Ukrainian feminist activist group Femen have continued their topless protests with an appearance at Nina Ricci’s show at Paris Fashion Week. Jumping onto the runway with ‘Model don’t go to brothel’ and ‘Fashion dictaterror’ painted across their chests, it was slightly unclear what the women were protesting against or why. However, it wouldn’t be the first time that they had merely taken issue with ‘the status quo’ (arguably a refreshing stance.)

The model who they attempted to involve in their protest, Hollie-May Saker, demonstrated a complete lack of amusement and later claimed on Twitter that she had ‘punched’ the ‘stupid bitch’ for getting her ‘saggy tits in my face’. When challenged by a follower and reminded that we are supposedly ‘all on the same side’, Saker replied that ‘If we are all on the same side then tell me why when I was doing my job did she come ruin it and lift up my skirt?’

Although it seems from the footage that Saker’s skirt was more the victim of crossfire than deliberately assaulted by Femen – caught in a topless woman’s wrist as she attempted to raise an arm of solidarity with the model – Saker clearly did not take kindly to having her job disrupted. ‘Have fun scrubbing that shit off your body bitch never been to a brothel in my life’ she tweeted, having already considerably over-used the word ‘bitch’. It’s fair to say that she won’t be signing up at the nearby Femen HQ, which moved last year to Paris, any time soon.

Boarding schools have been getting a bad rap recently. Since the publication of Joy Schaverien’s essay "Boarding School Syndrome: Broken Attachments, A Hidden Trauma" in The British Journal of Psychotherapy, the internet has been awash with articles describing the trauma Schaverien believes is part and parcel of being schooled away from home. The latest addition to this ever-expanding canon is Katie Engelhart’s re-examination of the supposed mental illness that is ‘BSS’ (Boarding School Syndrome) and the legitimacy of boarding schools detractors, published in VICE magazine earlier this week.

Such critical hostility towards the boarding school system is understandable. The revelation of sexual abuse, perpetrated by teachers and priests at Fort Augustus Abbey School in Scotland is the most recent example. These disturbing late revelations have led to a concerned paranoia as to the effects of abuse within a ‘total institution’. There are other good reasons for concern too. Bullying is extremely common. What’s more, recent psychological research is being used to argue that children sent to boarding school are deprived of the love and nourishment required for healthy psychological development.

Both Joy Schaverien and Jane Barclay (a therapeutic counsellor and ex-boarder working for the charity ‘Boarding Concern’), have argued that boarding school students are forced suppress the emotional trauma produced by being abandoned in an unfamiliar place populated entirely by strangers. They form a veneer of assured confidence and create habitual strategies to survive the dog-eat-dog boarding environment. These strategies then become maladaptive in adult life, leaving ex-boarders unable to form intimate relationships, incapable of properly expressing emotion and acutely susceptible to other coping mechanisms, such as substance abuse and alcoholism.

Barclay writes: “Ex-boarders have just as much difficulty rejoining the wider world as combat veterans and released prisoners and prisoners-of-war...Life is matter of survival, of ‘getting by’...”. Boarding itself, in Barclay's judgement, is a form of emotional torture and abuse in itself.

The evidence used in these studies is almost exclusively anecdotal. Many of the people questioned were individuals for whom the boarding system failed, where in reality, former boarders tend to have vastly differing accounts of their boarding school life.

What is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the discussion is the assumption that all boarding schools have remained suspended in time, frozen at some point in the mid-19^th century. The threat of corporal punishment is no longer present. The majority of Britain’s boarding schools are now mixed. “Boarding inspections take place every three years,” according to the BSA website, and government agencies, such as Ofsted, now have a plethora of criteria by which to judge boarding schools, including pastoral care.

Of course, these solutions do not account for the possibility that boarding itself may be a psychologically harmful experience. I would never dispute that many have suffered at school - but that is true no matter what type of school you attend. What is unfair about the attacks on boarding school, is that they fail to acknowledge the ways in which those schools have improved. There are many people who have benefitted significantly from the independence, intimate friendships and strong sense of community that the boarding life can offer. Boarding is no longer a question of dispassionate, uninterested parents banishing their noisy children to the countryside for correctional education. As Julie Lodrick said on BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour: “children are now very much part of choosing their school along with their parents.” Boarding is now expected to be a considered parental decision that involves the child’s preferences. Of course, these preferences diminish with the decreasing age of the child, but a primary boarding school cannot be held accountable for the questionable decisions of parents, who may, through indolence, simply have sent their child to a boarding school because it happens to be convenient. The BSA website offers the best summative statement of this concept: “Modern boarding really is a partnership between school and parents...”.  

What this issue really boils down to is the fact that any institutional system is only as good as the people that manage and maintain it. With parents, house-parents, teachers and children all operating on the same caring, sensitive wavelength, boarding has become a totally different form of education from that of even the mid-20^th century. Education, and therefore boarding, is a very subjective process. Some will suit the boarding life far better than others. However, accepting this principle, it is now expected that boarding schools offer the most attentive, caring environment they can, while allowing independence to flourish. It is not fair to judge modern schools according to the painful recollections of those who were failed by a set of institutions that have effectively disappeared from the educational spectrum.

"There is no greater cause for Labour than education. It is the great engine of social mobility."

Stephen Twigg used the above phrase in his speech to the Labour conference on Monday. He is absolutely right in his full-throated support for education as a powerful agent for social mobility and in his assertion that it is of intrinsic importance to the party. Some great rhetoric and sentiments were there but the rest of the speech was marked by a conspicuous lack of policy. Against the backdrop of a conference bursting with serious and concrete policy announcements, why did Twigg’s department leave such a gap in the formation of Labour’s manifesto? It seems the rush of policy announcements at conference skipped over the shadow education department, with only the promise that under a Labour government the compulsory education participatory age will be raised from 16 to 18.

Twigg concerned himself with the level and spread of child and family poverty, appropriate considering that the living standards crisis was the main theme of the conference. But the fact that education is a long-term agent in affecting living standards was seemingly ignored. In the UK of 2013, complete with rising use of food banks, Twigg committed his party to reforming childcare. It was clearly a pledge the party needed to make, but why did this make up the bulk of Twigg’s speech? Being rewarded with lashings of applause, he repeatedly pointed out failings of the coalition government and, although he was not wrong, his speech paled against many others from frontbenchers who announced specific policy ideas to combat the issues raised.

The most we heard about education at conference was from sources other than Twigg. Yvette Cooper made special mention of Michael Gove and how Labour would reverse his refusal to introduce proper sex and relationship education. Through Chuka Umunna and Ed Balls’s speeches, there was an emphasis on developing a skilled workforce to allow the UK to compete in the contemporary world, with specific emphasis on the need to revamp and reform vocational education, an area neglected by successive governments. It is strange, then, the most tangible policy announcements did not come from the shadow education secretary.

"Conference we have to wake people up to what is happening now"; in his speech, Andy Burnham urged the party and the public not to let  the dangerous and dogmatic NHS reforms go unnoticed. But it seems that Twigg has largely ignored the onslaught of policy coming from Michael Gove. The damage free schools are doing to our education system through underinvestment in areas that need it most and Gove’s regressive curriculum reforms are criticised by Twigg, but not sufficiently countered with hard policy.

In the end, free schools may well be pragmatically accepted by the party, but beyond that there has been no plan announced to tackle the large number of young people out of work, education or training. No plan to address the increasing need for many people to retrain later in their careers in an attempt to avoid unemployment. No mention of the issue of tuition fees, a big constituency for Labour and also a real opportunity for progressive reform. Twigg paid homage to the past reforms that inform the One Nation project, including the introduction of universal primary education by Gladstone, but he didn't seem as clear in his current vision as his colleagues.

This article is by no means an attack on Twigg, rather on the current lack of education policy. It may well be that the policy review hasn’t reached this area yet, or that there is a general malaise surrounding education policy in the party, although this seems unlikely. The policies announced at conference are only the preliminary blueprints for a manifesto but they are indicative of what kind of party Labour is right now.

With the NHS and the schools being subjected to some of the most divisive, dramatic and ideological reforms, the party should be indicating where it stands on education. Although there were fewer policies announced on health than on the economy, there has been a track record before then of policies coming out of the shadow health department. Where is the 'whole person care' of Labour’s education policy? It is short-sighted for the party to leave such a gap in policy, to be so quiet and to not live up to its great heritage of comprehensive education, massive investment and the Open University. As much as the One Nation project is growing in success for the party, it is by no means complete and cannot fulfil itself without addressing education. 

