Microsoft’s XBox One launches on Friday, and it's quite good for illustrating the many ways in which we make slight changes to our expectations of privacy in exchange when we think the trade-off if worth it.

It's a cliche, but to illustrate this point, here's the advertising technology imagined for Minority Report:

And here’s what happens when you walk into a room with an Xbox One in it:

Skip to 6:01. What you’re seeing is the Kinect camera recognising a person’s face, and tracking them. If it’s somebody who has an XBox Live profile, it will know who they are and log them in by the time they’ve sat down and picked up a controller.

There is little difference, functionally, between these two examples, and you can see how the second example might lead into the first. You don’t have to register your face with your Kinect - Microsoft has made that clear - but there are all kinds of privacy ramifications of introducing this kind of technology into a games console.

You can Skype chat with friends across the world, but you “should not expect any level of privacy” while you do so. The Kinect camera will always be listening to you, waiting for you to give it a voice command, because Microsoft wants its new console to be at the very centre of your home entertainment system, and have every other device - including satellite or cable TV - going through it. You could turn it off, but then you wouldn’t get to do this:

(Video: Major Nelson)

Twitch, the streaming platform that lets you broadcast your game as you play it so friends or others can watch, comes as default on the PS4 and will arrive on the XBox One in early 2014. There are a series of achievements that can be unlocked just for sitting and watching other people play games, for hours on end. The aim is to get you sitting in front of your console and TV as much as possible, and let Microsoft quantify that.

While the Kinect won’t be watching to make sure that you’re watching it, there are patents for that kind of functionality. They come with diagrams that truly are works of dystopian fiction:

This isn’t to say that the Xbox One is part of a sinister plot, or conspiracy, of any kind - it’s just that it is a nice example of the ways we can be convinced to trade our privacy for certain things, and how a series of small judgements that individually feel negligible can add up to a more serious long-term issue.

Once voice and gesture control, or the convenience of being signed in automatically by a camera, becomes a mundane thing, it becomes easier to slip in other things - maybe not for this generation, but for the one after it. Adverts between shows for products mentioned by the characters, or maybe eventually adverts for products that you were talking about with your friends. Those warnings at the beginning of films that the version you’re watching is only licensed for home use - not for schools, or prisons, or oil rigs - will actually mean something if a camera can tell you have too many people watching at once.

It makes it harder to protect our privacy, to stop that blurring of what part of your life is yours and what part belongs to others. Having our picture taken doesn't mean that a part of our soul gets caught inside the photo, but having our picture recorded, quanitified, monetised by third-party advertisers, and cross-referenced with other networks so that private companies know exactly how to tailor their products to you, well, that would feel intrusive. We might not realise the steps we've tacitly taken to reach that point.

 I’ve got my two younger granddaughters, Amarisse and Sienna, sitting at the drawing table working on designs. They are arguing over the felt pens, yet I bought them a set each so they wouldn’t argue but they are only five and four.

I have told them that when I buy my Premiership club, I want the shirts to be pink. Always liked pink. And I want a nice background pattern, hearts perhaps, or dogs or houses.

My older two grandchildren, Amelia and Ruby, aged 14 and 13, are honing their computer skills. I plan to make Amelia match day programme editor, as she is awfully good at writing, while Ruby I can see as marketing director. You would be too scared not to do what either tells you. Have you seen these teenage girls today? Terrifying.

I have spoken to Mr Tan, the Malaysian owner of Cardiff City. I don’t know why old-fashioned football fans got so upset when he changed Cardiff’s shirt to red. Cardiff, founded in 1899, have traditionally been blue, hence their nickname, the Bluebirds, but come on, life moves on. Red, so he says, is a lucky colour in the east, so get it on, boys, as they in that awful betting advert.

He’s also changed the club badge and sacked the head of recruitment, who was the manager’s right-hand man in getting them into the Premiership. He was replaced by some youth called Kazakh, who is apparently a schoolfriend of his 21-year-old son. Kazakh was not totally new to football or to Britain – he had been doing work experience at the club, painting walls. I think at present he is having work permit problems but I am sure Mr Tan will soon sort that out. Well done, anyway.

I did think about green when I buy my Prem club, as no Prem club plays in green, so it would make them stand out. We would get all the veggies and environmentalists shouting “Come on you Greens”. On reflection, I am going for pink. “Think Pink!” That will be the club slogan. Catchy, eh?

Dear old Mohamed al-Fayed put up a statue of Michael Jackson when he owned Fulham, very sensible, so corny and obvious to have a famous ex-player. Should I have Paul McCartney, one of my heroes, or Alfred Wainwright, author of the Lakeland guides? Probably go for AW, as long as the sculptor makes a good job of his pipe.

As owner of the club, lock stock and barrel, I will be able to do exactly what I like, so moustaches all the year round will be mandatory. None of this Movember nonsense, then shaving them off.

I’ll be going in the dressing room, before and after every game, with my own video crew. No player will be allowed to give interviews, put their name to articles or books – only to me. I have always wanted to do a follow-up to a football book I did many years ago, The Glory Game. Not possible any more, now they all have lawyers, agents, PRs, brand managers and commercial deals, and are far too rich anyway, so why should they be arsed. But with owning My Own Club, no probs.

They will all have to wear pink boots, matching their shirt. And I think I will bring back sock numbers. Remember them? Don Revie brought them in but they faded. Adverts, of course, on their bums – not physically, the tattoos would obscure them – but on the back of their shorts. I have always thought that advertising on shorts has been a missed opportunity.

Now, what job shall I give Tortee? I have got my four grandchildren sorted – all girls, you will have noticed. Tortee is also female, been part of our family for decades. She is aged 40, very mature, so I think I will make her manager. She will be the first tortoise in the history of football to be a Prem manager. Not sure about Third Division (North). I think Carlisle United had a tortoise as a gaffer at one time, or was it a sheep?

I’ll have sheep grazing on the pitch when there’s not a game, until they start digging. As freeholder, of the stocks and barrels, I’m looking into fracking. Once that starts, I’ll sell up and be off. Just like Mr Tan, probably . . .

It is a crystal clear autumn day and Larry, Moe and I are outside Westminster station. Before us, the gold trimmings on Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament are blinging away in the sunshine.

“And this, Larry, is where all the people who run the country work.”

“Why do they run the country?”

“Good question, my friend.”

It feels odd being back here. The last time I came to this Tube station was for a Very Important Meeting with a minister. I had my smart suit on and felt very purposeful, just like all the square-jawed wonks milling around us. Now, though none of our great leaders would dream of pointing it out, I am just a pleb. I’ve got my holey old puffa jacket on and my only purpose is to be first in the queue for the London Aquarium, where Larry, Moe and I plan to spend the morning watching real live sharks.

Larry’s long and fervent relationship with Bob the Builder has come to an abrupt end. It turns out that Bob is “just for babies”. His new hero is Captain Barnacles, star of the sea-life-based educational cartoon The Octonauts. I find little to love about Barnacles, a curiously blank-faced teddy bear in a diving suit, but watching fish at the Aquarium certainly beats counting diggers at the building site down the road.

One day, when Larry is older, perhaps we’ll come to look around the Houses of Parliament, so we can marvel at our democracy in action. But there’s no time for that today, so we cross Westminster Bridge at a snip. Result! We are literally the first people here. A meet-and-greet girl with a pneumatic smile takes our picture and waves us inside.

The first few tanks are just the warm-up: jellyfish like luminous petticoats; furtive hermit crabs; a brace of knobbly sea slugs. Larry scoots past with his eyes on the prize. Deep in the heart of the cavernous building he finds what he is looking for: an enormous, three-storey tank filled with an eye-popping array of sea life. Above us, turtles the size of dining tables perform elegant pirouettes. Rays glide and dip like fat kites. One silver fish has a face uncannily like that of Victor Meldrew. And at the very bottom of the tank, creeping slowly, menacingly, with the terrible snaggle-toothed nonsmile of a James Bond baddy: the sand tiger shark.

Larry is breathless with excitement. “He’s like a monster, Mummy, like a thing, like a big, fat, terrible . . .” He grapples with his limited vocabulary. “Like a BEAST!”

We sit down to watch. After a few minutes, hypnotised by perpetual motion, I drift into a flight of fancy. What if the inhabitants of Westminster and those of the aquarium swapped places? If the whole human hierarchy were stuffed into a tank: the stately grandees in their ermines floating turtlelike at the top; the backbench rays, their eyes firmly focused upwards. Who’d be the lurking tiger shark – George Osborne? Michael Gove?

Meanwhile, the animals would run the country. They would do something about overfishing. Maybe they would ban plastic bags, and cod fish fingers, and oil exploration in the Arctic. As ideas go, I’ve certainly had worse.

First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist”: so begins Martin Niemöller’s haunting critique of the German intellectuals who looked on while the Nazis rose to power. Who, 80 years later, is speaking out while Russia comes for its LGBT population?

There’s clearly a voice for gay rights within Russia, as harrowing images of bloodied activists are becoming increasingly common. Since Stephen Fry’s impassioned open letter to David Cameron and the International Olympic Committee, calling for the fastapproaching Winter Olympics to be pulled out of Sochi, protesters have been piling pressure on the Games’ sponsors to withdraw funding. One online petition, demanding that Coca-Cola speak out against Russia’s anti-gay laws, gained 350,000 signatures in October.

It’s hard to say whether Fry’s letter acted as a catalyst for the ongoing condemnation of Russia’s right to host the Games but his comparison of the crackdown on gay rights with anti-Semitic legislation passed by the Nazis was certainly powerful. Comparisons to Nazism are usually idle and misplaced, but in this case likening the dead-eyed Putin to Hitler couldn’t be more apt.

In Russia, supposedly a progressive democracy, new anti-gay legislation is opening the way for a state in which LGBT people are tortured to death, while the authorities do nothing. In a series of bills pushed through the Duma, Putin has criminalised “homosexual propaganda”.

You need only to Google Putin and take a look at his devastatingly camp shirtless photos to see the irony in this (in Russia anyone who “looks gay” – cough – is committing an arrestable offence). With their perpetrators safe from prosecution, homophobic attacks have become routine in Russia.

Many of these are carried out by neo-Nazi gangs who are leading a campaign called “Occupy Paedophilia”. (Russia has a bizarre history of confusing love between members of the same sex with child molestation; in 1933, Stalin outlawed homosexuality for this very reason. Mind you, this is a man who also thought that Holland and the Netherlands were two separate countries.)

Homosexuality was first outlawed by Tsar Peter the Great in the 18th century. It was decriminalised by Lenin shortly after the 1917 Russian Revolution, then recriminalised by Stalin. In 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin decriminalised homosexuality for the second time. The common factor in Russia’s intermittent scapegoating of LGBT people is a desire to buddy up to the Orthodox Church – even in the case of Stalin, some historians have argued. Putin’s war on gays is a noxious combination of the authoritarianism of the former USSR and the social conservatism of the Church.

All calls to withdraw the Winter Olympics from Sochi have been ignored and the games are set to open in February next year. When it comes to gay rights abuses, Russia is in effect a truculent toddler being handed a lollipop by a dishevelled and jaded parent. We fought, we lost.

On the other hand, the international movement against homophobia is now more vocal than ever. As Desmond Tutu said, in response to Russia’s legislated gay hate, “I’d rather go to hell than worship a homophobic God.”

November 8, 2013. A letter has been printed in this magazine. “Oh, for God’s sake,” it begins, “spare me the self-pitying pseudo-diaries of Nicholas Lezard . . .” The correspondent, one Sue Bailey via email, goes on to name two of my fellow contributors, but my vision is already too blurred with tears to read them, and I go off to hide in the wardrobe and snivel.

When the Beloved returns from work later that evening she hands me cups of hot sweet tea and fresh handkerchiefs until I pull myself together. I try to learn something positive from the whole affair. Well, I know a shot across my bows when I see one, and obviously what Ms Bailey is most strenuously objecting to is the way these are “pseudo-diaries”. Fair dos. We’ll have none of this pseudo-diary malarkey any more. From now on, everything’s going to be properly dated.

9 November A very official looking letter arrives. Through the little plastic window I can see the words “Warning Notice” in bold, along with the words “Nickolas Lezard” (sic). It is not until the evening, after the first couple of liveners, that I have the nerve to open it. In the interim, my mind has been racing with possibilities, all of them unpleasant and selfpitying in the extreme. When I think of the things I could be nabbed for, I get butterflies in the stomach, and they’re not light, pretty butterflies either. These are dark, horrid ones, the size of bats.

