Labour Conference where the only story in town, as far as the media is concerned, is whether the Prime Minister is going to call an early general election. Indeed, when Labour delegates reasonably reply, with increasing and understandable irritation, that they’re there to debate policy, the interviewers actually sneer (eg Martha Kearney on today’s World at One). Perhaps next week there will be a doubly narrow focus for the Tories to fend off – can David Cameron survive as party leader and does the party really want an early election? – or perhaps it will be the tired but still largely unresolved question of whether Cameron smoked/smokes dope.

Political sceptics will say that the politicians deserve it because of their use of “spin”. A little perspective needs to be applied to this argument. Tony Blair didn’t invent spin. Alastair Campbell didn’t invent spin. Politicians didn’t invent spin. The first human who spoke a coherent sentence invented spin: “I meant to bring a mammoth carcase home for dinner but the bloody thing got away”. (Translation: the hunter was too slow to catch it). Everybody uses spin on a daily basis. When Jonathan Dimbleby refers to “the Saturday edition” of Any Questions on Radio 4, what he really should call it is “the Saturday repeat” because it differs in no particular from the version that goes out live on Friday. That’s spin.

With the broadcast media’s reliance on sound-bites and the print media’s relegation of serious political analysis to page 94 (or the website), politicians are required not only to toe the party line but also to conform to what plays on telly and what is incapable of being misinterpreted when reproduced in print. Far from being control freaks, most of them are lucky if they get through a whole day without being pilloried and traduced. What’s worse, a growing proportion of us spends all the time between elections grousing about the government and then doesn’t even bother to use our democratic duty to cast a vote. As in so many of these matters of perception about the state of the world, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars (even our political stars) but in ourselves.