Iceland Foods: Life in the Freezer Cabinet
BBC2

I’m a little obsessed with Iceland Foods: Life in the Freezer Cabinet (Tuesdays, 9pm). For a start there’s its title, which is moderately weird, given that there is no life at all in a freezer cabinet – such places being home only to frozen peas, fish fingers and, in the case of Iceland, a selection of slightly bizarre finger foods (to which I’ll return, with some gusto, shortly).

Of course, when they say “life”, what they really mean is the company’s management. To be more specific, they mean Malcolm Walker, its grinning, gurning and goofylooking boss. Some commentators have likened Walker, a plain-speaking fellow who could not cross an open field without stepping in at least one cowpat, to Gerald “total crap” Ratner. This is unfair. Walker has a galumphing charm and a manic kindness one sees only rarely in the rich and successful. He also still seems to grasp how most British people live, despite his own wealth. If I were a politican, Labour or Tory, I would have him on speed dial, and run every policy past him as a matter of course.

Walker started Iceland in 1970 in Shropshire, with a couple of freezers and £30. Today, it has some 790 stores and annual sales of £2.6bn. However, it’s quite an odd business. Its cheapness I don’t disdain, given the economic circumstances in which many families, if not most, now find themselves. Nor do I turn my nose up at its employment practices: the company has a reputation for being a happy place to work and Walker, an inordinately benign boss, regularly treats his staff to various morale-boosting shindigs.

Some of its products, though, are strikingly strange, at least to me. It has this thing for combining dishes and flavours. The Chicken Tikka Lasagne. The Italian Stonebaked Breakfast Pizza. Party Fish, Chip and Mushy Pea Stacks. Baked Bean Baguettes. And – drum roll please and do pour the Asti – Bubble Bobble King Prawns. This, by the way, is basically a prawn that has been rolled in Rice Krispies and then deep-fried. Bit of tongue-twister to say but they are allegedly really fabulous with a chilli dipping sauce.

Such products are trialled at Iceland HQ in Deeside, Flintshire, where there is a test kitchen, complete with resident home economists, and a fully kitted out Iceland store. Walker buzzes happily between the two, taking a hearty bite of Bubble Bobble King Prawns in the kitchen before heading to the shop to try out his latest wheeze: a one-sizefits- all label for wine (it will read either “Good Red Wine” or “Good White Wine”).

Walker is the only person in Britain who feels nostalgic for the days when Kerry Katona was the face of Iceland, and is wary of the metropolitan ad agencies who would like to be ironic about Iceland. “They’re always the same,” he opines, “in their sharp suits, and then one in a denim shirt and maybe a ponytail, who’s the art director.” And fair enough, he’s hardly wrong. It was embarrassing watching an agency called Karmarama make their pathetic pitch, which was nine parts bullshit to one part sneer. Publicity doesn’t interest him either, which is just as well, given that his head of PR is a 59-year-old cynic with a sign that reads “Public Relations Centre of Mediocrity” on his office door.

The only acronym Malcolm ever uses is JFDI, which stands for “Just Fucking Do It”. The only upmarket ranges his store carries – we’re talking frozen risotto – come with the moniker “Posh Grub”, which seems a lot more honest to me than Tesco’s “Finest” and Sainsbury’s “Taste the Difference” ranges.

I found all these details fascinating and funny. But beyond the comedy, this series has blazed with real pathos and insight. A new store in Treorchy in the Welsh valleys brought valuable jobs to the town, and it was heartbreaking both to see how woefully illequipped for work some applicants were – and how desperate.

A hard-up local couple took advantage of Iceland’s arrival by using it to cater for their wedding, the bride merrily lining up rockhard chicken drumsticks in rows on an oven tray, her nails long and gleaming, her hair already in an up-do. This “totally lush” buffet cost them just £1.75 a head and it went down a storm with their guests, their smiles and sticky fingers revealing more of 21st-century Britain than any number of earnest and slyly knowing Newsnight reports.

We video-game lovers of a certain age belong to an emerging industry demographic: the grumpy gamer. Like Frank Underwood, the political schemer played by Kevin Spacey in the US version of House of Cards, grumpy gamers play in snatched moments of privacy in the short breaks of busy, stressful lives.

We buy consoles for our children, in part to recreate our teenage years, the good old days when we had to transcribe computer code from the pages of magazines before the satisfaction of a marathon all-nighter with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

We buy the games for the same reason my mum used to give me an apple, an orange and a sixpence every Christmas, or narrate “The Owl and the Pussycat” before I went to sleep. She did it because it took her back to her childhood.

So, I play Lego Batman with my kids, and when they go to bed I can play and review a darker Batman – this month, Batman: Arkham Origins, a cruelly unrewarding game, though not entirely without merit, as one would expect from this franchise.

The theme of Arkham Origins is assassination and survival. Eight mercenary assassins are hired to take out Batman. The Bat is supposed to glide through Arkham, picking up clues and solving problems as he works his way through the list of super-baddies who slug it out for the ransom on his head. Loyal butler Alfred, who dispenses advice to our solitary hero from the lonely Christmas batcave, assists him. I found Alfred a reassuring character – as one would expect from a Martin Jarvis voiceover.

Along the way, Batman meets old adversaries such as the Joker and the Penguin – the latter sounds like a Geordie, playing a New Yorker putting on a cockney accent. Victory requires the Bat to get into many fights with an array of thugs, some old, some new. By throwing old adversaries into the story, Warner Bros have given a familiar feel to its successful franchise.

That’s important because grumpy gamers are sentimental about old friends and foes. They talk about Mario, Zelda and Jet Set Willy as if they were the cast of digital friends reunited. When I press a fresh DVD into its console slot, there is always a parental impulse to lecture children about the artefact called audio tape recorder, the device that used to be the way we uploaded our games, back in the day. They look at me blankly, as blankly as they did on our first visit to Vinyl Revival in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.

Grumpy gamers also like to win as easily as possible. Games that require persistence and attention to nit-picking handset detail have less of a premium than they used to. When I slump into that midnight sofa, I want to mash the handset and not worry too much about whether it’s an XXY or an XYY thumb manoeuvre. I just want to deal with the bad guys and clean up the city as quickly as possible.

Is any of this good for us? Scientists in Germany have recently claimed that playing video games augments grey matter in the sections of the brain used for spatial navigation, strategic planning and working memory. On reading this erudite study, my immediate thought was, in an Alan Partridge voice, take down for Mr Keith Vaz. Video games are good for the brain. Gamers win; Daily Mail lose.

Cognitive science may be rebalancing the argument in favour of video games being good for humanity but I’m afraid Batman: Arkham Origins is not. The stimulated grey matter that results from the latest offering by Warner Bros only applies to those sections of the brain usually associated with frustration, intolerance and, well, grumpiness.

The good news: the game, which is a prequel to the successful Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, contains all the old features we’ve come to love from this franchise. The combat system is as graceful as a ninja at the Darcey Bussell dance school. Batman’s tech is all there: batarang and grapple hook, smoke pellets and explosive gel. He gets some new kit too, enhancing but not significantly altering gameplay for loyal fans. If it were a second album, the game would be More Specials– still memorable and loved by fans but less edgy, raw and lacking the shock of the new.

And here’s the bad news: I couldn’t do it. I just could not get beyond the first proper boss level, a dual with Deathstroke. Not being able to kill Deathstroke after 20 hours on a single level says more about my ability than the game but there’s a lot of grumpy gamers out there. Boss levels are by their nature tough to get through but surely it represents a failure for the developers in making the level so hard that you just can’t get past it?

In the end, I reset the game and started from the beginning on “easy” level. This was irritating. Even on this mode, I could not deal with Deathstroke without the advice of Bruce, the teenage son of a friend, which was humiliating. I played it 70 or 80 times before grumpily seeing Deathstroke get his comeuppance. The last time I played a game this punishing to user error was Manic Miner on the Spectrum. Then, nothing could prevent me from being pixel perfect until victorious.

This time round, it’s different. Batman dies but the grumpy gamer is born.

Tom Watson is the Labour MP for West Bromwich East

Many foodies hate the word “foodie” – I’ve never quite worked out why. Granted, it’s an ugly word, if it’s a word at all, but the state it describes – of being obsessed with one’s dinner – is not in itself a crime. It depends on how that obsession manifests itself: foodism runs the gamut from gourmandise to snobbery. At one end squats the great god Michelin, white rubber rings plumped with foie gras, truffles and first-growth Bordeaux; at the other sits the elegant figure of the cookery writer Elizabeth David, acknowledging that, despite the opinion of some that wine and egg dishes don’t go together, she regards “a glass or two of wine as not, obviously, essential but at least an enormous enhancement of the enjoyment of a well-cooked omelette”.