Anyway, it turns out that Westminster Council has taken a dim view of my cleaning lady’s habit of taking out the recycling on the wrong day, and in its view I am in breach of Section 87 of the Environment Protection Act 1990 and “liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale (currently £2,500)”. This raises several questions, the most trivial being what kind of an environment they think they’re protecting in the first place – it’s not exactly all red squirrels and rare orchids out there, let me put it that way – and the least trivial being how the hell I am going to find £2,500, considering all my money is gone by the 20th of each month.

The reverse of the letter consists of a photo of the bags of recycling and a sworn statement from the Westminster warden, who is named, but I suspect the dark hand of the Shop That Sells Expensive Wank down the road.

When the Beloved gets back later from work and revives me with a moistened sponge and some smelling salts, she points out that the letter goes on to say I’m not actually being fined, and there is a paragraph that begins “now that the implications have been made known to you . . .”. You can say that again. The toe I bashed two weeks ago still hurts.

10 November My old friend Dave arrives from Rome. My first university friend, Dave was the first of us to pass all the milestones: first to get married, first to have children, first to have a quadruple heart bypass. Half Italian, and a keen epicure, he arrives laden with gifts: a salami the size of a premature baby, a bottle of 2001 Sagrantino di Montefalco, which he assures me is the best in all Italy, and the heart of a three-year-old Parmesan cheese, which comes in a rather unappetising-looking cylinder, but when sliced dissolves in the mouth in a golden crumble of crystalline, cheesy goodness. I am going to have to hide this from the Beloved, who likes cheese even more than I do.

Not much to be self-pitying about. My toe still hurts so badly I can’t put on my Chelsea boots. We run out of wine, but I am not ready to open the good stuff. Dave’s son pops over. He is more of a monoglot than his father but luckily the Beloved can speak Italian so conversation flows. She asks where he lives. I tell you, you have not lived until you have heard an Italian try to say “Willesden Green”.

11 November I have a bath and try to clean between my little toe and the one next to it, as I begin to suspect a large quantity of jam is accumulating there. I move the toe a millimetre and the agony is surpassed only by the blow that caused the injury in the first place. I take to my bed. I think I’m ill, but it is very hard for freelance writers to tell whether they’re ill or not. I see that someone has written “meh” underneath an article of mine. Jesus, the times we live in.

12 November I am now too scared to take the recycling out on any day at all. Blue bags stuffed to bursting now hinder egress and ingress to the Hovel, and are probably now a fire hazard to boot. Toe still hurts. Satisfied, Ms B?

1. Orthodox economists have failed their own market test (Guardian)

Students are demanding alternatives to a free-market dogma with a disastrous record, writes Seumas Milne. That's something we all need.

2. It’s no coincidence the MPs found guilty of fiddling are all Labour (Daily Telegraph)

The party may take the moral high ground, but lying and cheating are deep in its DNA, says Peter Oborne. 

3. Bernard Ingham says Northerners who loathe the Tories are ‘demented’. Perhaps I can put him straight... (Independent)

Slashing the welfare state and cutting taxes on the wealthy was never going to play well, says Owen Jones. 

4. This Pope is no liberal. He’s a true Catholic (Times)

Francis has won the Left’s admiration but this 'pro-lifer' opposes abortion as much as poverty, writes Tim Montgomerie. 

5. Accurate forecasts suit Osborne for once (Financial Times)

Expect a warts-and-all account of the OBR’s inability to see the recovery, says Chris Giles.

6. Has pride in public service had its day? (Daily Telegraph)

Ordinary people are being let down far too often by those who put their own interests first, says Sue Cameron.

7. China will keep its leaders busy (Financial Times)

They have set themselves a formidable task that will have far-reaching consequences, writes David Pilling. 

8. You can’t have an amnesty for murder (Times)

As Northern Ireland becomes increasingly like the rest of Europe it must observe the same legal principles, says David Aaronovitch.

9. The best healthcare delivery system in the world? Are you off your rocker? (Independent)

The Republicans are on a hot streak thanks to Obamacare's false start, writes David Usborne. 

10. JFK's assassination wasn't the end of anything, it just felt that way (Guardian)

Every generation has its Kennedy moments, writes Martin Kettle. From 9/11 to Iraq, history moves on.

On 24 September, Lady Clark of Calton, the chair of the Scottish Law Commission, ruled against the proposed Viking development in which 103 wind turbines would have been erected on the central mainland of Shetland, mostly on peatland.

The Scottish government had manhandled the project through the final planning phase, despite massive community opposition and the objections of the RSPB, the John Muir Trust, Shetland Amenity Trust, Sustainable Shetland and Scottish Natural Heritage. Citing a range of concerns, Lady Clark made particular note that she was not satisfied Scottish ministers had complied with their obligations under the Wild Birds Directive 2009, adding: “it appears not to be disputed by anyone that whimbrel [a curlewlike member of the snipe family] are a declining species in the UK, with approximately 95 per cent of 290 breeding pairs in Shetland”.

This ruling was, as my mother used to say, “a real tonic” for Scots who, over the past several years, have seen our wildlands and their birds subjected to senseless damage by ill-considered rural projects ranging from the 220km Beauly-Denny super-pylon line to that now-notorious luxury golf resort on a Site of Special Scientific Interest at Menie, imposed by imperial fiat from Holyrood after it was rejected by local decision-makers. For once, it seemed as if democracy and environmental concerns had prevailed over big business interests and the whims of high office.

This hope for environmental justice may be short-lived, however, as the Scottish government quickly announced its decision to appeal Lady Clark’s ruling. It has every right to do so, but one wonders why a government that constantly trumpets its sustainable credentials and commitment to “freedom” would be so intent on ignoring not only a piece of European legislation designed to protect endangered birds, but the outcome of a High Court judicial review in which a very small David rightfully triumphed over a very large Goliath.

Sadly, the threat to Shetland’s wild birds continues, considering the resources that big corporations, backed by government, can bring to bear against a local environmental group such as Sustainable Shetland, whose only funds come from members’ donations.

I suppose there are those in Holyrood who take the view that, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, “if you’ve seen one whimbrel, you’ve seen ’em all”. One can but hope that others would echo recent comments in the Lords by Viscount Ridley, when he points out that “There is a feeling that wind seems to be exempt from the normal rules. If I were to erect a structure 140 metres high, doubling the height above sea level of the hills alongside the valley of the Stinchar in Ayrshire, for example, there would rightly be an outcry. If I were to kill hundreds of birds of prey every year, there would be outrage. If I were to kill thousands of bats, I would go to jail. How can it be that the wind industry uniquely is allowed to ride roughshod over the environmental rules that protect the rest of us from anyone spoiling the view, killing eagles and pouring concrete into peatland?”

I believe that there are many Scottish politicians, even within the SNP, who worry not only about the land but about their government’s propensity to override any local decision it finds inconvenient. Unless they speak out now, we will see a real blot on Scotland’s environmental copybook.

If Judge Clark’s ruling stands, it sets the stage for a new era of serious environmental protection throughout these islands.

If it does not, a few people will become very rich indeed, but the whimbrel (to use the Gaelic name, Guilbneach-bheag, or “little lamenting one”) may well vanish from Shetland, lamenting to the end, not only for itself, but for us all.

Scrutinising your own fuzzy face in the misty morning mirror, you hear this bewilderingly obscure dialogue emanating from the radio:

“Let me make it perfectly clear –”

“I’m going to have to interrupt you there: when you say you wish this matter to be perfectly clear, how clear do you mean?”

“As I said, I want there to be no confusion on this matter –”

“So, total clarity?”

“Absolutely.’’

“The metaphor is a visual one, is it not?”

“I’m sorry?’’

“The metaphor you use to express the idea that you wish your statements to be entirely comprehensible, and without any ambiguity, works by analogy with the visual field.’’

“Um . . . yes . . . well . . . s’pose so.”

“So, if I may pursue that analogy, should we think of this visual field as clear in the way a car windscreen might be clear?”

“Um . . . possibly.”

“In which case is your clarity a function of there being no object blocking the windscreen; or is it a matter of there being no opacity?”

“Ah. This all seems a little involved to me.”

“But minister, you’ve made it perfectly clear that you wish to be perfectly clear, and I’m only seeking to clarify that clarity.”

“You seem to be making the whole business rather murky to me.”

“Would it therefore be fair to say that the windscreen through which you perceive your own clarity is in itself rather murky?”

“That’s not what I meant –”

“But wait just a minute: you granted me the initial metaphor, I then extended it a little, but now you say that your understanding of that image is itself imperfect – ‘murky’ in fact.”

“Look, you aren’t going to bamboozle me – I stick to my initial point: I wish to make it perfectly clear.”

“I think everyone listening understands that, minister – what concerns them is that someone entrusted with such a serious matter is unable to assure the public that he himself is perfectly clear about his own clarity. That is all I wish to establish: are you?”

“What?”

“Are you clear about being clear?”

“I believe I am.”

“So, there are no splashes of birdshit on your windscreen or any other obstructions ?”

“None whatsoever.”

“And you are looking at this windscreen through a second windscreen that is also free from smut or grime?”

“Yes . . . yes, I am.”

“How do you fit this second windscreen inside the first? Is it warped around your face, like the Perspex of a space helmet – or is it mounted on a curious little frame that’s suspended a few inches in front of your eyes by aluminium struts secured with nickelalloy bolts that are counter-sunk in your cheekbones?”

“I think . . . you’re being rather ridiculously literal-minded about this metaphor –”

“Would you concede that to be literalminded is, in a manner of speaking, to spell everything out?”

“Yes – yes, that’s true . . .”

“Which is surely only another way of being perfectly clear?”

“Now hang on a minute, you’re not going to catch me out that easily – you’re going to claim that I don’t want you to be perfectly clear about the perfect clarity with which I perceive my own perfect clarity, and that simply isn’t the case!”

“Is it complexly the case?”

“Now you’re being facetious.”

“No, no, please . . . nothing was further from my mind – ”

“Is it, I wonder, so far from your mind that you can’t in fact see it with any clarity?”

“Are you being rhetorical, minister?”

“Possibly – although I do find this image amusing: you looking in the rear-view mirror at your own facetiousness, which is hundreds of yards off and speedily retreating, when suddenly you’re broadsided by me, because with this complicated visual prothesis attached to my face, once the bright light of reason begins to shine I’m unable to see anything at all.”

“That’s as may be, but all I’m seeking to establish is that objects – such as my facetiousness –may appear larger in the mirror.”

“I accept your apology.”

“Thank you very much, minister.”

“Thank you, John.”
 

No. 10 is tellingly refusing to deny the report in today's Sun that David Cameron has ordered aides to "get rid of all the green crap". A Downing Street spokesman merely stated that "we do not recognise this at all" (a classic non-denial denial). In reference to the environmental levies imposed on fuel bills, a Tory source earlier claimed of Cameron: "He’s telling everyone, 'We’ve got to get rid of all this green crap.' He’s absolutely focused on it." The source added: "It’s vote blue, get real, now – and woe betide anyone who doesn’t get the memo." 

Those words are strikingly at odds with Cameron's recent declaration in Sri Lanka, following Typhoon Haiyan, that "I'm not a scientist but it's always seemed to me one of the strongest arguments about climate change is, even if you're only 90 per cent certain or 80 per cent certain or 70 per cent certain, if I said to you there's a 60 per cent chance your house might burn down do you want to take out some insurance? You take out some insurance. I think we should think about climate change like that.

"Scientists are giving us a very certain message. Even if you're less certain than the scientists it makes sense to act both in terms of trying to prevent and mitigate.

"So I'll leave the scientists to speak for themselves about the link between severe weather events and climate change. The evidence seems to me to be growing. As a practical politician I think the sensible thing is to say let's take preventative and mitigating steps given the chances this might be the case."

The comments are also, of course, the diametric opposite of Cameron's pledges in opposition. Since you won't find them on the Conservative website, here's a reminder of the PM's past greenery.

He told Newsnight on 3 October 2006: "We’ve said publicly, we’ve committed that we think green taxes should take a bigger share of overall taxes." And similarly declared on The Politics Show on 29 October 2006: "I think green taxes as a whole need to go up."

It's also worth pointing out again that the recent surge in energy prices owes more to higher wholesale prices and profiteering by the big six than it does to environmental levies. Of the £112 of "green taxes and green regulations" recently attacked by Cameron, the majority are energy efficiency measures designed to aid vulnerable households, including the Energy Company Obligation (£50), the Warm Home Discount for pensioners (£11) and smart meters and better billing (£3). Of the average energy bill of £1,276, just £50 (4%) is accounted for by green taxes in the form of the Renewables Obligation (£30), the Carbon Price Floor (£3), the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (£8) and feed in tariffs (£7). 