For lack of a better epithet – and in support of the kind of foodiness that is not about prioritising sustenance above a point that is reasonable or even credible but about nourishing one’s life – I am coining the term “winie”. Wininess, unlike snobbery, needn’t be expensive. If I had received a pound every time the epithet “wine snob” was hurled at me, I could have bought the Balthazar of Château Margaux 2009 I spotted – it was quite hard to miss – in a fancy wine shop in Dubai Airport recently. (A Balthazar is 12 litres; the only bigger bottle is a Nebuchadnezzar, at 15 litres. Why, one wonders, did Margaux hold back?) Only six were made, apparently, and this one’s a snip at $195,000, if anyone out there fancies a duty-free acquisition the size, in every sense, of a house. But I wouldn’t have bought it if I could, because I don’t believe the wine will ever be made that is worth that kind of money. That’s why I’ll always fail the wine snobbery exam.

Being a winie, however, is an enviable occupation. In Dubai, it enabled me to bypass all the so-called icon wines – the bottles of Castarède Armagnac 1888 and the magnums of Ridge Monte Bello 2005 – and head for the lower end of the shelves, where I knew that $32 for a bottle of Allegrini’s La Grola 2010 was an excellent price and that the wine – a ripe blend of Corvina, Syrah and Oseleta from a family of north-east Italian winemakers, full of tobacco, berry and espresso, like a smoker’s morning fantasy – would make a group of exhausted colleagues on a work trip lose their slump and regain their sparkle. A winie cares more for context than for price tag because, while good wine can enhance any occasion, up to and including breakfast (try Clos Vougeot 1959 with your croissant and tell me it doesn’t improve your day), that’s all it can do. The occasion is the point.

Circumstances can make nectar of bad booze – the boring prosecco opened to celebrate a long-awaited reunion can sparkle like a dull person lit by love – but good wine can do no more for a lacklustre evening than help drown it out. This is why I want to lob a Balthazar at people who call me a wine snob. Knowledge of wine helps me to live well. I’d rather drink water with a wit than Margaux with a moron, although I hope you won’t oblige me to make that choice.

When the great gourmand American writer A J Liebling arrived in Paris to cover the Second World War for the New Yorker magazine, the director of his bank invited him to a lunch that “turned out to be just Marennes, Pouilly-Fuissé, caille vendangeuse and Grands Échezeaux” – that is, some of the world’s best oysters from France’s Atlantic coast with decent white Burgundy, followed by quail potted with grapes and grand cru red Burgundy. That “just”, to me, is the word not of a wine snob but of a winie: the nourishment was marvellous but the company substandard, or at least the conversation flawed. The director had shouted him the meal to let him know he was too late – “There’s a strong tip on the Bourse this morning that the war’s going to be called off.” The month was October 1939. Eggs don’t ruin good wine – but waffle will.

Thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Milk Marketing Board from the 1950s onwards (do you remember “Full of natural goodness”, “Milk’s gotta lotta bottle”, or “Drinka pinta milka day”?) dairy produce enjoys an almost unassailable position in British dietary culture. Milk is seen as vital, an indispensable source of calcium and vitamin D, the foundation stone for healthy teeth and bones.

The health-care professions have been as taken in as anyone; not even evidence implicating dairy in the development of later-life problems such as heart disease has been able to undermine the belief that, for our children to get the best start, they need to be pumped full of cheese and yogurt, all washed down with a glass of nice-coldice- cold milk.

This cultural enthusiasm for dairy led the medical profession into a collective, decades-long blindness. Even today, parents who believe their child to be allergic to milk are likely to be dismissed as oddballs, clutching at improbable straws in an attempt to understand their offspring’s health problems. Dreadful eczema? That’s a skin disease. Intractable abdominal pain and digestive mayhem? There must be something wrong with the gut. Chronic cough and mucous? That’ll be the lungs.

Milk, after all, is what babies are made of. What could be wrong with such a natural, wholesome food? However, because of a growing body of research, there is a dawning appreciation that allergy to the proteins in cow’s milk is behind a range of childhood illnesses.

The journey towards this understanding has been made difficult by several confounding factors. First, there is more than one type of allergic reaction. Immediate hypersensitivity to milk, which is rarer, is easy to diagnose. Directly after exposure to cow’s milk protein, the affected individual displays a florid response, which includes swelling of the lips, face and eyes; a wheeze and breathing difficulty; and a rash called urticaria, which looks like widespread nettle stings.

Much more common in cow’s milk protein allergy (CMPA) is delayed hypersensitivity. This is tricky. There is no clear link in time between exposure and symptoms. These babies tend to have difficult-to-treat eczema, refractory respiratory problems and a range of digestive disorders such as reflux (where acid stomach contents come back into the gullet and mouth), diarrhoea or constipation, colicky pain and even bleeding into the bowel.

We still do not completely understand delayed hypersensitivity and it is likely to be more common than its currently estimated prevalence of around 5 per cent.

Even when delayed hypersensitivity is suspected, there are a number of factors that can frustrate the diagnosis. Unlike immediate hypersensitivity, there is no blood or skin-prick test that can be given. Confirmation can only come from strict exclusion diets, where one would expect symptoms to resolve over a period of between two and eight weeks.

Exclusion diets are hard to stick to. Doctors frequently advise parents to switch to soya-based products, but there is crossreactivity between cow’s milk and soya protein in around 60 per cent of cases. Failure to improve when on a soya-only diet is often mistakenly interpreted as ruling out CMPA.

Another common misconception is that breastfed babies can’t develop CMPA, yet the offending proteins in a dairy-consuming mother will cross into breast milk and provoke allergy in just the same way as with bottle-fed infants.

From an evolutionary perspective, consuming milk beyond babyhood is unnatural, yet all infants depend on milk in their first year or so. Breastfeeding mothers with allergic offspring can go dairyfree but bottle-fed babies are, figuratively speaking, up a gum tree.

Fortunately, there are now a number of formulas available to treat CMPA. In each, the protein components are hydrolysed – chemically “chopped up” into smaller units –which are less likely to provoke an allergic response. But these are very expensive and their growing use is a source of concern to those responsible for NHS prescribing budgets.

A better long-term solution is to encourage and support breastfeeding – currently fewer than a quarter of new mothers are still exclusively breastfeeding at six weeks.

This needs to be coupled with a thorough rethink of our relationship with dairy foods. Even experts in the field of CMPA remain spellbound by the belief that milk is essential for calcium and vitamin D, advising breastfeeding mothers to take artificial supplements if they are cutting out dairy.

But, in reality, milk is a relatively mediocre source of these nutrients. There are innumerable other foodstuffs that carry more calcium than milk – broccoli, figs, almonds, sesame seeds and leafy green vegetables, to name but a few.

As for vitamin D, getting ourselves and our children out into natural sunlight every day is nature’s time-honoured solution. Who knows, we might even inculcate a renewed enthusiasm for fresh air and exercise into the bargain.

When your luck runs out, it runs out all at once. I muse on this as I enter the third hour of my wait in A & E. The day before, I had banged my little toe against the door frame so hard that it is still too sensitive to touch a day later and the configuration of the pain strongly suggests that a bone might have been broken.

I suppose there’s nothing much they can do with a broken little toe, except tell you not to use it, which I think I could work out all by myself, so what I was really after in St Mary’s was information and validation of my own suffering. Which, after the rather painful journey to the hospital – it’s a 15-minute stroll from the Hovel but a rather longer hobble – was fairly acute.

Still, what the hell is this, my waiting here with a possibly broken toe (I did it while rushing to get the clothes out of the machine, which makes me one of the few people in the modern age to have hurt themselves while doing the laundry) when there are people around me visibly suffering? As I write, my friend Leyla Sanai is contemplating the amputation of her leg because of her scleroderma, and is bearing her sufferings with a fortitude that is beyond comprehension. There is a young Spanish man sitting next to me who appears to have something terrible going on with his arm. “Joan,” calls a nurse from a consulting room. He looks up and there is a silence. Of all the people in this room, none is prepared to answer to the name Joan.

“Joan Estevez,” says the nurse. The young Spaniard lifts his head. “Juan,” he says.

“It says ‘Joan’ here,” replies the nurse, in tones which suggest that the name “Juan”, which this young man seems to be claiming as his own, is an imposture and an affectation. Eventually, though, as no one else seems to be claiming the surname “Estevez”, she lets him go into the room.

The quarter hours go by. A nurse had offered me a couple of co-codamol on turning up and I had accepted more out of politeness than need; in rest, the toe was quite docile, but the nurse had charmed me by calling me “sweet pea” and I had a hunch that a couple of these on an empty stomach would have a rather soothing effect. They do but I recognise another pain bubbling up: that of the end of a brief interlude of domestic happiness.