The Tories could transfer the cost of these measures (which are forecast to reduce bills by £166 by 2020) from consumer bills to general taxation, as the SNP has pledged to do, but Labour will reply that the government is merely giving with one hand and taking with one another. For that reason, the party believes that it is Miliband's pledge to freeze energy prices that will have "the longest shelf-life". 

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)

Most political observers can trot out Keynes’s remark but it does not follow that political leaders are mere ventriloquists. Even the most unintellectual and anti-intellectual have to decide to which academic scribbler or scribblers they are going to enslave themselves. And how politicians put different ideas together makes a critical difference to the politics they pursue. Just compare varieties of liberalism and conservatism – and communism and fascism – under different leaders.

Moreover, many of the most successful political leaders are not “exempt from any intellectual influence”; on the contrary, for some, intellectualism is a central part of their political personality and appeal. As the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland once wrote, “People don’t believe in ideas: they believe in people who believe in ideas.”

All of this is prompted by grappling with the career of François Mitterrand, courtesy of Mitterrand: a Study in Ambiguity (Bodley Head, £30), an excellent new book by the former BBC Paris correspondent Philip Short. His previous subjects as a biographer were Pol Pot and Mao Zedong. An odd trio but, as with the other two, Short brings to the former French president great insight without undue sympathy, qualities admired by Mitterrand, who said the most essential attribute in politics is “indifference”.

The reason for grappling with Mitterrand is simple enough: he is the most successful left-wing leader of any of the three leading western European countries (France, Britain and Germany), measured by longevity in power and arguably also by electoral dominance. A front-rank politician by the age of 30 in 1946 and a senior minister in successive governments of the Fourth Republic while in his thirties, he went on to lead today’s Socialist Party in 1971, then to win two presidential elections (in 1981 and 1988) and two parliamentary elections. Having condemned Charles de Gaulle’s strong Fifth Republic presidency as “a permanent coup d’état” when the general assumed power in the late 1950s, he occupied the post in full plenitude for 14 years (1981-95), ruling for longer than de Gaulle – longer indeed than any leader of France since Napoleon III – in a political career spanning half a century.

However, the explanation for Mitterrand’s success is anything but simple; also complex are the lessons for today’s left as it struggles to win and hold power across Europe, not least in France, where François Hollande evinces little of the mastery of Tonton (“Uncle”).

Short’s biography is subtitled A Study in Ambiguity but it could equally be described as “a study in deception”, because there was nothing ambiguous about the massive falsehoods and carefully constructed but entirely bogus images that litter every part of Mitterrand’s career. Short begins the biography with an electric account of the “observatory affair” of 1959, when Mitterrand faked an assassination attempt on himself as a ploy to regain the political initiative the year after de Gaulle buried the Fourth Republic and most of its political inmates. The fake was exposed and it is extraordinary that he ever recovered.

Yet the greatest deceptions were still to come. Throughout his presidency, he lied (and ordered his doctors to lie) about his health. Diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer within months of taking power in 1981 and expected to live for only three more years, he told his urologist: “It’s a state secret; you are bound by this secret.” When the cancer went into remission, he not only stood for re-election while maintaining the secret but struggled on for the full seven years although the cancer returned and, by the end, became undeniable.

His personal life was similarly full of falsehood. While his wife, Danielle, and their two sons were his public family, they coexisted with a secret second family of his mistress (who was 27 years younger than him) and their daughter, with Mitterrand shuttling between the two in Paris and the country, again unknown to the public until the end of his presidency. His daughter, Mazarine, was named after Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV’s wily and secretive first minister, whose precepts for the politician were taken deeply to heart by her father: “Be sparing with your gestures, walk with measured steps . . . Simulate, dissimulate, trust nobody.”

It is no surprise that it is hard to pin down what Mitterrand believed. Partly this is because his ideas changed so much and so often. Starting out as an official of the Vichy regime and an admirer of Philippe Pétain, he was elected in the Fourth Republic for a shifting array of parties of the centre right. As a minister in the mid-1950s, he was a voice not only of conservatism but of outright reaction and repression in respect of Algeria and the French colonies.

Throughout the 1960s, his big idea was anti-Gaullism. He championed liberalism in the face of overweening personal and presidential power. Socialism entered his vocabulary only as he sought a viable anti- and post- Gaullist political grouping, which, as a result of his artful machinations, came together in the Socialist Party in 1971.

Mitterrand then rose to power on the back of an alliance with the still-strong Communists. He fashioned this as the tribune of a leftism that included wholesale nationalisation, a war on the rich and a huge expansion of welfare spending without any regard for conventional economics, which he professed to despise.

This led to the “common programme”, which was put into action in 1981. Elected on the rhetoric of a “complete rupture” with capitalism and the slogan “Change life”, Mitterrand appointed Communist ministers to a pan-left coalition that embarked on the most radical and frenetic programme of nationalisation, state spending and cultural reform attempted by any western European government since the early postwar years.

Barely a year later, Mitterrand put most of this into rapid reverse. With the franc collapsing and the financial markets in revolt, economic orthodoxy returned, state spending was slashed and the Communists were ejected. Nationalisation was rolled back after the right won the parliamentary elections of 1986. Scotching the notion that he should resign in the face of this debacle, Mitterrand instead fashioned a new concept of “cohabitation” between a president of the left and a government of the right. He proceeded to outwit the then prime minister, Jacques Chirac, fighting him on the slogan of “Opening to the centre” in the 1988 presidential and parliamentary elections, while Chirac scrapped with Le Pen and the National Front – whose potency was largely a creation of Mitterrand’s manoeuvre to change the electoral system to proportional representation before the 1986 elections, specifically to strengthen the far right in relation to the centre right.

Re-elected as a centrist, Mitterrand appointed a government under the centrist social democrat Michel Rocard, including a large number of non-aligned ministers and even a handful of centre-right former ministers, before succumbing to another “cohabitation”, this time under Edouard Balladur (who had been the finance minister in the first “cohabitation”), which saw out his final two years of office.

“It was not in my interests to oppose the trend of public opinion,” said Mitterrand, abdicating any role in leading opinion as he drifted, with increasing physical and political infirmity and growing controversy – not least about his Vichy past, coming fully into the open for the first time – to the end of his second term.

Shortly before his replacement as prime minister in 1991, Rocard described his rival and nemesis as “cynicism in its purest sense”. During his 14 years in the Élysée, Mitterrand got through seven prime ministers, each the product of labyrinthine political calculations, the subtlety of which was often lost on the participants.

In all these manoeuvres, over five decades, ideology and political language were as often as not the servants of short-term political advantage. Simulate, dissimulate. Once he became a “socialist” after 1970, for instance, varieties of leftism were deployed to outwit party rivals on all sides and to make possible (and later to destroy) the alliance with the Communists.

The ceaseless shifting of Mitterrand’s ideas is a dominant theme of Short’s biography. Having sought out the essence of Mitterrand’s credo as a lesson for left-wing rejuvenation, I am instead bewildered by the endlessly turning kaleidoscope. I cannot think of a modern democratic leader who has made so successful a career trading rival ideas and policies to suit immediate political convenience. In the British context, over the course of his career, he was Tony Benn, Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Enoch Powell, all rolled into one.

All of this ideological somersaulting was donewith immense intellectual engagement and fine calibration. In Mitterrand, the academic scribbler was more the servant of the practical politician than vice versa. A big part of “brand Mitterrand” was an ostentatious intellectualism giving apparent depth and sincerity to whichever creed he was peddling at any given time, however great the difference with the last one.

Mitterrand said he needed to read for two hours or more a day “to oxygenate the brain”. Many of his major shifts in ideas were accompanied by a book or pamphlet by the maestro – including his remarkable 47-page “Letter to all the French”, written as a manifesto for his “opening to the centre” for his 1988 re-election, advertised with little modesty as covering “all the big subjects which are worth discussing and mulling over between French men and women”. (“The night before it was to be published [he] stayed up till 3am at the printing press correcting the proofs, like a neophyte brooding over a first novel” – a brilliant detail, as are Short’s revelations that during tedious cabinet presentations, Mitterrand annotated antiquarian book catalogues and on presidential flights would sometimes ask the pilot to circle before landing so he could finish a chapter.)

Is Mitterrand’s legacy an object lesson in intellectual manoeuvring, with no inner core, as the method of a politician supreme? It is more than that in four respects. First, however labyrinthine his methods, there is a substantial progressive legacy from which the French left takes inspiration, including the abolition of the death penalty, significantly raising the minimum wage, equal rights for women and minorities, decentralisation and numerous beneficial grands projets.

Second, the 1982-83 reversal had the effect of demonstrating to the European left that “socialism in one country” didn’t work; pragmatic social democracy is the successful face of “Mitterrandism”.

There wasn’t the clear break with the doctrinaire past of the German SPD in the late 1950s and the British Labour Party in the mid-1990s, which is part of François Hollande’s problem as he tries to play the centre and an unreconstructed left together. Yet the post-Mitterrand French Socialist Party is as broad a church as its British and German counterparts and knows how to govern from the centre.

Third, there was a Mitterrand core: peace with Germany and projects to entrench European peace and security, from the European Communities in the 1950s to the single currency in the 1990s. A survivor of European war and its horrors – including time as a prisoner of war – Mitterrand never allowed the central pillars of a pro-German and pro-US foreign policy to become part of the game of “simulate, dissimulate”. Ironically, it was de Gaulle who played dangerously in this arena.

With Communists in his government and the left triumphant, Mitterrand’s first move in 1981 was to assure Ronald Reagan in unequivocal words and actions that France was a reliable ally. He did the same with Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands war a year later and also with Helmut Kohl, after an initial wobble, on German reunification. It was ambiguity at home but clarity abroad – and clarity in the cause of European peace and stability. Hence the most enduring image of Mitterrand: hand in hand with Helmut Kohl before two huge wreaths at Verdun in 1984 at a ceremony to seal Franco-German reconciliation.

Fourth, throughout his life and career, Mitterrand had a patrician sympathy with the underdog. Although he was the son of a stationmaster who inherited a family vinegar business, he served in the ranks in the war, having failed the competition for a commission, and developed a contempt for hierarchy and authority (besides his own) and a social sympathy for the less fortunate that was genuine and lasting. His political initiation – and his early political power base – was in organisations for returning prisoners of war. This need not have led him to the socialist left but it helped him accomplish the transition with an authenticity born to some degree from experience.

No feats of intellectual and political gymnastics can substitute or detract from personal experience. In Mitterrand’s case, it was his intimate experience of a France prostrate, impoverished and divided, that dominated his twenties and shaped him fundamentally.

Philip Short suggests another attribute of Mitterrand the leader: natural authority rooted in an “inner solitude” – “a part of [his] being that was locked, inaccessible to others, which is one of the characteristics of uncommon leaders everywhere” – and which came in part from a long period in the political wilderness (the 23 years from 1958 to 1981). He draws the parallel with de Gaulle in the wilderness in the 1950s; Churchill in the 1930s also comes to mind.

Perhaps. Yet François Mitterrand showed himself to be a notable leader as a prisoner of war and an organiser of fellow returnees long before his wilderness years. Maybe it owed more to Cardinal Mazarin, whose further advice for politicians was to “maintain a posture at all times which is full of dignity . . . Each day spend a moment studying how you should respond to the events which might befall you.”

In the last months of his life, his doctor told him he was a mixture of Machiavelli, Don Corleone, Casanova and the Little Prince. When Mitterrand enquired, “In what proportions?” the physician replied, “That depends on which day.”

You are invited to read this free preview of the upcoming New Statesman, out on 21 November. To purchase the full magazine - with our signature mix of opinion, longreads and arts coverage, including Bryan Appleyard's cover story on the decline of Apple, Rafael Behr's essay on "Milibandism" and the Labour leader's ideas, Alan Johnson's personal reflection on his family, and an archive piece from 1958 by Doris Lessing, plus our books of the year special - please visit our subscription page.

This is a column about Muslims and child marriage. I hesitated before writing it. When I pointed out the prevalence of anti-Semitism and homophobia within British Muslim communities earlier this year, I was accused by some of my co-religionists of “selling out”, of “fuelling Islamophobia”.

I understand their annoyance. Why give the racists and bigots of the Islamophobic far right yet another stick with which to beat us?

The problem is that this particular stick is already in their hands. Child, or underage, marriage is very much a part of British society. And the inconvenient truth is that it is Muslims – not Christians, Jews or Hindus – who are responsible for much of it. There is no point pretending otherwise. Nor is it morally tenable to stand idly by as young girls in the UK are forced into marriages before they are physically or psychologically ready, against their will and against the law.

First, a bit of background. The legal age for marriage in Britain is 16. Yet, back in October, I watched ITV’s “Exposure” documentary, Forced To Marry, in which two undercover reporters, posing as the mother and brother of a 14-year-old Muslim girl, called 56 mosques across Britain to ask whether they would perform the girl’s marriage. Shamefully, imams at 18 of those 56 mosques – or one in three – agreed to do so.