The Beloved, you see, has been offered a job in Gothenburg for something approaching twice the salary she is bringing in here. The offer was made some time ago and she has been putting off making a decision for as long as she can. I have been to Gothenburg and wouldn’t go back there if you paid me, but she is for some reason enamoured of the country and the language; so it’s rather as if someone had offered me a job in Verona.

Is that right? In my campaign to dissuade her from going, I have been doing a spot of research, both on the internet and the internot (ie, books) and have come up with some killer facts about this country, for which I am beginning to nurture a dislike – as you would a rival in love.

“There are 12 people in Sweden,” I tell her, only slightly massaging the facts to suit my purpose. “In the summer, three of them are eaten alive by giant mutant mosquitoes. In the autumn, feral moose, pissed out of their minds on decaying windfalls, account for about four more. Those that remain blow their brains out in winter, which lasts for nine months.

You can only buy alcohol from a small corrugated-iron shed in Malmö, and when you do your name is put on a criminal register, right next to the paedophiles and heroin traffickers. A bottle of beer costs 6,000 kronor and tastes of moose piss, for the very good reason that that is what it is made from.”

I reinforce my point by demonstrating that when you type the words “bad things about Sweden” into Google you get 36,200,000 results (try it). But it’s a jump up in terms of her career and if I was the one to hold her back by having a crying fit, I’d feel guilty for the rest of my life. So, I know that all I can do is try to ignore my own very strong feelings for once and think of what is best for her.

Hence, perhaps, my concentration on my toe. Which, as it turns out, is not broken (but a week later is still painful and impossible to touch). It took four hours to learn that; as long as a return flight to Gothenburg, I reflect.

One reason why Labour strategists are confident that their party will win the next election is that it is the "least toxic" among voters. While a significant chunk of the electorate would never consider voting Conservative (most notably ethnic minorities, northerners and Scots), far fewer would never vote Labour. 

That point is reinforced by a new poll from YouGov today showing that while 33% would never vote Conservative, far fewer (24%) would never vote Labour. The Tories' problem is greatest in Scotland, where 59% would never vote for them (they currently hold just one seat out of a possible 59) and in the north, where 39% would never vote for them (they hold 43 seats out of a possible 158).

Conservative MP Gavin Barwell notes that"modernisation is about reducing/reversing this gap" but that's a project Cameron, under the tutelage of Lynton Crosby, long abandoned. The Tories are fond of deriding Labour’s alleged "35 per cent strategy", under which a coalition of the party’s core supporters and Lib Dem defectors allow it to crawl over the electoral finish line – but few note the irony that the Tory leadership has now adopted its own version of this game plan. Under heavy fire from the Ukip insurgency, the party has retreated to its core territory of welfare, immigration and Europe.

But interestingly, the Tories are only the third most toxic party. Thirty five per cent would never vote Lib Dem, while 43% would never vote UKIP. While many casually claim that voters will never make Ed Miliband prime minister, it is the Labour leader who is fishing in the largest pool. 

The pop quote of the month comes from Eminem, who, asked which part of his new album he was most “excited about”, said none of it: he was just glad it was over. I tried to get an advance listen of The Marshall Mathers LP 2 without resorting to illegal downloads but the label refused to send any review copies out, presumably because he’d already given it such a massive kicking himself.

Sometimes I think we’re due a return to the music writing of the 1960s, when the first pop critics, sitting on a record company sofa in Hush Puppies, simply listened to a record and narrated what was on it, instead of providing comment. The Beatles’ “Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!” is “fairground music brought up to date and quite fascinating to hear,” according to Allen Evans in the New Musical Express in 1967. A year earlier, the Kinks’ Ray Davies had said, of “Eleanor Rigby”, “I bought a Haydn LP the other day and this sounds just like it.” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” he observed, “will be popular in the discotheques.”

Ground control to Major Vuitton

Anyway, I thought of the recalcitrant Eminem when, red-carpeted at the Mercury Awards, the 19-year-old Jake Bugg was asked about how he felt being nominated for the gong and said he wasn’t that bothered. To be fair, through Bugg’s eyes there is no need for industry recognition – his debut album sold 450,000 copies and life for him is a vast, flapping duvet of 14-year old girls, stretched out across a festival field.

I was a Mercury judge for the first time this year: the task of getting 200 records down to one may have been enormous but the 90- minute ceremony passed smoothly apart from Lauren Laverne’s much-celebrated Blunt/Blake spoonerism. James Blake, this year’s winner, is the son of the one-time Colosseum guitarist James Litherland, though you don’t hear much jazz rock in his strain of pastoral dubstep. Way back in the summer before voting began, I wondered if David Bowie would win the award because people wanted to force him to come out of the house and collect it, but no. On the night, he is beamed in via a new video (a remix of his song “Love Is Lost” by James “LCD Soundsystem” Murphy), featuring props from his archives: a few years back someone had been charged with the task of carving the face of the dame on to a piece of wood and turning him into a marionette. On our table someone trawls their phone for visual proof that Bowie is appearing in a Louis Vuitton ad campaign, having previously turned down one for Kit Kat. As it turns out, he is.

1001 lists to read before you die

The workers of Britain were provided with a 375-hour Spotify soundtrack for their offices last week when the NME unveiled its megapoll, “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time”. The Smiths’ “The Queen is Dead” (1986) was No 1. I thought the music press had got the listings thing out of its system about five years ago, around the time of Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Singers of All Time” (I can’t think of 100 singers) and coffee-table publications such as 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, but just this morning, a new book came through the door that took the music/death/planning equation to a cosmic new level: 1001 Guitars to Dream of Playing Before You Die (Octopus Books, £20).

NME should have had a country-wide poll open only to the public vote. Robbie Williams and One Direction would be at the top followed closely by the guy off The X Factor who sings gospel music; INXS and Dire Straits would be in the top 20. Most of what ordinary people listen to behind closed doors is seldom talked about by music journalists. They’ve started to acknowledge this on Radio 2’s Jo Whiley show, in which I participate once a month or so. I am made to review albums that have already been in the public domain for a week, so that the guy driving the van down the A47 can tweet the programme and tell us that what I’m saying about Alison Moyet is completely untrue. It’s a challenge and quite exhilarating.

The even realer Slim Shady

And so to the Eminem album, for which, as we go to press, there is sadly no time for anything more than a narration review. In the opening track, “Bad Guy”, Eminem sounds very angry and frustrated with his female friend and says he has been driving around her neighbourhood for nine hours and 45 minutes now with his mouth full of saliva. He appears to be breaking and entering her house. This song is a slower pace than Eminem’s usual jog-beat and his voice is quite manly and robust. In the album’s third song, “Rhyme or Reason”, the rapper explains that he has no father but that this is OK because his mother reproduced like a komodo dragon.

Imagine if you lived in a place where                                
the cool breeze caresses your face as                               
you stare at the lush green landscape,                               
where birds sing as you walk by,                               
where you can fish by the lake,                               
where your neighbours share your lifestyle dreams,                               
where your kids can play outdoors safely . . .                               

Where is this idyll? Migaa – a 20-minute drive from the rubble of the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi, Kenya – is a new development complete with a private hospital, conference centre, “shop till you drop” mall facilities and a 200-acre executive golf course. Natasha, a sales rep, talks me through the mid-range Tamarind Tree residences – fully serviced apartments with a lift and a concierge, high-speed internet, a roof terrace with a solar-heated pool and a bar.

“We also have a wall,” she tells me. Patrolled by armed security guards, it is a 12- kilometre-long electrified stone wall around the perimeter of the compound.

Migaa is one of several “premier gated cities” springing up around Nairobi, from the $14.5bn Konza Techno City to Tatu City, with its helipad and biometric ID system, unveiled last year by the Moscow-based Renaissance Partners in Cannes, France. Nairobi is not the only place this is happening: a pan-African trend to upgrade to the “smart city” of the future is emerging. Uganda’s capital, Kampala, has Kakungulu eco-city, with two malls, a 50,000-seater stadium and a golf course with seeds for the greens flown in from Florida. Accra, Ghana, has Appolonia. Lagos, Nigeria, has Eko Atlantic, “rising like Aphrodite from the foam of the Atlantic”. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, not to be outdone, has la Cité du Fleuve, emerging, like a “water lily”, on reclaimed land in the middle of the Congo River near the capital, Kinshasa. The mansion designs on offer include “palace-style Arabe” and “Mediterranean villa”. Elsewhere, there’s Masdar in the United Arab Emirates, Norman Foster’s eco-oasis in the desert, coming in with an estimated $20bn price tag for 40,000 inhabitants.