The imam of a mosque in Manchester was secretly recorded as saying that performing such a marriage would “not be a problem”. An imam in Birmingham, despite being told that the girl didn’t want to get married, could be heard saying: “She’s 14. By sharia, grace of God, she’s legal to get married. Obviously Islam has made it easy for us . . . We’re doing it because it’s OK through Islam.”

Let’s be clear: two-thirds of the imams refused to perform such marriages, with many making it clear they “found the request abhorrent”. But here’s the issue: a third of them didn’t. A third of those imams hid behind their – my! – religion: “We’re doing it because it’s OK through Islam.” Frustratingly, many Muslim scholars and seminaries still cling to the view that adulthood, and the age of sexual consent, rests only on biological puberty: that is, 12 to 15 for boys and nine to 15 for girls.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As is often the case, there is no single, immutable “Islamic” view. As Usama Hasan, a reform-minded British Muslim scholar and former imam, argues: “There was a rival view in Islamic jurisprudence, even in ancient and medieval times: that emotional and intellectual maturity was also required, and was reached between the ages of 15 and 21.” The latter view, he tells me, “has been adopted by most civil codes of Muslim-majority countries for purposes of marriage”.

The Quran does not contain a specific legal age of marriage, but it does make clear that men and women must be both physically mature and of sound judgement in order to get married. It is also worth clarifying that Prophet Muhammad did not, as is often claimed, marry a child bride named Aisha. Yes, I’ll concede that there is a saying in Sahih Bukhari, one of the six canonical Hadith collections of Sunni Islam, attributed to Aisha herself, which suggests she was six years old when she was married to Muhammad and nine when the marriage was consummated. Nevertheless, there are plenty of Muslim historians who dispute this particular Hadith and argue Aisha was in reality aged somewhere between 15 and 21.

This isn’t a case of “liberal” Muslims v “conservative” Muslims, either. Even the much-maligned Muslim Council of Britain has said it is “strongly opposed to [underage marriage] on the basis that it is illegal under the law of the land where we are living and even under sharia it is highly debatable”.

Indeed it is. Afifi al-Akiti, an Oxford-based theologian trained in traditional Islamic madrasas across south Asia and North Africa, tells me that the vast majority of classical scholars throughout Muslim history agreed on a minimum marriage age of 18 – two years older, incidentally, than secular Britain’s current age of consent.

So, how to explain the view of a third of the imams contacted by ITV? The influence of Saudi Arabia, and its decades-long export of a reactionary, retrograde brand of Islam, cannot be ignored. The damage that has been done to a nascent British Islam by pre-modern, Saudi-inspired, literalist dogma is incalculable. Consider this: in 2011, when the Saudi ministry of justice announced it might prohibit marriages involving girls under the age of 14, Sheikh Saleh al-Fawzan, one of the country’s most senior clerics, issued a fatwa to allow fathers to arrange marriages for their daughters “even if they are in the cradle”. To call such a mindset outdated or medieval would be a gross understatement. It’s an endorsement of paedophilia, plain and simple.

It is also an apt reminder of why most countries, including most Muslim-majority countries, have minimum ages for marriage codified in law: to deter adults from exploiting children and to protect the most innocent members of our society.

“We have a moral duty to obey the law of the land,” says al-Akiti. For adult men to try to marry young girls is illegal and immoral. But British Muslims have a special responsibility: to make the case that there is nothing Islamic about underage marriage, either.

Will this column be used by EDL-types to further their pernicious, anti-Muslim agendas? Maybe it will be, but I can’t stay quiet. I’m the father of two young girls. When I hear of forced, underage marriages being carried out in the heart of major British cities, I think of my own daughters. And I feel sick.

This is 2013. Not 613. Or 1813. Child marriage is a form of child abuse. It must be stopped.

Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the political director of the Huffington Post UK, where this column is crossposted

After Ed Miliband delivered his speech at this year’s Labour party conference, pledging to freeze energy prices if elected, many predicted that the promise would unravel within days. Yet two months later, he retains the political advantage. Growth has returned, with the economy expanding at its fastest rate for six years, but Mr Miliband’s success in shifting the debate towards living standards, which have continued their decline, means the Conservatives have not benefited. The Tories remain torn between seeking to match his offer and desperately seeking to refocus attention on their preferred terrain of the deficit.

The Labour leader’s success was no accident. As Rafael Behr writes in his essay on “Milibandism” on page 32, his policies are underpinned by “a consistent analysis of what is wrong with Britain”. It was on the day after his election as Labour leader that Mr Miliband first used the phrase “the squeezed middle” and was widely mocked. It has proved to be of enduring relevance as the disconnect between the national income and voters’ incomes has become clearer. After stagnating in the years before the crash, real wages have fallen for 40 of the 41 months since the coalition government took office (the exception being April 2013, when high earners collected their deferred bonuses in order to benefit from the reduction in the top rate of income tax). The Labour leader was similarly derided for his interest in concepts such as “responsible capitalism” and “predistribution” but commentators have been forced to acknowledge their significance as they have been translated into the crunchy detail of policy.

With Labour’s poll lead and his personal ratings improving, Mr Miliband can speak with justified confidence of forming the next government. However, if his positioning has created opportunities for Labour, it has also created dangers. Mr Miliband has come under internal pressure to “shrink the offer” and put forward a modest manifesto that limits the room for attack by political opponents. A conflict has opened up inside the leadership between those who believe that the crisis of 2008 demonstrated the need for fundamental reform of the economy and state and those who believe there is little that cannot be resolved through the resumption of growth and the harnessing of its proceeds for public services. It is a battle of ideas between hard and soft reformers. And the choice facing the party is between the transformative politics of Blue Labour and the transactional politics of its Brownite antithesis.

Mr Miliband must side unambiguously with the former. The New Labour years demonstrated the limits of both an unbalanced economy over-reliant on the City and a bureaucratic state indifferent to public-service users. Because of the large fiscal deficit that a Labour government would inherit, reform of both is not just desirable but essential. As Jon Cruddas, the party’s policy review co-ordinator, noted in his speech on “one nation statecraft” in June, “Labour will inherit a state that in many areas has reached the limit of its capacity to cut without transformational change to the system.”

This means devolving power downwards from Whitehall and reorienting services such as the NHS around prevention rather than just cure. Andy Burnham’s proposal to integrate physical, mental and social care into a single budget and single service is perhaps the best example of the kind of reform required. By allowing more patients to be treated outside wards and freeing up to 40 per cent of beds, an integrated service could save the NHS around £3.4bn a year. But as a result of the structural reform required and the upfront costs involved, those in favour of a minimalist manifesto have sought to sideline the idea.

Here, as elsewhere, it is time for Mr Miliband to honour the bold rhetoric that won him the leadership in 2010 and this publication’s support. The Labour leader does not aspire merely to be an efficient manager of capitalism but a reformer in the mould of Attlee and Thatcher. He should resist those urging him to take the incrementalist path.

As Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary looms, time travel is everywhere – on the screen, at least. Famously, the Doctor can whizz through the years using a “dimensionally transcendental” machine, the TARDIS, and make changes to the past as and when he likes. But what is time travel – and how much of “Doctor Who” might really be possible?

A handy definition of time travel comes from philosopher David Lewis. Lewis says time travel involves a journey having different durations viewed from outside (in “external time”) or from inside (in “personal time”). Suppose you spend five minutes travelling aboard your machine, as measured by (e.g.) your watch and your memories. On arrival, you find 150 years have elapsed in the outside world. Congratulations, you have time-travelled. Five minutes of your personal time has covered 150 years of external time.

Odd as this sounds, Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity introduced such possibilities to physics in 1905. The theory says: the duration of a process varies with the relative velocity of the observer. The closer that relative velocity gets to the speed of light, the longer the travelling process takes.

Suppose you want to see the Earth a billion years hence, but worry you have only about 50 personal years left. Special Relativity specifies that if you travel very close to the speed of light relative to the Earth, your 50 personal years can cover one billion Earth years.

In backward time travel, personal and external time differ in direction, so journeys end in external time before, not after, they begin; you spend five personal minutes travelling 150 years into the external past. General Relativity suggests that the universe is essentially curved spacetime, which might allow such divergences of external and personal time.

Relativity treats space and time as aspects of a single entity: “spacetime”. One of the more remarkable features of General Relativity is that it allows time and space axes to be interchanged, so one observer’s space axis can be another observer’s time axis.

In 1949, Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel used General Relativity to describe a universe where intrepid voyagers can go anywhere in (past or future) time without travelling faster than light. Gödel’s universe has no boundaries in space or time, and all the matter in it rotates. But our finite, non-rotating universe is not Gödel’s. Despair not though – simply spin an ultradense, very (maybe infinitely) long cylinder very fast. Spacetime should curve around the cylinder so the direction of the local future partially points into the external past. Such devices are called “Tipler Cylinders”, after physicist Frank Tipler.

Better yet, quantum theory suggests that “wormhole” connections between different spacetime points spontaneously form and break all the time. The chances are that natural wormholes are tiny - vastly smaller even than an electron, (and a billion trillion electrons can fit in a teaspoon). But you could perhaps find (or create) a wormhole big enough and durable enough to let you slip through into the past. Difficult, but theoretically possible.

No, you can’t kill your physics teacher

So perhaps you could travel into the past. But what about paradoxes? What is to stop you assassinating your grandfather or yourself as infants? One answer says: logical consistency.

Classical logic says you cannot consistently kill in infancy someone who achieves adulthood. But, Lewis says, time travel need not involve doing the logically impossible – provided travellers’ actions in the past are consistent with the history whence they come. So you could try killing your baby grandfather, but something would foil you – you would sneeze, or your gun would jam. Lewisian time travel is therefore (classically) consistent, but might look very strange, since seemingly possible actions (like shooting an unprotected infant) would prove impossible.

Another view says that backward time travel requires many worlds – that is, many different but equally real versions of physical reality. Physicist David Deutsch and philosopher Michael Lockwood argue that time travel must involve inter-world travel. If you travel backwards in time, you must arrive in a history different from your native one and so would be quite unfettered by your past once you get there. You could even kill this other history’s counterparts of your grandfather and yourself.

Both these concepts of backwards time travel may disappoint anyone wanting to change the “one and only” past. Conventional logic says time travellers would either help make history what it was (Lewis) or create a different history (Deutsch/Lockwood). However, quantum logic might let travellers change the actual (one-and-only) past.

Suppose we hold that quantum measurements determine (or change) quantities measured, even if those quantities lie in the past. Someone could travel back and “observe” history turning out differently from how it originally was, thereby retrospectively making actuality different from what it had been. What would happen to travellers who rebooted history is not clear, but this model seems closer to the time travel familiar from “Doctor Who” and other fictions. Beware, though, because quantum theory allows no predicting, and still less controlling, of the outcomes of changing the past. There would be no way to foresee the effect you would have on the present.

So classical logic, General Relativity and quantum theory all seem to permit time travel. Classical logic plus General Relativity suggest backward travellers face weird consistency constraints. Many-worlds travellers face no constraints, but get displaced into different histories. Quantum-logic travellers could change the (one and only) past without constraints, but they couldn’t predict or control what they would get.

So far, however, it seems only the Doctor knows how to change the past at will.

Alasdair Richmond received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to fund one semester of a two-semester leave period that covered the academic year 2008-2009.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

While pledging to dramatically expand the rate of housebuilding in the UK if elected (to at least 200,000 a year by 2020), Labour has had less to say about how it will achieve this target. But in a speech to the National Housebuilding Council today, Ed Balls will begin to fill in some of the gaps. 

The shadow chancellor will promise to look at reviving development corporations along the lines of those that constructed the post-war New Towns, noting that they had the power "to acquire, own, manage and dispose of land and property; undertake building operation; provide public utilities; and do anything else necessary to develop the New Town." But he will also warn that they are not a sufficient solution to the problem. Balls will say: "These Corporations generated revenue by selling land and housing, receiving rental income and receiving commercial income. However, they needed up front funding to build the infrastructure and housing which could later be sold at a profit."

In a notable challenge to George Osborne, he will call on the Chancellor to expand the level of Treasury guarantees available for housebuilding. Having offered £12bn of guarantees for mortgages on properties worth up to £600,000 (in the form of Help to Buy), why won't he do the same for New Towns? As Balls will say: 

George Osborne has shown himself willing to use the Government’s balance sheet to guarantee some house building – but in particular demand through guaranteeing household mortgages. And yet we read that the New Towns which you heard about a year ago have stalled.