In South Korea, Songdo is already open for business. Described by Cisco as a “model for future cities”, Songdo has smart water, smart garbage (pneumatically sucked out of sight), smart parking with cars guided to empty lots, centralised blood pressure monitoring consoles, elevators you can order from your television screen and ubiquitous 52- inch plasma screens for high-definition video conferencing. Plus, a green space modelled on New York’s Central Park and a canal system inspired by Venice.

Then there are the ambitions of China. After a decade of rolling out the infrastructure equivalent of Rome every two months, China, according to the news agency Xinhua, now aims to step up the pace, with 100 model cities, 200 model counties, 1,000 model districts and 10,000 model towns by 2015. It’s Grand Designs on steroids. Yet will these urban dreamscapes work in reality?

If urbanisation is the defining trend of the 21st century, with 4.9 billion people predicted to be living in African and Asian cities by 2030 (the population of the world as recently as the mid-1980s), are we up to the task? Or is this the next real estate bubble, not sub-prime but super-prime, dressed up in the mushy atmospherics of eco-bling? There are three potential problems.

The first is the demand for jobs. Around the world, some 200,000 people a day leave the countryside – crops failing, the agricultural model broken – in a pattern of distressed migration that takes them to the slums. Nairobi’s population has swollen to around 3.4 million. The figures are unreliable but some 60 per cent of its population is estimated to be slum-dwelling, concentrated in just 5 per cent of the city’s space.

The challenges are patent. Nairobi is bursting. Its streets are jammed (the city recently rose to fourth in the world in IBM’s Commuter Pain Index), its services are crumbling. Business, in a vicious circle accelerated by the terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping centre, is leaving the city. As it leaves, it reduces still further the flow of tax revenue that, from roads to health to education, could transform public services.

Unemployment is at 60 per cent, with only 9 per cent (according to some estimates) in formal-sector unemployment. More than 500,000 new unemployed young people join the labour force every year; 90 per cent of the unemployed have no skills or formal training beyond primary education.

Why do the rural poor come to the city? For a woman such as Mama Felix, the owner of the Pink Lady hairdressing salon in the slum of Mathare, there’s a central answer – because that’s where the hope is. Braid by braid, customer by customer, she is working her way towards getting back the savings she lost to a loan shark. She has no running water and no lights. Half the money she earns goes out to relatives in the countryside. But she has some scissors, a mirror, an electric dryer and, above all, a market for her skills.

For all the “flying toilets”, Mungiki street gangs and illegal changaa breweries, Nairobi’s sprawling slums of Mathare, Kibera and Korogocho are concentrators not just of poverty but of opportunity. If the businesses move out to the new satellite city – if you move the engine that’s creating 45 per cent of Kenya’s GDP and economic opportunity 15 miles away – the migrants will follow and set up camp. You haven’t solved the underlying problem with a new city: you have just moved it on down the road. These new “smart” cities aren’t going to look like the architect’s model. They are going to have a lot of people camping in and around them, looking for jobs.

The second problem is the supply of jobs. Just how many will the smart city manage to offer? As part of its cultural life, Migaa, which is built on over 700 acres of a coffee plantation, will celebrate the rich heritage of that industry with the Coffee Museum, complete with digital displays and a café: a site for agricultural production transformed into a site for consumption and for the deployment of the development strategy known as “pacification by cappuccino”. As Slavoj Žižek notes in The Year of Dreaming Dangerously: “There is a wonderful expression in Persian, war nam nihadan, which means, ‘To murder somebody, bury his body, then grow flowers over the body to conceal it.’”

From its IT systems to the merchandise in its malls, the smart city risks being an import city, closed to local skills and goods, with a reduced capacity to develop or integrate local expertise in the supply chain. As a result, there’s the danger that it will become something close to an iPad city, a mesh of topdown, closed systems, both vulnerable and interdependent, with a deskilled local labour force that’s unable to repair or maintain it.

The smart city becomes a city that is only as good as its software, built for obsolescence. The impact of new cities such as Angola’s Kilamba, or China’s deserted Tianducheng (with its 108-metre-high “Eiffel Tower” and replica Champs-Élysées), is to create the throwaway city.

The third problem is what J K Galbraith called “the massive onslaught of circumstance”. Food price rises, which have already resulted in events from the tortilla riots in Mexico to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, have been shown to have a direct link to civic unrest. As Henk- Jan Brinkman and Cullen S Hendrix wrote in a report for the World Food Programme: “Food insecurity, especially when caused by higher food prices, heightens the risk of democratic breakdown, civil conflict, protest, rioting and communal conflict.”

If the predictions of climate-change-driven drought and impacts on crop prices across eastern and central Africa hold true, the new smart city is facing a complex external environment, with several specific threats to the boundary wall: more people with more mouths to feed, facing higher food prices, with fewer jobs to help them afford it.

As a point of reference, it was in the Lower Shabelle area of Somalia – where drought struck and brought child mortality of 10 per cent – that the Islamist terrorist group al- Shabaab gained control. Resilience, the capacity to adapt and heal, not the opposite, is what the 21st-century city will need.

Done right, the smart city has the potential to provide affordable housing and construction jobs and help incubate a next generation of start-ups. Done badly, it’s a different story and has the potential to leave us with three problems: a broken countryside, swamped megacities and non-resilient new satellite cities.

In 2011, there were 23 urban agglomerations that qualified as megacities, which means that they had populations exceeding ten million inhabitants. By 2025, there are expected to be as many as 37 megacities. The challenge for Nairobi and all of these cities is a defining challenge for societal well-being in the years to 2050.

Is there another option, beyond the smart city, that might work? In Erik Hersman’s photograph, taken 60 kilometres outside Nairobi in the Savannah at the construction site for Konza, the contours of two potentially dystopian cities of the future can be seen. The first, implied in the deserted fields, is the decreasingly resilient megacity, the swamped “petropolis” of Nairobi. The second city, Konza, advertised on the billboard, is what is currently on track to be its replacement, the new smart city, “cyburbia”, the gleaming citadel, censored and sensored. This is the eco-city as escapist urbanism.

I s there a third city, beyond the dyad of old Nairobi and its glimmering cyburb of Konza? Is there a city where technology helps us not escape but address the looming crisis of rural African poverty? Is there a city where we could thrive?

“The fields,” said the poet Ben Okri, “are sprouting strange new mushrooms.”

The group standing in front of the perimeter gate are members of Nairobi’s iHub, part of a network of self-organising groups that now run 16 innovation spaces across the city. From the iHub to M:Lab, Nailab and 88mph, an alternative approach is forming, deploying technology not to escape the problems of distressed migration but to tackle the root causes.

M-Kopa, the brainchild of Nick Hughes, one of the founders of the mobile money transfer system M-Pesa, is an example. Across the globe, there are as many as 1.5 billion people without access to power, spending 40 to 70 per cent of their income on kerosene and firewood, with two million deaths a year from smoke inhalation and 150 million tonnes of carbon released annually.

M-Kopa set out to address these three problems by making solar home-lighting systems affordable and accessible to low-income consumers. In October 2012, M-Kopa partnered with Safaricom to launch the first ever “pay-as-you-go solar solution” using mobile money. M-Kopa takes the d.Light mobile solar light and puts a mobile chip in it. This has a big impact for users. Instead of having to buy the light outright, at a cost far beyond their range, Kenya’s cash-strapped poor can make an initial deposit of $30, then lease it, just like a mobile phone, for around 50 cents a day: less than they would be spending on kerosene or firewood.

Using M-Pesa, the mobile money transfer system, they pay instalments of 40 Kenyan shillings a day for 12 months, about 30 shillings less than the cost of paraffin and charging. In return, they get the M-Kopa system, comprising a base station with a solar panel, three lamps and a charging kit for phones.

And they don’t just get power. Using the chip, they can get micro-insurance, buy fertiliser and make micro-payments for productive equipment such as the KickStart agricultural hand pump, which, at the cost of $34, gives access to the underground water table, tripling the number of crops that local farmers can plant.

They get the basic needs that make it possible to stay out of the slums and succeed as a rural farmer. The essence of the approach is to use technology not to accelerate consumption but, as Ford did with the Model T, to transform productivity within a new group of the population. In one study, exam pass rates went up from 68 to 82 per cent and incomes per head from $160 a year to $1,600. For Mama Felix, it means more hours in the shop, lights for her family, phone-charging and mobile money transfers. It means the chance to move slowly out of poverty.

Does it make business sense? The poorest of the poor spend $36bn a year on kerosene alone. The market for M-Kopa is believed to be $1bn a year in Kenya. It is a market that is the opposite of the sub-prime. It is big, growing and, when you serve it, by raising user productivity and income, you expand it.

M-Kopa is part of a growing movement to use technology for development. Another Kenyan innovation, iCow, is a voice-based application for small-scale dairy farmers. It helps farmers trace the oestrogen cycles of their cows and also gives technical advice on animal nutrition, milk production and gestation. Users of the application have reported an increase in income of 42 per cent, with milk retention increased by 56 per cent. Meanwhile, MFarm, a Kenyan agribusiness company, has partnered with Samsung to launch a new tool that allows subscribing farmers to obtain real-time price information, buy farm inputs and find buyers for their produce.

The MFarm tool was founded by three Kenyan women who met through the iHub in Nairobi. Their idea, facilitated by a group called Akirachix, a community of over 200 tech women, was developed at the M:Lab incubator at Nairobi’s iHub and launched after they won a 48-hour boot-camp event and €10, 000 of investment.

It is early days but a pattern is emerging. “Technology,” says Kentaro Toyama, “is not the answer. It is the amplifier of intent.” As we confront the challenge of urbanisation, we can deploy technology with two different intentions. One is vertical, isolating ourselves in gated smart cities from the crises affecting the poor. The other is horizontal, harnessing technology to empower smart citizens, with the goal of making both the rural and the urban work.

Leo Johnson is the co-author, with Michael Blowfield, of “Turnaround Challenge: Business and the City of the Future” (Oxford University Press, £20). For more information, visit: turnaroundchallenge.org

The constituency of Osgoldcross was created when the Eastern West Riding of Yorkshire seat was broken up in 1885. In 1906, it elected the Liberal Joseph Compton-Rickett. He wrote fiction under his own name and the pseudonym Maurice Baxter. His most notable works were The Christ That Is To Be (1891) and The Quickening of Caliban (1893), in which a second human species is discovered in Africa, one of whom, Forest Bokrie, goes to Cambridge University. In his pseudonymous novel James Strathgeld, a businessman with no scruples walks over everyone to get what he wants.

Compton-Rickett made his money as a coal merchant. Long after his death, his firm was involved in a court case after a detonator was delivered with some Coalite, exploding when burned. A settlement was paid for damages.

San Francisco

They forgot the Skittles. The young white American boys who dressed up as the corpse of Trayvon Martin and his killer doused the one playing the 17-year-old in Hallowe’en fake blood but omitted one detail. When Trayvon was gunned down by a Neighbourhood Watch officer, George Zimmerman, in February 2012, he was unarmed and holding a packet of brightly coloured sweets.

It was just a stupid Hallowe’en costume. In the scheme of things, perhaps it shouldn’t matter that in pictures that circulated online this past week the two lads appeared to be having an enormous giggle over their decision to dress up as Martin and Zimmerman. Perhaps it shouldn’t matter and in a different country, at a different time, perhaps it might be possible to partake in that morbid humour without feeling the bile rise in your throat.

The US is still, strictly speaking, a free country. Young people are free, if they wish, to make light of the death of a boy whose family is still in deep grief, a boy whose face was carried on placards across the US as a symbol of the structural violence perpetrated against black men by police and state and security personnel. And the rest of us are free to observe in that act of mockery the monstrous accommodation of racism in modern America.

When Zimmerman was acquitted of Martin’s manslaughter this summer, the angry protests that followed did not leave out the Skittles. Hundreds of people of all races wore hoods and carried packets of the sweets, chanting, “I am Trayvon Martin.” Zimmerman had not, after all, been alone in the dock. The entire US justice system, and its casual attitude to the life and liberty of people of colour, had been on trial.

When is it too soon to dress up as an iconic murdered teenager, grinning, in blackface and a bloodstained hoodie, while a friend points his fingers like a trigger to your head? It’s too soon when more than 312 people of colour were killed by the police or security services last year. That’s one every 28 hours. It’s too soon when, in 2011, 87 per cent of the people targeted under the stop-and-frisk laws in New York were black or Latino, in effect rendering it impossible for a young person of colour to walk the streets freely in a city that considers itself the cultural capital of the world. And it’s too soon when, in May 2012, exactly the same law used in Zimmerman’s defence – Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law – failed to prevent a battered woman of colour going to jail for 20 years.

Marissa Alexander’s husband, Rico Gray, beat her during and after her pregnancy. Nine days after her daughter was born in 2010, she fired a warning shot to stop Gray attacking her again – and was sentenced to three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Unlike Zimmerman, Alexander was acting in pure self-defence and hurt nobody at all – but on 8 November she will appear in court again to find out if she can get bail, which might lead to the chance to be free before her three children are grown. “Marissa has been victimised twice, once by her abusive ex-husband and again by the state of Florida, which has stolen nearly three years from her life for an act of self-defence that injured no one,” said Aleta Alston-Toure of the Free Marissa Now campaign.

In practice, people of colour are subject to a different set of judgements in America. You don’t even need to have your hand on a weapon to be considered a criminal who can be disposed of by the state. All you need, like Trayvon Martin, or Kimani Gray, the 16-yearold who was killed this March, or 22-year-old Oscar Grant, who was killed on New Year’s Day in 2009, is to be walking down the wrong street when the wrong cop is on duty.

I do not pretend to any sort of visceral understanding of racial injustice in America. The personal, political nature of racism is such that the kids queuing for crisps at the corner shop have forgotten more than I will ever know about it. White people and foreigners have the option of looking away. We have the option of coming late to a chiefly academic understanding of racial violence in the US. But that does not mean we are unaffected. On the contrary: the entire globe is affected by how the social fabric of the world’s only superpower is threaded through with the kind of structural violence that allows black boys to be gunned down on the way to the grocery and their killers walk free. It matters that the country planning drone strikes and setting surveillance policy across the planet treats those lives so cheaply.

There are different ways to remember the dead. Two days after Hallowe’en, the Dia de los Muertos took place in San Francisco. This Mexican festival has become a cultural fixture in this city, where I’m visiting friends. People of all races and backgrounds paint elaborate bone make-up on their faces and march through the streets with candles to the beat of hollow drums, buzzing on sugar skulls and churros. There’s a fierce, sad joy to it.

Among the shrines to loved ones carried through the streets were portraits of Grant and Martin, with the legends: “I am Oscar Grant –my life matters.” “I am Trayvon Martin –my life matters.”

Everyone knows that athletes have to make a virtue out of unreflectiveness. A blank mind, the absence of irrelevant thought, an ability to forget the past, to block out the future, to exist in the moment – these are the psychological traits of most great players. “Just do it” – the best known of Nike’s slogans – said it best. That is why sportsmen often dry up when asked to explain what they were thinking, let alone how they were feeling. As little as possible is the honest answer.

Having read Alex Ferguson’s autobiography, I am beginning to think the same can apply to management. This is much more of a shock. Whole industries – not just management books but also the lucrative lecture circuit – depend on the assumption that we can draw transferrable “lessons” by exploring the theories of successful leaders. The truth is much more uneven and complicated.

Some leaders do proceed according to principles that fit into a theoretical framework. Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, enabled his impoverished team to beat much richer ones by exploiting inefficiencies in the transfer market. He has tried to turn management into a science. This is leadership by methodology – thinking or, more accurately, calculating your way to victory.

Yet there is a different type of leader, who depends on something much simpler and harder to emulate: the innate force of their personality. Ferguson was firmly in this latter camp. His theoretical musings are much less interesting than those aspects of his personality that elude reflectiveness, even now.

The commonest misconception about leadership is that it is a skill. It isn’t; it’s an effect. Ferguson’s presence changed how people acted. Central to that was his fierce and unslakeable competitiveness. I began the book wondering why a septuagenarian knight of the realm was traipsing around the nation’s supermarkets signing hardbacks, still selling his side of the story – how could he be so dismissive of his former players, why stoop to that level? Then, I realised that it was all magnificently in keeping with his character. Sniping, fighting, settling scores: you don’t need Ferguson to explain what he was good at; he is still doing it as you read. To learn from this book, ignore the theory, feel the venom.

It is all too easy to point out the logical flaws in Ferguson’s book. “Always tell them the truth,” he writes about his relations with players. You know what he means but it is clearly untrue. Always? When they are vulnerable, when you are rebuilding their self-belief, when they are tending towards conceit? No, the truth is just one psychological weapon, alongside bluff and all the others. The question is when to tell them the truth and how.