The Government is providing guarantees of up to £12bn for Help to Buy. He should now step up to the plate to back the supply of new houses in New Towns.

Providing guarantees to Development Corporations could be essential to provide backing for a large-scale growth programme to provide confidence, reduce risk and give credibility to the development.

We cannot afford to dither any longer - and I cannot see a stronger case for the full throated backing of the Chancellor than a step change in housing supply.

To do that we will need the full backing of the Labour Government, including the Treasury, for new towns - willing to devolve the powers, determined to provide the resources, and showing the leadership and vision that is sadly lacking in Government at the moment.

One issue not mentioned in the extracts released by Labour is that of council borrowing. Were the current cap on borrowing to be lifted, local authorities could fund a major expansion of social housing. The Chartered Institute of Housing estimates that raising the caps by £7bn could enable the construction of 60,000 homes over the next five years, creating 23,500 jobs and adding £5.6bn to the economy. As Boris Johnson argued in refrence to London in his recent manifesto 2020 Vision, "We should allow London’s councils to borrow more for house building - as they do on continental Europe - since the public sector clearly gains a bankable asset and there is no need for this to appear on the books as public borrowing."

Yet for entirely ideological reasons, Osborne has rejected this suggestion. Unlike in other European countries, borrowing by councils appears on the national balance sheet making the deficit appear larger than it is. For a Chancellor determined to ensure that borrowing falls every year (to the extent that he delayed payments to institutions such as the World Bank and the UN and forced departments to underspend by £10.9bn), regardless of other policy objectives, lifting the cap is out of the question.

But if Labour is to even get close to building the number of new homes required, it will surely need to do so. As a recent Policy Exchange report noted, he UK needs a minimum of 1.5 million new homes from 2015 to 2020 simply to meet need, 300,000 a year. Around 221,000 new households are expected to be formed each year over this period and there is a significant backlog. Thus, even the eventual target spoken of in Labour circles - a million in five years - falls short. Unlike the Tories, with their reckless aim of stoking a new property boom, Balls and Labour are certainly asking the right questions, but they're not offering all the answers yet. 

This story first appeared on the New Republic

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about condoms is that they work. Once negotiated out of their crinkly wrappers, they reliably protect against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV. They are simple to make, cheap to buy, and easy to obtain, whether you’re in Norway or rural Niger. Using a condom doesn’t require a prescription or a healthcare provider, and there are rarely any adverse effects - unless you consider the loss of pleasure, which, this being sex, matters a great deal.

On Wednesday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced it was disbursing $1 million in grants for a next-generation condom that does the job without the perceived pleasure trade-off. “The undeniable and unsurprising truth is that most men prefer sex without a condom, while the risks related to HIV infections or unplanned pregnancies are disproportionately borne by their partners,” said Dr Papa Salif Sow, a senior program officer on the HIV team at the Gates Foundation. “The common analogy is that wearing a condom is like taking a shower with a raincoat on. A redesigned condom that overcomes inconvenience, fumbling, or perceived loss of pleasure would be a powerful weapon in the fight against poverty."

Many of the grantees are tackling the sensation problem by turning to materials other than latex. Latex, which is derived from natural rubber, has been the industry standard since Youngs Rubber Company, the first makers of Trojan condoms, rolled them out in 1920. While the latex of today is a marked improvement over yesteryear’s rubbers, researchers say further advancements are unlikely. The only modifications now are further design flourishes, like texture and cherry flavor. The advantages of latex are chiefly its cost (low) and durability (strong enough), while the drawbacks are well-known: it smells, slips, is thick, and, for some, allergenic.

Materials scientists from the University of Oregon are using their $100,000 grant from Gates to develop an ultra-thin condom of a polyurethane polymer with “shape memory” properties. Think of something similar to shrink wrap that conforms to the shape of an object as it is heated. Now think of a penis: during intercourse, body heat would cause molecules in the condom to contract, molding it to the user. The material also would be thinner - about half as thin as current condoms - and twice as strong, says Oregon’s Richard Chartoff. As a bonus, antimicrobial nanoparticles embedded into the condom would guard against sexually transmitted diseases.

“The goal is to make a condom that has the same texture as human skin - you won’t even know it’s there,” said Jimmy Mays of the University of Tennessee, another grantee, who believes he can get there with thermoplastic elastomers, a stretchy, durable class of plastic he’s been researching for 25 years. Thermoplastic elastomers, which feel soft and rubbery, can flex for a longer period than latex without breaking and then recover their initial dimensions, making them a favored material in consumer products like toothbrush grips and iPhone covers. “I’m not a condom guy - I’m a polymer chemist, and our material was tailor-made for this purpose,” he told me.

If the Holy Grail is to simulate human skin, then by a certain logic animal tendons make perfect sense. Mark McGlothlin, of Apex Medical Technologies in San Diego, will use his grant to produce a male condom using collagen fibrils from cow tendons, a material he’d once investigated as an alternative to latex in the mid-1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic. (He eventually put out a polyurethane condom instead, which stayed on the market for 15 years.) “A lot people are trying to get stronger and thinner material - that was always my focus,” he said the other day. “But the texture of collagen is very much like the mucous membrane: the feel of it, the heat transfer of it, and to the touch, it feels very much like skin.” As McGlothlin explained, you can think of collagen condoms as a bio-safe, micro-thin cow leather, without the nasty tanning chemicals. Another advantage is that, as a raw material, collagen is ubiquitous across the world. McGlothlin will be getting his beef tendon from a Chinese food store in California, but slaughterhouses, or even fish markets, are other potential sources.

Meanwhile, the California Family Health Council, working with the Colombian inventor Innova Quality SAS, says it has a material that’s “going to revolutionise the way condoms are used,” according to Ron Frezieres, the Council’s vice president of research. That material is polyethylene, the same transparent, odorless, hypoallergenic, sheer plastic used in the gloves worn by food handlers. It clings rather than squeezes, promising to be less restrictive than standard condoms. Polyethylene is more environmentally stable than latex - it can sit for longer periods of time on the shelf of a sweltering warehouse before breaking down, for instance - and is also stronger, as proven by blowing air into it until it pops, the standard test by which the industry evaluates condom strength.

CFHC is basically taking an existing polyethylene condom which is made in Colombia and currently sold in eight countries, perfecting its design, replacing the oil-based lubricant for one that’s silicone-based, and working through the requisite FDA approvals. The real innovation, it says, is in the way the new condom is put on - or “donned,” in the jargon. You don’t unroll it, feeling and fumbling in the dark for the correct side. Rather, the condom, which comes rolled up with pull tabs, is pulled over the penis like a sock. (Here's a somewhat NSFW illustrated demonstration.) They will come as a set of three, packaged in the same kind of thin, credit card-shaped box as Orbit gum, and printed with catchy designs.

Other grantees are also exploring novel ways to don a condom. With his Gates money, Willem van Rensburg, a South African, will be improving upon a condom applicator he invented a few years ago. The new product, called Rapidom, works likes this: a foil condom wrapper, perforated down the middle, is held over the penis and pulled apart using both hands. Still attached to the condom, a plastic applicator inside the wrapper then guides the condom down until it is fully applied. With a final tug, the applicator and the wrapper come off, leaving the condom in place - all one motion, with only minimal disruption to the moment. “People don’t want to think - the sequence should flow logically and naturally,” said van Rensburg, who plans to spend eight weeks testing the Rapidom in “resource poor” areas of Africa.

The Gates Foundation is hoping that somewhere out there is an idea for a condom that men would prefer to no condom at all. Ultimately, said Dr Sow, the field is moving toward so-called multi-purpose prevention technologies (MPTs) - silver bullets that can effectively stanch both the 86 million unintended pregnancies and the 2.7 million new HIV cases around the world every year. A one-size-fits-all diaphragm, easier to use vaginal rings, improved gels and injectables - hormone shots - are some of the MPTs currently being developed. But the most promising MPT remains the most modest: a penis sheath.

This story first appeared on the New Republic.

In Anatomy of Britain, first published in 1962, Anthony Sampson depicted Britain’s establishment as a set of intersecting circles, each representing a different institution, loosely linked to each other round an empty space in the middle. It was in the nature of Britain’s democracy that there was no single dominating centre. If this complex Venn diagram, however, does have a single point where all the circles intersect, it would probably be located in whichever room Chris Patten is currently standing.

It is hard to think of another public figure who has moved more fluidly and effortlessly between pivotal institutions of power – the Conservative Party, the House of Lords, Oxford University, the diplomatic service and the BBC. In fact, he reached the top of them all – as chairman of the Conservative Party, chancellor of Oxford (a post he still occupies), governor of Hong Kong, European commissioner and now chairman of the BBC Trust. Many think he would have eventually led the Conservatives had he not lost his Bath constituency seat in 1992, partly through being distracted by helping his ally John Major to win the general election.

“My career has never been calculated,” he told me when we met in his office at the BBC Trust in central London. “People talk about ‘planning’ a career. I mean I was supposed to join the BBC when I was 22. So, I come to the BBC when I’m sixtysomething. And getting involved in politics was an accident on the road. I’ve never really – well I’ve taken decisions not to do things – but I’ve never actually planned a career. It just sort of happened to me.”

Planned or not, the institutions of politics, elite education, diplomacy and the media (which, in the case of the BBC, is closely linked with the arts) have all been conquered. That leaves only religion, the law and sport left to complete the full set. Becoming archbishop of Canterbury is made tricky by his Catholicism, and at the age of 69 there may not be time to become a High Court judge. But becoming president of the MCC – he knows and loves cricket – would complete an establishment full house.

Chris Patten is no stranger to challenging roles. As a Europhile, he watched the Tory party tear itself apart over Europe in the 1990s; as the last governor of Hong Kong, he had to negotiate with China. But even he cannot have expected his tenure at the BBC to coincide with such a series of crises. First the BBC tolerated and failed to expose Jimmy Savile, then it wrongly implicated Alistair McAlpine, before being forced to admit it was paying lucrative pay-offs to executives that far exceeded its contractual obligations.

The scandals, however, have been fuelled by an underlying sense that the BBC has been losing its way in a much more general, abstract sense. To the right-wing press, it is an indefensible statist bureaucracy. That view, inevitably, has only hardened. But even people who are much more sympathetic to the BBC feel that the executive pay-off scandal has confirmed what they had long sensed – that the BBC had been quietly taken over by an executive class that was far too attentive to its own interests and insufficiently interested in making great programmes. Patten thus finds himself in a peculiar position: as both watchdog and cheerleader-in-chief.

Is the BBC suffering a crisis of confidence?

“Inevitably, given the hits it’s taken, not least the endless criticism in the written press, there has been some effect on morale,” he concedes. “Yet when people who work for the BBC talk to audiences or people from outside the UK, they’re reminded of what a fantastic national institution it is. Just after the Savile hits – an awful, dispiriting look into the cultural practices of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties – polls showed that despite Savile the BBC was one of the only institutions in the country that people trust and feel proud of. The NHS, armed forces, monarchy, BBC all had big percentages in favour.”

He contrasts the negative ratings of other institutions: “You look at the rest of the media, you look at the police and the courts, I’m afraid – let alone bankers.”

He believes the BBC has felt the blows unusually deeply. “The BBC is the only institution that I’ve been associated with which gets a sense of Schadenfreude about its own problems or mistakes. It beats itself up more. I think we should start to be more positive about ourselves. People get a fantastic service for 40 pence a day. I think the important thing for the BBC is not to lose its nerve. My friends from around the world are amazed that BBC is in the headlines so much. They assume this must be an organisation that everybody is exceptionally proud of. Well, sensible people are.

“I went to a concert in Oxford on Monday. The Spanish soprano Sylvia Schwartz was saying at the supper afterwards how wonderful the BBC was. She lives in Rome most of the time and travels from opera house to opera house, always trying to get the World Service or finding out if she can get Radio 4 or Radio 3. And you set that against the front pages of some of the Sundays. I mean, I was thinking the other day that in some newspapers the BBC gets bashed more than President Assad. It’s extraordinary.”

Most recently, on Monday 11 November, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, speaking at the Society of Editors conference, claimed that the power and reach of the BBC’s freeto- view online news operation was undermining local newspapers. “There is a real need for the BBC to think about its own position and what it is doing and the impact it has,” she said.

“The BBC has to think carefully about its presence locally and the impact that has on local democracy.”

The walls of Patten’s office in the BBC Trust are lined with paintings from chapters in his life – an image of Hong Kong harbour hangs next to a painting of his house in France. His tone is wry, affable and measured, as though he has pondered many paradoxes and idiosyncrasies of mood and taste. A sentence running away from him, the feeling of being out of his depth, admitting to surprise: it is hard to imagine him suffering any of those experiences. Patten is now 69. “But my cardiologist tells me 69 is the new 49, so I try not to feel old.”