The book also resiles from explicitly admiring power, even though the pursuit and preservation of power is the book’s subliminal theme. The only time he explicitly mentions the term, he denies it is relevant, as though power were a dirty word, perhaps tainted by capitalist overtones. He prefers the word control. I can’t see the difference.

Ferguson’s personality was naturally coercive. Violence is the most underrated of all leadership traits (and I write as an ex-captain who had no gift for it at all). By violence, I do not mean the use of violence or even the threat of violence. I mean the possibility of violence. Sport is about confrontation. In the vast majority of sports, that confrontation is abstract. Physical blows become metaphorical blows. Where the boxer strikes directly with his fist, the tennis player does so by hitting a ball with his racket from the safety of the other side of the net.

However, even in non-contact sports, something of that underlying physicality survives the process of translation. Some players, a few lucky players, seethe with the threat of violence. They do not have to do anything to prove it; you simply know it is there. You see it in their eyes. With some opponents – even though rationally I always knew there was almost zero chance that the cricket match would descend into trading blows – something much more powerful than rationality advised me not to test my assessment of the “almost zero chance”.

Managers, too, benefit from the same quality. No leader achieves greatness by punching people. Quite a few, however, benefit from the impression that it would be a grave error for anyone entirely to rule out the possibility. Ferguson was a publican before becoming a manager. “Sometimes I would come home with a split head or black eye. That was pub life. When fights broke out, it was necessary to jump in to restore order.” Try imagining Arsène Wenger having done that – or boasting about it later if he had.

Ferguson also recognised his own brand of physicality in others. He liked to have enforcers in his side – and on his side. When the iron-willed Serbian defender Nemanja Vidic told his manager that he might go to fight in Kosovo, Ferguson purred with delight: “He had the eyes for it.”

In one crucial respect, this book is anything but a sell-out. It is a football book through and through. It has little time for abstract theory. It is concerned with the nitty-gritty – judging players, sacking people, conquering rivals, quelling uprisings. Trying to write a grander, more elevated book would have been dishonest in tone as well as substance.

At the heart of this book is a paradox that unwittingly skewers the premise of the genre: to lead like Ferguson, you first have to be like Ferguson, which requires you not to be trying to be somebody else. The people I feel sorry for are not the targets of his pen, not Beckham and Keane, but the students at Harvard Business School who are undoubtedly already underlining the wrong sentences – such as, “Tell them the truth” – and ignoring the crucial point, never written down but always felt by the reader: you can’t fake it.

Ed Smith’s latest book is “Luck: a Fresh Look at Fortune” (Bloomsbury, £8.99)

Next spring, the Labour Party will convene a special conference from which there should emerge a renewed relationship with affiliated trade unions. That, at least, is the plan. The event was conceived in a moment of turmoil in Ed Miliband’s office earlier this year. A row about the role of the Unite union in selecting a candidate for the constituency of Falkirk had spiralled into a crisis of authority for the Labour leader.

To demonstrate irreproachable independence from those who bankroll his party, Mr Miliband set out an agenda to change the relationship drastically. If it works, it will help restore the party’s credentials as a democratic mass movement for ordinary working people. If it fails, it will open Mr Miliband to caricature as the weakling puppet of old-left reaction.

Although the outcome of the conference cannot be foreseen, the outline of negotiations is clear enough. The Labour leadership will tell union bosses that they will end up with another Tory government if they thwart its reforms. The union bosses will use their money to extract concessions. The likeliest result is a compromise that allows the Labour leader to claim victory with conspicuous changes to the way union members “opt in” to party membership while other measures that might dilute union influence at Labour conference (and thus in future leadership elections) will be kicked into the long grass.

Meanwhile, the truth about what happened in Falkirk is lost in ongoing factional warfare. Senior party figures want investigations reopened; Mr Miliband’s office does not. Separately, Unite has become embroiled in controversy over allegations that its officers encouraged the intimidation of management in an industrial dispute at the nearby Grangemouth refinery. Again, Mr Miliband felt obliged to distance himself from the institution that furnishes up to a quarter of his party’s annual funding. That the relationship is dysfunctional can no longer be disputed.

Many trade unionists understandably feel beleaguered. Their influence has declined precipitately in recent decades yet they are attacked by Tories as if they hold the whole of society to ransom. Their duty is to protect their members from exploitation. It is not obedience to the preferences of conservative commentators. If unions did not agitate for more candidates with ordinary backgrounds to stand for parliament, the Commons would be more stuffed with privately educated professional politicians than it is already.

And yet the nobility of the ambition is too often traduced by methods that range from the clumsy and ineffective to the bullying and corrupt. The reality is that behemoth unions – Unite, Unison, GMB – formed from multiple mergers of smaller groups have arrogated the right to speak on behalf of the “working classes”, which they define too often in terms of ideological purity rather than income or background. They have compensated themselves for diminished influence in the wider British workplace by inflating and consolidating their power within the Labour Party. Whenever Labour talks about modernisation and change – whether in the reform of public services or party structures – the trade unions allow themselves to be cast as the citadels of reaction; the homeland of a more “authentic” left, which happens also to be a left of perpetual minority and electoral defeat.

Ultimately that is the tendency that has forced Ed Miliband to convene his special conference. There are more trade unionists who understand that imperative than is commonly recognised. It is time they made their voices heard.

Sri Lanka is a rogue state

Something terrible happened in the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009, an ethnic war that had divided the country for 26 years. The Sri Lankan army – aided, it is said, by the Chinese – destroyed the resistance of the Tamil insurgents in a brutal offensive that enabled the government to reclaim the north of the country, where the Tamils, a mostly Hindu minority, had aspired to create a new independent state. Hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians were rounded into socalled no-fire zones. These zones were mercilessly shelled by government troops and there was huge loss of civilian life.

Since the end of the war, the Tamils have been harshly oppressed and there have been widespread human rights abuses and media censorship. The shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, on page 23, condemns these abuses and laments that David Cameron has missed an opportunity to agitate for change in Sri Lanka, ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), which will be held in Colombo from 15 to 17 November. Yet Mr Cameron should have done more than condemn the abuses: he should have boycotted the CHOGM in an attempt to shame the rogue Sri Lankan state into reform.

I was at the Sydney Cricket Ground in January 2004 when Steve Waugh played his final Test. It was the last match in a four-Test series and Waugh, the Australia captain, had only to walk out of the pavilion or touch the peak of his baggy green cap or pick up the ball and throw it back to the wicketkeeper for the stadium to erupt in applause.

The Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, where Sachin Tendulkar will play his final Test from 14 November, seats 12,500 fewer spectators than the Sydney Cricket Ground. But expect the din to be louder, more relentless and laden as much with hysteria as with a sense of – to borrow from the commentator and former Australian cricketer Matthew Hayden – a nation’s frantic appeal to one man for one more miracle.

The reverberations will be felt across the country. They are already being felt – and not just in terms of the cricket. In the wealthy but murky corridors of Indian cricket administration, no one will say if Tendulkar – like Waugh – was told that he should make this his final Test and retire rather than risk being dropped (in Tendulkar’s case, from the forthcoming series against South Africa).

The Indian cricket board has long had no love for Test cricket (other than in the brief period when India was ranked number one in that format of the game), preferring instead the far more popular Twenty20 and even 50-overs-a-side formats. Yet this was an opportunity to create a grand stage for a grand farewell. This was a chance to make money from a Test match against a lowly opposition. This was, perhaps, the opportunity to get the Tendulkar retirement issue out of the way, as well.

So the West Indies series was conjured up. The tour to South Africa was pushed back. Tendulkar duly announced his retirement. It was decided that the final Test would be played in Mumbai, Tendulkar’s home ground. If there was a quid pro quo, no one was breathing a word about it.

The Wankhede Stadium is expected to be full – now a rare occurrence for a Test match in India. More than ticket sales, however, the big money comes from advertisers on television. Indian papers have reported that ads for a ten-second TV spot are likely to be sold at a premium of 200 to 300 per cent.

The hospitality industry is ready to exploit the event in every way it can, with bars and restaurants rolling out special offers and menus and showing the match on big screens.

It is not just about the money. This will be a game that everyone will want to remember. That is a reflection of what Tendulkar means to India.

A special postage stamp will be issued for his final Test. A commemorative coin will be used for the toss. There will be Tendulkar masks for spectators. In Kolkata, the venue of his 199th Test, a tableau commemorating the high points of Tendulkar’s career will travel across the city.

The cricketer is reported to have requested 500 tickets for friends and relatives for the Wankhede Test. He has also asked for the construction of a special ramp for his wheelchair-bound mother, who has never seen him play in a stadium before.