What is the role of the BBC Trust, and his role at the top of it? “The Trust was set up because the board of governors’ model was thought to have failed – the lesson that people drew from the Hutton imbroglio, rightly or wrongly – and the intention was to establish a body that was both regulator and strategy [provider]. It’s not supposed to act as the head of the personnel department and manage the BBC’s projects. It is supposed to set out the strategy and the executive is supposed to apply that. And I think that what Tony [Hall, the recently appointed director general] and I are trying to do, before Christmas, is to agree on a review of our relationship that will make that more explicit.”

There is a wider context to the BBC’s struggles; this has been an era of crisis across national institutions. MPs suffered their grubby expenses exposé, the banks had their LIBOR scandal (among other disasters, of course), the press was floored by phonehacking and Leveson, the police have lurched from taking newspaper backhanders to the cover-up following the Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell wrongfully being accused of calling two officers “plebs”, and then the BBC entered its own troubles.

Meanwhile, the British public – threatened with declining standards of living and angered by a sense of being misled and ripped off – has taken a righteous and visceral thrill in the catastrophes of the nation’s various elites. Each depressing tale had added sting to the populist complaint that “they’re all at it”.

The horror show of institutional catastrophe has been further fuelled by the gleeful pleasure of each elite when the focus of resentment finally turns elsewhere. Bankers were thrilled about the MPs’ expenses scandal, the media even more so, which encouraged MPs to relish the problems within newspapers and the BBC. The establishment is eating itself, limb by limb.

Last month, Grant Shapps, chairman of the Conservative Party, renewed the assault on the BBC, questioning the future of the licence fee. Patten was appalled. “We were appearing in front of a select committee the other day, we’re always appearing in front of select committees, I think we’re now up to 17 in a year, on one issue or another. I said what had surprised me during my period as chairman of the Trust was on the whole the lack of political pressure from anybody. And then just to make it look as though I was a cloth head, the chairman of the Conservative Party launched himself into an exceptionally illjudged attack on the BBC.”

Patten has been on both sides of argument between political parties and the media about fair reporting. “The chairmen of the Conservative Party invariably have a bash at the BBC in the run-up to elections. I have to say to my eternal shame I did the same. But what was odd [about Shapps’s intervention] was publicly linking an attack on a journalist [the BBC home editor, Mark Easton] with the BBC as whole and the licence fee.”

I ask Patten if the criticism of the BBC was just another aspect of the wider warfare between different sectors and groups in the media?

“The Sunday paper [the Telegraph] that carried the interview with Mr Shapps, I think in four Sundays out of five had some BBC crime on its front page. And you wonder why? I mean in some cases there are, I guess, commercial reasons, the BBC is held responsible for the difficulties that some newspapers’ business models are in. I think that’s preposterous because newspapers in the US are in the exact same position and you can’t blame the BBC there. I think it’s sometimes ideological: that there shouldn’t be a public service broadcaster.”

Patten describes the scale of opposition to the BBC: James Murdoch’s 2009 MacTaggart Lecture accusing the BBC of having a “chilling effect”, the world-view of one newspaper group that “Britain is going to the dogs”, as well as aftershocks from the Leveson enquiry.

“What surprised me about Shapps’s . . . mis-Shapp was that the newspaper ran the story big but didn’t seem to notice that this was the week in which the newspapers were pointing out how dangerous it was to allow politicians to get anywhere near the regulation of the media.”

The question of BBC executive pay, meanwhile, is not going away. Earlier this month, Mark Byford, formerly the deputy director general, said there was nothing “greedy” about his £949,000 pay-off.

How does Patten explain how remuneration got to that level? “The BBC went from having pretty ‘civil servanty’ pay to paying over the odds for a number of reasons. First of all, in the Eighties and Nineties there was a view that some of the professional jobs in the BBC we weren’t doing well, so we needed to pay market rates. Then I think the view was taken, ‘Well, if you want to pay accountants more, why don’t you pay creative people more?’ And it’s bred from there, partly because of competition from the indies and from Channel 4 and ITV.”

He is damning about the pay-offs. “Noone – nobody sensible – would argue that the way that severance pay had been handled had been other than messy and shabby. It was wrong. The worst damage has been inside, because people have seen their budgets being squeezed and [also] these big pay settlements. Some of these severance payments raised . . . well, not just eyebrows . . .”

He quickly seeks to put the total amount of money wasted into context. “If you then look at a period of seven years from 2006 to 2013, people who left and were paid more than they were contractually entitled, that totalled £6.8m. Which is about what you’d have to pay to televise a football match. This is not the most outrageous example I can think of mortal sin.”

He pauses. “But it was wrong. And it stopped. And it won’t happen again. I strongly suspect that in three or four years’ time, there’ll be people arguing that we’re losing people elsewhere because they’re not being paid competitively. But from the top, the figures have all come down. I think we’ve reduced senior executive pay by about 30 per cent and numbers by about 30 per cent. Tony Hall was recruited at [a salary of] £450,000, and Mark Thompson was recruited originally at about £400,000 more than that. And so it goes on. I don’t know – well, I do know – what the editor of the Daily Mail gets. Or the chief executive of Sky gets. But there is a professional cachet about being a senior figure at the BBC.”

One recurrent accusation against the BBC is that it indulges too many bloated layers of management. This view is usually framed, as in the pay-off scandal, as the misuse of taxpayers’ money to the advantage of a bureaucratic elite. But there is a second, subtler problem with an over-managed institution: it becomes risk-averse and uncreative. The ascent of managerialism works against the BBC making adventurous top-end programmes, especially the type that the market finds difficult to fund. So there is a sense of double disappointment: the managerial class has not only been disempowering the BBC’s creative talent, it has simultaneously been feathering its own nest.

When he took the job, Patten said that the BBC ought to be able to make programmes at least as good as Danish imports such as The Killing. Yet what is striking about the BBC is that it has contributed relatively little to the current golden age of television drama – HBO’s The West Wing and The Wire, Netflix’s House of Cards. Why?

Almost everyone who experiences trying to make good programmes for the BBC describes the same debilitating process: the labyrinthine process of “pitching”, the layers of decision-makers, the way the people with the ideas very seldom meet the people who can make them happen, the general leadenfootedness. There is a sense of hovering BBC tastemakers imposing their view of what other people like, even if they don’t like it themselves.

John Lloyd, who created QI, Blackadder and Spitting Image, put it like this: “They care far too much about what people think, and it’s not even what they think, it’s what they think they think. That’s how you get the programme where ‘people would probably like that’. Well, do you like it? No, I don’t like it – I live in Notting Hill and I’m very cultured and I go to the opera – but them, they’ll like this.”

In short, creative people have limited patience for bureaucratic sclerosis – both its impositions and its outcomes – so isn’t there a risk that they will simply give up on the BBC? I hadn’t got far into that question before Patten interjects.

“I agree. That’s exactly what Tony Hall is trying to do at the moment. Strip out some of those layers of bureaucracy that have, among other things, a deadening effect on creativity. Your point about commissioning is extremely well made. We definitely have to be faster on our feet.”

Patten quickly turns to a list of programmes he currently admires. “I’m still pleased that there’s some really wonderful programming. I’ve just watched Ambassadors, really funny and perilously close to the real world. The best drama I’ve seen since I’ve been in this job is the Tom Stoppard Parade’s End, which I thought was magical. Downton Abbey is a huge success. But I’m glad that we made Parade’s End, not Downton. So there is a lot [of good programming] but there needs to be more.”

Wouldn’t making something as broad and ambitious as The Wire, while it might not appease the BBC’s ideological critics, at least show creative self-confidence?

“The BBC has to endlessly balance, to reach and also challenge the audience. And you can’t completely forget about reach. But you’ve also got to take a risk with audiences – which Wilfred Pickles did when he introduced poetry in workers’ canteens, and when the Third Programme was started. And challenging programming is what we should constantly ask ourselves about. When you’re asked: ‘What does distinctive or challenging programming mean?’ it’s one of those questions to which the best answer is: ‘Well, you know it when you see it.’ It’s not de haut en bas. It’s realising that people are invariably capable of enjoying more than the market assumes.”

It is a sentiment close to Steve Jobs’s famous dictum: “People didn’t know what they wanted until I invented it.”

Patten returns to his theme of the BBC taking risks. “When they take a punt, it’s sometimes superbly successful. I think that Grayson Perry’s Reith Lectures this year have been absolutely brilliant. They’ve achieved a wonderful public educational purpose. I think lots of people, as a result of Grayson Perry’s lectures, will go into art galleries now with the self confidence to say, ‘I really don’t like that. You know what, I really do much prefer the horses and the trees and the mountains to that condom with a nail in it.’”

Unsurprisingly, Patten thinks the BBC should be unafraid to be highbrow. “I am a great supporter of the Mary Beard view that if you’re doing history programmes, the best people to do them are historians, or art critics, or literary critics or whatever.”

And allow them to speak in proper paragraphs, instead of using the formula of choppy two-sentence chunks, before impatiently cutting to the next scene?

“I feel that quite strongly. I don’t know why – well I do know why – if you’re doing the history of the world, you have to cut periodically to slightly improbable scenes of people dressed up in woad, or wearing armour and hitting one another. It’s not necessary.”

Given all his enthusiasm for risk, does Patten consider the BBC to be fundamentally conservative? “We’re constantly told that it’s a sort of left-wing, Trot organisation, which is just ludicrous – and the audience think it’s ludicrous as well. The polls last weekend showed that I think 60 per cent of people thought it was trustworthy and accurate, against 14 or 16 per cent who didn’t. That was not a fact that made its way into any newspapers.”

And conservative with a small “c”? Few are better placed to understand the distinction: Patten wrote a book, The Tory Case, about conservative thought, belonged to the left of Thatcher’s iconoclastic Conservative government, and as an former Tory MP now heads an institution often accused of having a left-liberal bias.

“How conservative is the BBC in a big sense? You can think of arguments on both sides. I think that [the drama series] Top of the Lake is an example of it not being conservative. But you could argue that the amount of drama that is cops and dead bodies – usually women’s – suggests a certain attenuated view. We do need to have some more daring drama.”

Aside from the question of creative dramacommissioning, there is a certain irony about the assumption that conservatism is always the problem. After all, isn’t there also a sense that the BBC is conservative in an Oakeshottian sense, in that it is one of the threads that connects British lives?

“I think institutions are hugely important . . . when they work. Because if they do – if they’ve survived – it tends to be the case that part of their survival mechanism is that they have a good sense of how and when to change. There is that wonderful line in [Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel] The Leopard, ‘Things have to change in order to remain the same’, which is a great piece of conservative wisdom. We still have, despite our best efforts, some great institutions. We’ve got the second best university system – much better than Europe, which is surprising, given where we were in the 19th century.”

Interwoven with his reflections on the BBC, Chris Patten has touched on the poetry of George Herbert, the origins of the First World War and the batting technique of England’s number three, Jonathan Trott. His interests reflect the breadth of his career. Given all the pleasures of private life, it’s interesting that he’s still in public life, sitting under harsh striplights in this office, reacting to the latest select committee and about to sit for photographs for this profile. Is it duty? Habit? A sense that the elite is where he belongs? Perhaps a mixture of all three.

What would constitute a successful term as chairman? “Success would be that the BBC was on the way to renewing the charter, at a reasonable licence fee level, which would enable it to go on producing the kind of programming it does now. And for the levels of trust in the BBC to have consolidated and stabilised; I’d like them to be even higher. It’s a great national treasure and it’s important that it should act like a national treasure and be regarded as – not beyond criticism – but as something that we can be reasonably proud of.”

As a summary, Patten’s throwaway aside earlier in the conversation may be more apt: “In my experience, success is the avoidance of catastrophe.”

Ed Smith is a New Statesman contributing writer. His latest book is “Luck: A Fresh Look at Fortune” (Bloomsbury)

Secrets and Leaks:
the Dilemmas of State Secrecy
Rahul Sagar
Princeton, 304pp, £27.95

When states keep secrets, who decides which ones are worth keeping? This is one of the questions that underpinned the recent parliamentary debate about oversight of the security services, following Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations. The conventional answer is that the executive decides – which in the US means the presidency.

In his 1973 book, The Imperial Presidency, the American historian Arthur Schlesinger argued that the executive had grown too powerful and the “secrecy system” it oversaw had become bloated and dangerous. The American constitution had outlined a set of checks and balances to limit the secret-keeping power of the executive, but over the course of the 20th century, as the US fought more wars and secrecy became more central to national security, practice departed from principle. Open government was replaced by a lying, dissembling executive branch that sought to “bury its mistakes, manipulate its citizens and maximize its power”. How could this process be reversed? Congressional and judicial oversight was needed to reign in the president. Transparency could then once again trump secrecy.

In this timely study, the political theorist Rahul Sagar argues that this solution is too simple. It gets the history wrong: the American government was never as open as the story of decline suggests. And it gets the politics wrong, too. Institutional mechanisms for monitoring state secrecy just don’t work.

Take an example: the rotation of officials. When a new president is elected, new officials accompany him to office. The idea is that they will have different priorities to their predecessors and will therefore be more likely to expose past wrongdoing. But coverups work to the advantage of those in power, even when they cut across party lines: revelations of abuses of power lead to calls for more oversight, which then tie the hands of the new government. So, state officials can’t be trusted to enforce transparency. Judges and lawmakers can’t be relied on either. Both are too deferential to the executive and easily captured by special interests. Sagar shows persuasively that we cannot trust institutions to “watch the watchers”. We must instead rely on the “virtues and vices” of individuals.

Sagar’s thesis is that if we want a credible way to monitor state secrecy and control the “overclassification” of secrets, there is no better way than whistleblowing. He defines whistleblowing as a kind of “unauthorised disclosure” – the public version of “leaking”. Leakers disclose information anonymously. Too many leaks create a paranoid political culture and provide conspiracy theorists with ammunition: if secret information is made public anonymously, everything that was secret looks like a conspiracy; it becomes hard to separate the cover-ups of embarrassing mistakes and the concealment of minor abuses from real conspiracies.

Whistleblowing avoids this extra layer of secrecy. When done right, it is a kind of justifiable civil disobedience, which provides a way of striking the balance between secrecy and transparency that democracy requires. But according to Sagar, whistleblowers can also be a threat to democracy. They are not accountable representatives but private individuals, acting in their own interest. And they can have poor judgement, seeing abuses and conspiracies where there are none and threatening national security as a result.

Despite these costs, Sagar thinks whistleblowing is the best mechanism we have to monitor state secrecy. The tone of his book is pessimistic: the problems of secrecy in a democracy are intractable; the tensions between security, liberty and privacy can’t be resolved. But Sagar does set out in detail what it would mean to get whistleblowing right. The ideal whistleblower would be cautious, first contacting their boss and only later going to the press. On rare occasions, where the information that whistleblowers disclose highlights “gross wrongdoing” and a catastrophic abuse of power, the disclosure of which is patently in the public interest, they wouldn’t need to reveal their identity.

Sagar’s example is Abu Ghraib. Most of the time, however, the disclosure is of “suspected” not “gross” wrongdoing. In standard cases, an assessment of the whistleblowers’ intentions is required. The public must be able to examine their motives and ensure they are acting in “good faith” – they must not be partisan, driven by morality, politics or revenge. They should be “disinterested”.

This is a strange argument. Sagar’s critique of institutional oversight shows a clearsighted realism about state power and national security. But if Abu Ghraib is the standard for gross wrongdoing, then his scheme doesn’t allow for the many other kinds of wrongs that states commit and conceal – notably the NSA’s surveillance programme. His picture of the surveillance state is far too rosy. But his focus on intentions is the real red herring, and his preoccupation with “good faith” whistleblowers too moralistic.

Why does it matter if Edward Snowden is a hero or a narcissist? What’s important is what whistleblowers uncover, the insights into the hidden workings of state secrecy they give that a government committee never could. Focusing on the personality of individuals fixes the terms of the argument so that the whistleblower can never win. It is a gift to conservative defenders of surveillance that lets the state off the hook.

Katrina Forrester is research fellow in the history of political thought at St John’s College, Cambridge

Everyone has an opinion on migration but very few can justify it. I have reached this dismal conclusion in writing a book on the subject. I started the book out of concern about how migration was affecting those left behind in countries of emigration – I have spent my working life studying poor societies – but its scope gradually widened to include the effects on migrants and on the indigenous populations in host societies.

There is a serious technical literature that has studied various aspects of migration but very little of it has found its way into the media; nor has it been fitted together into an analytic whole. Instead, the media have been drowning in advocacy, supported by anecdote, assertion and moralising. As I read and listened, I was struck by the gulf between the strength with which opinions were held and the depth of ignorance on which they managed to remain afloat. I recognised this condition: it was the path to policy-based evidence.

The passion underpinning opinions on migration is fuelled by identities and fears. This is true on both sides of the debate but I will focus on the likely readership of this article – those who think of themselves as liberal intellectuals, my own circle. Among this group, distaste and disdain for opponents of immigration have become differentiating tests of identity. Beneath the vitriol is the fear that any concession to popular prejudice risks unleashing anti-immigrant violence.

Ever since Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in 1968, serious discussion of migration has been taboo in British social science. I lost count of the number of times I was cautioned while writing my book Exodus not to include anything that could be ammunition for Ukip. In other words, I was told to write yet more policy-based evidence. British migration policy is too important and in too much disarray for this to be defensible.

In defying the advice not to give comfort to Ukip, I am confident that I am not unwittingly unleashing dark forces of latent violence. If indigenous mass violence against immigrants were a serious prospect, I would accept that caution was in order: the academic pulpit should be used responsibly.

Powell’s forecast of immigrant numbers was remarkably accurate but his forecast of their social consequences was grotesquely wrong. This is not because of any fortuitous management of British migration (which has been inept beyond the bounds of parody), nor of any unusual strengths in the English character. All high-income societies have developed robust conventions against intergroup violence. This is one of the defining and distinctive characteristics of high-income societies and it is a relatively recent achievement. Many poorer societies have not developed such conventions, as they depressingly demonstrate day by day. This is one reason why these societies remain poor.

As part of my research, I have come up with ten building blocks needed for reasoned analysis of migration. Some are straightforward; others are analytically tricky and you will need to chew on them. Indeed – with apologies for a self-serving remark – you will need to read the book.

Block 1 Around 40 per cent of the population of poor countries say that they would emigrate if they could. There is evidence that suggests this figure is not a wild exaggeration of how people would behave. If migration happened on anything approaching this scale, the host societies would suffer substantial reductions in living standards. Hence, in attractive countries, immigration controls are essential.

Block 2 Diasporas accelerate migration. By “diasporas”, I mean those immigrants and their descendants who have retained strong links with their home societies, rather than cutting loose and integrating into their host societies. These links cut the costs of migration and so fuel it. As a result, while diasporas are growing, migration is accelerating. Diasporas continue to increase until immigration is matched by the rate at which immigrants and their offspring are absorbed into the general population. A crucial implication of this interconnection is that the policies for migration and diasporas must be compatible.

Block 3 Most immigrants prefer to retain their own culture and hence to cluster together. This reduces the speed at which diasporas are absorbed into the general population. The slower the rate at which they are absorbed, the lower the rate of immigration that is compatible with stable diasporas and migration. By design, absorption is slower with multicultural policies than with assimilative policies.

Block 4 Migration from poor countries to rich ones is driven by the wide gap in income between them. This gap is the moral horror story of our times. The difference in incomes is ultimately due to differences in political and social structures: poor countries have political and social systems that are less functional than those in rich ones. Their dysfunctional systems persist in part because they are embedded in the identities and narratives of local cultures. Migrants are escaping the consequences of their systems but usually bring their culture with them.

Block 5 In economic terms, migrants are the principal beneficiaries of migration but many suffer a wrenching psychological shock. As far as can be judged from the net effect on happiness, the economic gains and psychological costs broadly offset each other, although the evidence on this is currently sketchy.

Block 6 Because migration is costly, migrants are not among the poorest people in their home countries. The effect on those left behind depends ultimately on whether emigrants speed political and social change back home or slow it down. A modest rate of emigration, as experienced by China and India, helps, especially if many migrants return home. However, an exodus of the young and skilled – as suffered by Haiti, for example – causes a haemorrhage that traps the society in poverty.

Block 7 In high-income societies, the effect of immigration on the average incomes of the indigenous population is trivial. Economies are not damaged by immigration; nor do they need it. The distributional effects can be more substantial but they depend on the composition of immigration.

In Australia, which permits only the immigration of the skilled, the working classes probably gain from having more skilled people to work with. In Europe, which attracts many low-skilled migrants, the indigenous poor probably lose out through competition for social housing, welfare, training and work. The clearest effect on the jobs market is that new migrants compete with existing migrants, who would consequently be substantial beneficiaries of tighter controls.

Block 8 The social effects of immigration outweigh the economic, so they should be the main criteria for policy. These effects come from diversity. Diversity increases variety and this widening of choices and horizons is a social gain.

Yet diversity also potentially jeopardises co-operation and generosity. Co-operation rests on co-ordination games that support both the provision of public goods and myriad socially enforced conventions. Generosity rests on a widespread sense of mutual regard that supports welfare systems. Both public goods and welfare systems benefit the indigenous poor, which means they are the group most at risk of loss. As diversity increases, the additional benefits of variety get smaller, whereas the risks to co-operation and generosity get greater. Each host society has an ideal level of diversity and hence an ideal size of diasporas.

Block 9 The control of immigration is a human right. The group instinct to defend territory is common throughout the animal kingdom; it is likely to be even more fundamental than the individual right to property. The right to control immigration is asserted by all societies. You do not have the automatic right to move to Kuwait; nor do the Chinese have the automatic right to move to Angola, although millions would if they could. Nor do Bangladeshis have the automatic right to move to Britain and claim a share of its social and economic capital.

It sometimes makes sense to grant the right to migrate on a reciprocal basis. Thousands of French people want to live in Britain, while thousands of Britons want to live in France. Yet if flows become too unbalanced, rights derived from mutual advantage can be withdrawn: Australia, for instance, withdrew them from Britain. The expansion of the EU has created these unbalanced situations and the original reciprocal right may therefore need modification.

Block 10 Migration is not an inevitable consequence of globalisation. The vast expansion in trade and capital flows among developed countries has coincided with a decline in migration between them.

These ten building blocks are not incontrovertible truths but the weight of evidence favours them to varying degrees. If your views on migration are incompatible with them, they rest on a base too fragile for passionate conviction.

Once accepted, the building blocks still leave plenty of room for disagreement as to their application to particular societies at particular times. Yet they do not leave room for existential confrontations between polarised positions. Liberal intellectuals want to combine rapid immigration, the multiculturalism that entitles migrants to remain within a distinct cultural community, and an egalitarian society. This is a noble vision but unfortunately the desirability of a policy combination does not ensure that it is technically possible.

In economics, there is a well-known “impossible trinity”: the attempt to combine open capital accounts with targets on exchange rates and interest rates is doomed to fail. I fear that the open door, multiculturalism and generous provision of public services may be the social policy equivalent – another impossible trinity. This is because the major social risk posed by rapid migration combined with multiculturalism is not that the society polarises but that it atomises. It’s not that England would descend into violence but that our tacit norms of co-operationand generosity would gradually be undermined.

British society depends on these norms that, for the most part, we take so much for granted that we are barely aware of them. The weight of the evidence suggests overwhelmingly that if a society fragments between an indigenous population and a variety of diaspora communities, co-operation will weaken. More surprisingly, diversity even appears to weaken co-operation within the indigenous population: as indigenous networks are disrupted, people withdraw into more isolated lives.

The evidence for these adverse effects of diversity is partly analytical, partly statistical and partly the results of experimental games. In a magazine article such as this, however, there is not enough space to present it all, so you will have to make do with a practical example of a social convention that could be threatened by immigration.

A word of caution is in order. Examples are merely illustrative: anecdotes are not analysis. They can be stacked up to illustrate anything and so, while they are handy to understand an argument, they cannot be used to assess its merit.

Britain has an unarmed police force. The rarity of this practice should alert us that it is potentially fragile. It rests on a convention among criminals that faced with unarmed police they, too, should be unarmed. Individual criminals would gain an advantage by arming themselves, so for the convention to remain in equilibrium depends on an unlikely pattern of collective behaviour among criminals – a bizarre code of decency among crooks.

This highly attractive convention is under threat. One reason is that criminals in some diasporas have brought with them entirely different conventions. Jamaica has a murder rate that is 50 times that of Britain and so its criminals have an ingrained gun culture. Somalia has had inter-clan warfare for a generation, so its criminals are socialised into extreme violence. A sufficiently high frequency of Jamaican and Somali criminals in Britain would be liable to change the behaviour of indigenous criminals: why follow a personally disadvantageous convention if many others are breaking it?

At some threshold of criminal violence, an unarmed police force would become quixotic and our society would lose something we cherish. Judging by the difficulty that other societies have had in establishing the convention, it is likely that, once lost, it could not be re-established.