The noise surrounding his final Test will grow and grow in the coming weeks. The match will mark the end of the career of India’s greatest sporting legend. It will also be the last chance for everyone to make as much as they can out of Indian cricket’s first global brand and wealthiest sportsperson.

Soumya Bhattacharya is editor of the Hindustan Times (Mumbai) and the author of “Why India Can Never Do Without Cricket” (Peakpublish, £9.99)

You could be forgiven for thinking that the recent report by the chief medical officer for England, Sally Davies, covered only one topic – improving child health. The press picked up on the argument that, given the upsurge in cases of rickets, the government should consider providing free vitamin supplements to all children, but there was much more in the report. Davies’s next point, that we should fortify our flour with folic acid, has been ignored for far too long.

This recommendation arguably has much greater potential impact. Boosting folic acid in foods eaten by pregnant women significantly decreases the occurrence of foetal “neural tube defects”, reducing cases of conditions such as spina bifida and anencephaly, in which large parts of a baby’s brain simply don’t form.

The neural tube, which eventually carries the spinal cord and the brain, starts as a groove that deepens and then closes off. A folic acid deficiency can prevent the closing process, leaving nerves exposed. Folic acid provides a “methyl group” – one carbon atom and three hydrogen atoms – that binds to foetal DNA and ensures the genetic instructions are carried out properly, fully closing the neural tube.

We’ve known about the importance of folic acid since a landmark paper was published in the Lancet in 1991. In an experiment involving 2,000 women known to be at higher risk of having babies with neural tube defects, supplements of folic acid prevented between 70 and 80 per cent of the defects. The benefits were so starkly obvious that the experiment was stopped early: it was deemed unethical to continue to withhold supplements from those in the control group.

The test results led more than 60 countries to mandate the fortification of flour with folic acid. The neural tube forms in the first four weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant. For full protection, the foetus needs the folic acid right from conception, yet only 37 per cent of women in the UK are taking folic acid supplements when they fall pregnant.

In the US, the fortification of cereal products with folic acid prevents roughly 1,300 neural tube defects a year and forestalls 360 infant deaths. Every year in the UK, 1,000 children are born with a neural tube defect, one and a half times the number of such births in the entire United States. That’s because the UK government advises only that women who might get pregnant should take folic acid supplements – it has consistently ignored scientific advice to put folic acid in the nation’s flour.

Until early this year, the government was able to hide behind claims that folic acid fortification might increase rates of bowel cancer. Those claims were disproved in a Lancet paper in January. The only remaining fig leaf for the government’s current position is a vague concern that one shouldn’t impose medicines on the country.

There is also an economic case for fortifying flour with folic acid. Each spina bifida patient costs the NHS about half a million pounds over their lifetime. In the US, the financial benefits have been shown to outweigh the cost of fortifying flour by 40 to 1. A 2011 costbenefit analysis of fortifying flour with folic acid suggested it would save the UK several million to hundreds of millions of pounds per year.

By all means, let’s get children out into the sun, and taking Vitamin D supplements if necessary: rickets has no place in 21st-century society. But if we are serious about our children deserving better, it also makes sense to give our baked goods a little extra goodness.

The next London mayoral election will be the first in which neither Ken Livingstone nor Boris Johnson is a candidate. In his concession speech in 2012, Livingstone ruefully said that he would not fight another campaign, while Johnson now rarely disguises his intention to stand for parliament in 2015. With the departure of these hegemons, the capital’s other big beasts are considering their chances of taking City Hall in 2016.

It is on the Labour side that activity is greatest. The end of the Tories’ Boris bonus means that the election is the opposition’s to lose. Through speeches, blogs and op-eds, the contenders are making themselves known. There is David Lammy, the Tottenham MP, who “thought hard” about whether to stand in 2012 before opting to chair Livingstone’s campaign and has already published an attack dossier on Johnson’s record (“Boris Isn’t Working”). Then there is Tessa Jowell, lauded for her role in bringing the Olympics to London and well liked across the party despite her defiantly Blairite politics.

On the left, there is Diane Abbott, liberated to speak freely after her recent sacking from the front bench and framing herself as a Livingstone-style maverick. “Londoners don’t want a party hack. Big cities never want a party hack,” she said recently.

The field spans out to include Andrew Adonis, the cerebral former transport secretary, whose passion for infrastructure and grands projets prompted him to declare in 2011 that he “would love to be mayor”. Other possible contenders include Oona King, Livingstone’s defeated rival from the last selection contest, and Margaret Hodge, the redoubtable chair of the public accounts committee.

If there is a candidate to watch, it is Sadiq Khan. The shadow justice secretary is one of Labour’s most articulate and energetic performers and was recently named shadow minister for London by Ed Miliband (whose leadership campaign he managed in 2010). Borrowing the metaphor used by Johnson to describe his prime ministerial ambitions, he recently remarked: “If I was at the edge of the box and the ball came free and I thought I had the best chance of shooting and scoring, then I might do it. But let’s see if the ball comes free.”

Whether “the ball comes free” may yet rest on the result of the general election. “Sadiq might feel duty-bound to serve as justice secretary if Labour wins,” one party figure told me, noting that he had held the brief since Miliband’s first reshuffle. For this reason, Labour is likely to delay the selection contest until after 2015, to avoid candidates’ bids being viewed as a judgement on the party’s election chances.

The joker in the pack is Eddie Izzard. The stand-up comedian will not run this time (despite leading in the polls) but has pledged to do so in 2020, suggesting that he either expects a Labour defeat or plans to challenge an incumbent. The announcement prompted one Labour MP to refer me to “the curse of Izzard”: “He campaigned for the euro and for AV. What could possibly go wrong?”

The portrait artist Don Bachardy says his best work was the drawings he made in 1986 as his partner, Christopher Isherwood, lay dying. It was the end of a relationship that had lasted 33 years, beginning on Valentine’s Day, 1953, when Isherwood was 48 and Don was 18.

Don was working in a Hollywood supermarket when they met, sketching profiles of movie stars from glossy magazines. Isherwood nurtured his young boyfriend’s talents, becoming his first live sitter and leading him, ultimately, to what Bachardy calls “the major moment of my career as an artist”.

“I could have drawn him in my sleep,” he tells me over coffee at his editor’s house in Holland Park, west London. “If I lived another 50 years, I’d never have as many drawings or paintings of anybody.”

“When Chris was dying, I cancelled all my sittings and did nine, ten, 12 drawings of him a day, under impossible circumstances. It gave me something to do instead of just standing by wringing my hands.”

On the morning we meet, Bachardy, now 79, is fresh off the plane and feeling “all in a pep”. He’s wearing Levi’s, sneakers and a plain black Tshirt, and tells me how sad and disoriented he feels to be in London. “I’ll calm down in a minute,” he says, in a distinctive transatlantic drawl. “I feel secure at home in the house we shared for so many years and so vulnerable when I leave it.”

Bachardy and Isherwood flaunted their relationship in an era when visible same-sex couples were rare. “When we first went to New York together, that Christmas in 1953, a serious rumour went round town that Christopher had brought a 12-year-old with him from California,” Bachardy recalls, staring fixedly at his feet.

“I really did look young for my age,” he chuckles, looking up. “But that didn’t stop him. He insisted on not hiding me away.”

It was Isherwood who helped Don find his vocation, sending him to London in 1961 to study at the Slade School of Art. The pair wrote playful love letters, indulging their fantasies and recasting themselves as “the animals”: Isherwood the stolid, reliable workhorse Dobbin; Don a sexy, mercurial cat.

Who originated the animal talk? “Chris loved Beatrix Potter, and you see I’m a kind of unconscious mimic,” he says. “It’s something I use in my portrait work: I really identify with the person that I’m looking at. In a way I’m doing a self-portrait in character as my sitter.”

Throughout the letters, Isherwood urges Bachardy to seek “consolation” abroad (“ONLY NOT TOO MUCH!!”, as he wrote in one). He introduced him to his circle of London friends – Richard Burton, Cecil Beaton, the director Anthony Page (with whom he had a prolongued affair) – while stressing the need for discipline and perfectionism in his art.

I suggest Isherwood seemed a little heartbroken when alone in Santa Monica. “Can you see he was encouraging me the whole time?” Don says. “I was his creation. He was entering into my life so intimately and that’s exactly what I was responding to – such incredible support.”

Today Bachardy’s portraits of the most important actors, artists and writers of the second half of the 20th century hang in the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He paints every day but confesses he is running out of steam. “I can still do it but I’m slower. That’s something Chris and I had in common: whatever we did, we always gave it our best.”

As he says this, he beams. “You see, he’s still helping me! He’s going to help me to die. I’ll say to myself, again and again: ‘He did it. So can you.’”