Race and culture are distinct. Jamaicans and Somalis are not genetically prone to crime and violence. Anyone of any race can absorb any culture: ethnic Jamaicans and Somalis can become culturally indistinguishable from the indigenous English and many have done so; just as ethnic English criminals might adopt the norms of Jamaica and Somalia.

A diaspora is not a race; it is a cultural network. It only becomes synonymous with race if there is no cultural absorption. Multiculturalism, as its name implies, is about culture, not race. Its objective is to slow or prevent the absorption of diasporas into mainstream indigenous culture. In so doing, it reduces the rate of migration compatible with a stable diaspora and hence with stable migration.

With an open door, migration keeps accelerating beyond this level so that diasporas keep expanding, thereby increasing diversity. In turn, beyond a point diversity starts to undermine the co-operation and generosity on which egalitarian policies rest. This is why the trinity of policies judged desirable by liberal intellectuals may be impossible.

With the current state of knowledge, such questions remain open. The analytics suggest that the net effects of migration follow an inverse-U pattern: moderate migration is modestly beneficial, whereas rapid migration carries potentially large risks. We lack the research to determine where our society is along this inverse U.

My guess is that, to date, Britain has had net benefits. We do, however, know that uncontrolled migration accelerates. Consequently, at some point the costs of additional diversity would outweigh the benefits. We do not know at what rate diasporas are being absorbed. Hence, we do not know what rate of migration would be compatible with stable diasporas. We do not know at what point particular social conventions would start to crack in the face of rising diversity. We do not know what the costs of such cracks would be.

In these circumstances, liberal intellectuals who dismiss concerns about future migration, as distinct from the complaints about its past effects, are being cavalier at other people’s expense. It is the indigenous poor, existing immigrants and people left behind in the countries of origin who are potentially at risk, not the middle classes.

If future migration is to be controlled and the permitted rate related to stabilising the size of the diaspora, migration policy and the supporting data will need revision. We do not even know the rate of illegal migration in Britain. Nor do we know the size of the diaspora: it needs to be defined and measured not by place of birth but by degree of cultural separation.

The core objective of migration policy should probably be to stabilise the size of the diaspora, culturally defined. There are evident legal, political and ethical limits that will need to be respected – not least arising from the EU – but a commitment to stabilising diversity, reasonably defined and measured, remains a meaningful and implementable objective.

We do not know whether the current size of the diaspora is right but the caution appropriate to scientific ignorance and the evidence of widespread concern among the indigenous population suggest that stabilisation would be a sensible medium-term objective until we know better. To stabilise the diaspora, the measure of migration that matters is gross, not net. Net migration, which is the current policy target, is not a completely pointless measure but the only sensible use for it is in conjunction with domestic demographics: a net migration target could presumably aim in the long term to stabilise the size of the population.

Having rethought targets, we will then need to rethink the mechanics of how migration should best be controlled. All forms of temporary migration are benign and should be excluded from targets. Students from poor countries who return home are highly beneficial to those left behind. There is good research evidence that over and above the skills they take back with them, students’ exposure to the political and social values of their host societies rubs off on them: once they return, they spread these functional values. It’s true that student visas are open to abuse – students refusing to go home is not just a problem for the host society; it is debilitating for poor countries. Yet the current policy response of restricting students from coming here is damaging for such countries and it chokes off one of our most promising economic opportunities.

There is ample scope for a deal between the government and universities: more students in return for effective controls. Universities have powerful control points – the award of a degree and prepayments – which they already use without compunction to ensure that students pay their bills. The same system could be used to ensure that they leave the country on completion of their studies.

One of the key insights of recent research is that the composition of migration matters more than its rate. Migrants are more beneficial if they are skilled and employable. Whereas skill can be assessed by a points system, employability can only be assessed by employers and so a sensible requirement is that migrants should already have a job offer. Existing migrants want to bring in their dependants. This occupies migration slots that could otherwise have been occupied by skilled workers; it is likely to slow the rate at which diasporas absorb into mainstream society and increases the burden on welfare systems.

A particularly sensitive issue is the right to bring in a prospective spouse. Indigenous citizens have the right to bring in foreign spouses but it is viable as a right only because few indigenous citizens wish to use it. It may be unreasonable to extrapolate from the largely unexercised rights of the indigenous to infer a right that would be used very frequently by immigrants. A similarly contestable extrapolation to the rights of immigrants concerns social housing and related benefits. Many migrants from poor countries will have needs that exceed the low-income indigenous population but should they preempt limited provision?

Granting the right to immigrate can be part of a package of rights and obligations designed to protect the rights of the indigenous. This is particularly important where entitlement to welfare systems is needsbased, as in Britain, rather than dependent on past contributions, as in continental Europe. Migrants to high-income countries from poor countries have won the lottery: a package that protects the rights of the indigenous poor scarcely encroaches on this good fortune while defusing one of the reasons for fear.

Parents naturally want to pass on their culture to their children. This is true both of immigrants and of the indigenous English population. It has become an article of faith in liberal and official discourse that cultural diversity should be respected and promoted. However, not all cultures are equally functional. The cultures that immigrants from poor societies bring with them have some attractive features but they are implicated in the social failures from which these migrants are escaping. For example, poor societies typically have far lower levels of trust and higher levels of violence and intolerance. There is therefore a solid, objective reason why we should want the children of immigrants to absorb English culture.

Left to their own inclinations, migrants cluster. In Britain, clustering is getting more pronounced. This reduces the rate of absorption of even basic attributes such as language. High concentrations of diaspora clusters in schools are so likely to slow absorption that it may be sensible to cap the proportion permitted. Other countries have had more active policies of dispersal: location is made part of the package of rights and obligations.

The consequences of uncontrolled future immigration are potentially serious. Designing controls that are effective, just and advantageous to citizens will be complex and contentious. Yet the task cannot be ducked. In saying so, I am aware that I have broken a taboo and that a fatwa awaits me. But Exodus will not unleash the forces of prejudice. It may, however, lance a boil.

Paul Collier is professor of economics and public policy and director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. His latest book is “Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century” (Allen Lane, £20)

Penelope Fitzgerald: a Life
Hermione Lee
Chatto & Windus, 528pp, £25

The word that immediately occurs to one when thinking of Penelope Fitzgerald’s last four novels – Innocence (1986), The Beginning of Spring (1988), The Gate of Angels (1990), and The Blue Flower (1995) – is “miraculous”. There is nothing quite like them in English literature: in fact, they are not really English novels at all, except in language. They are inexhaustible in their meanings; mysterious and oblique, even baffling, in craft, beauty and effect; and every reader who has come to them has asked, at one time or other, a variant of the question, “How is it done?”

In this first ever biography of Fitzgerald, which comes 13 years after her death, Hermione Lee, pointedly using the (madeup) words of Novalis in The Blue Flower as her epigraph (“If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching”), has set out to attempt some answers to that question. The result is a luminous masterpiece of life-writing.

Penelope Knox was born in 1916 into a family of renowned high-achievers, on both her paternal side (Knox) and maternal (Hicks). It is unsurprising that her first book, published when she was 60, was a group biography of her father, Edmund “Evoe” Knox, and his brothers, Dillwyn, Wilfred and Ronald. Penelope inherited not only the Knoxes’ extraordinary intelligence but also other typical family traits: obstinacy, a distrust of wealth and pomposity, an inability to share or express emotions, a certain stripe of neurosis and reserve. After Somerville College, Oxford, she worked for the BBC for most of the 1940s, an experience that was to go, 30 years later, into her fourth novel, Human Voices.

She married Desmond Fitzgerald in 1942 and the couple ran the internationalist highliterary magazine World Review from 1950 to 1953, when it folded. It is from this time that one can date the beginning of the Fitzgeralds’ years of adversity. The family – by then, they had three children: Valpy, Tina and Maria – moved from Hampstead to Southwold, Suffolk in 1957. Desmond began to drink heavily and his career in the law petered out. They had no money and they moved back to London in 1960 to live in a houseboat, Grace, moored in Chelsea. She began working as an English tutor in crammers; this was to be her main source of income for many years.

Things got much worse – Desmond was discovered stealing from his chambers and was disbarred; Penelope never spoke to anyone about this chapter in her life. Six months after this, the boat sank, taking with it most of their possessions. For the next 18 months they lived in a series of squalid homeless centres and temporary housing until the end of 1964, when they moved into council housing in Clapham, which was their home for 11 years. The pages on Fitzgerald’s poverty are unsentimental, clear-eyed and heartbreaking.

After Desmond’s death in 1976, Fitzgerald lived, variously, with her daughters’ families and in a rented attic room in St John’s Wood. Then the books started coming, one after another: two biographies; five novels, written from the material of her life stored up for so long; then those four late novels from the mid-1980s. From 1988 until her death, she lived in the coach house adjoining the house of Maria and her husband in Highgate.

It may appear at first glance that the biographer’s ordinary cradle-to-grave chronology provides the spine of this Life but look closely and you’ll see that the armature is a preternaturally finely tuned literary criticism. I read the “finding” in the epigraph as Fitzgerald’s books; the “searching” as uncovering what it was in her life that gave rise to them. It’s a book of great and harmonious intellectual unity, its artful investigation into how Fitzgerald’s inner life up to the 1980s can account for and be predictive of the late work gives the book its internal coherence.

It is easy to find parallels between her life and the first five novels – Lee does this with rigour yet extraordinary sympathy – but the later fiction calls for a different kind of illumination. Accordingly, Lee traces Fitzgerald’s reading, her intellectual and emotional affinities, producing a cogent account of Fitzgerald’s research, so compressed and buried within the work that the worlds the books bring forth feel entire and lived and utterly truthful. And the sustained pursuit of Fitzgerald’s central interest in failure and losers – “exterminatees”, as she called them – gives the biography its empathetic resonance.

The two-and-a-half-page preface alone is a wealth of such condensed thoughts that several could be pulled out into monographs. She writes that Fitzgerald’s life is “partly a story about lateness – patience and waiting, a late start and late style”. Those last two words proudly insert both Lee’s biography and her subject’s work into the Adorno-Beethoven- Mann-Said conversation. There’s no getting away from it – Fitzgerald was a genius.

Then there’s the gleam of those gem-like details: Fitzgerald’s compulsive cheating at games, even with her little grandchildren; the lunchtime sausage roll warming on the radiator in one of the schools where she taught, filling the classroom with its smell; cutting down her clothes to make Valpy’s dungarees; dyeing her hair with tea bags . . . Here is the heart of the meaning of life-writing: to bring the dead back to life.

“Magisterial” can be a forbidding word; it can imply distance, loftiness, even a touch of arrogance. But Lee’s magisterial work is inseparable from warmth, intimacy, humaneness, and love for the subject of her biography – and the sui generis work that Fitzgerald left behind.

Neel Mukherjee is the author of “A Life Apart” (Corsair, £7.99)

Discovering Music
BBC Radio 3

“Atonal isn’t a word you’d expect to hear in association with Vaughan Williams but here we are . . .” Just a few minutes into another brilliant episode of Discovering Music (7 November, 8.20pm) about Vaughan William’s seventh symphony, Sinfonia Antartica, and the presenter Stephen Johnson is in his stride, speaking in a way that is hard to render on the page but that sounds incredibly natural and yet also like every other word is italicised.

The ten-year-old programme is a profoundly effective show and tell: extracts from a decent recording of a piece of classical music are stopped occasionally for analysis, using phrases such as, “We can sense a deepening here,” and, “Remember we already heard some evocative sounds like that in a previous movement.” Sinfonia Antartica made a wonderful subject, sounding so absorbed in the freakish, almost alien textures of layered, ancient snow, with lots of grieving harp and piano (“It suggests ice so cold it’s almost dry”).

On a good week, Discovering Music can be the best thing on Radio 3. I mentally tuck into a waitress trolley weighed down with oodles of ham and cheese whenever the show starts. But is it about to be axed? I’m afraid that’s the rumour. Already collapsed in length and inched into a 20-minute concert interval in the last round of cuts, its future never looked good but . . . Oh, such a simple, inexpensive programme! One record, one script. Why lose it?

And why, more to the point, these terrible numbers? Radio 3 fell to the bottom of the network radio league in terms of budget this year, receiving an increase of just £300,000, where Radio 1 managed to grab £3.3m. Even more worrying is that the BBC Trust recently described Radio 3 listeners as a “a subset of the Radio 4 audience”. Never was a phrase more designed to make people feel like the losing crew at the end of the boat race. The disdain contained in that phrase feels absolute. It suggests a license to dismantle not just certain music specialism programmes or even speech-based programmes on Radio 3 but possibly, somewhere down the line, once it’s been squashed to a kind of Classic FM, an entire station, without so much as a single desperate dash across town or a breathless conference in a lift. It really is ice so cold it’s almost dry.