Loafing around can be an act of dissent against
the ceaseless demands of capitalism.
Illustration: Matt Murphy/Handsome Frank

Recently, I saw a man on the Tube wearing a Nike T-shirt with a slogan that read, in its entirety, “I’m doing work”. The idea that playing sport or doing exercise needs to be justified by calling it a species of work illustrates the colonisation of everyday life by the devotion to toil: an ideology that argues cunningly in favour of itself in the phrase “work ethic”.

We are everywhere enjoined to work harder, faster and for longer – not only in our jobs but also in our leisure time. The rationale for this frantic grind is one of the great unquestioned virtues of our age: “productivity”. The cult of productivity seems all-pervasive. Football coaches and commentators praise a player’s “work rate”, which is thought to compensate for a lack of skill. Geeks try to streamline their lives in and out of the office to get more done. People boast of being busy and exhausted and eagerly consume advice from the business-entertainment complex on how to “de-fry your burnt brain”, or engineer a more productive day by assenting to the horror of breakfast meetings.

A corporate guru will even teach you how to become a “master of extreme productivity”. (In these extreme times, extremity is always good; unless, perhaps, you are an extremist.) No one boasts of being unproductive, still less counterproductive. Into the iron gate of modernity have been wrought the words: “Productivity will set you free.”

Strategies to enhance the “productivity” of workers have been formalised since at least Frederick Winslow Taylor’s early-20th-century dream of “scientific management” through methods such as “time studies”. The latest wheeze is the Big Data field of “workforce science”, in which everything – patterns of emails, the length of telephone calls – may be measured and consigned to a comparative database to create a perfect management panopticon. It is tempting to suspect that the ambition thus to increase “worker productivity” is aimed at getting more work out of each employee for the same (or less) money.

To the long-evolving demands of productivity at work we must now add the burden of productivity everywhere else. As the Nike T-shirt’s slogan implies, even when we’re not at work, we must be doing work. There is certainly a great deal of Taylorised labour available on the internet: “sharing”, “liking” and updating profiles constitutes click-farm piecework for which we eagerly volunteer, to the profit of the large “social” media corporations.

Even for those who are not constantly bombarded with work demands outside the office, the ubiquity of information processing presents a temptation to be on call at all times. Our world has become an ambient factory from which there is no visible exit and there exists an industry of self-help technologies devoted to teaching us how to be happy workers. “Is information overload killing your productivity?” asks a representative business story. The answer is to adopt yet more productivity strategies. The labour of work is thus extended to encompass the labour of learning how to keep up with your work (specialised techniques, such as “Inbox Zero”, to manage the email tsunami) as well as the labour of recovering from your work in approved ways. 

“Exercise,” advises one business magazine feature. “It makes you more productive.” In a perfect world, you would be getting exercise while you work – standing desks and even treadmill desks are sold as magical productivity enhancers. In the future, we’ll enjoy the happy possibility of carrying on with our work while out running, thanks to “wearable computing” devices such as Google Glass, which has the potential to become the corporate equivalent of the electronic tags that record the movements of criminals.

In the vanguard of “productivity” literature and apps was David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system, according to which you can become “a wizard of productivity” by organising your life into folders and to-do lists. The GTD movement quickly spread outside the confines of formal work and became a way to navigate the whole of existence: hence the popularity of websites such as Lifehacker that offer nerdy tips on rendering the messy business of everyday life more amenable to algorithmic improvement. If you can discover how best to organise the cables of your electronic equipment or “clean stubborn stains off your hands with shaving cream”, that, too, adds to your “productivity” – assuming that you will spend the time that is notionally saved on a sanctioned “task”, rather than flopping down exhausted on the sofa and waking groggily seven hours later from what you were sternly advised should have been a power nap of exactly 20 minutes. If you need such “downtime”, it must be rigorously scheduled.

The paradox of the autodidactic productivity industry of GTD, Lifehacker and the endless reviews of obscure mind-mapping or task-management apps is that it is all too easy to spend one’s time researching how to acquire the perfect set of productivity tools and strategies without ever actually settling down to do something. In this way, the obsessive dream of productivity becomes a perfectly effective defence against its own realisation. 

As Samuel Johnson once wrote: “Some are always in a state of preparation, occupied in previous measures, forming plans, accumulating materials and providing for the main affair. These are certainly under the secret power of idleness. Nothing is to be expected from the workman whose tools are for ever to be sought.”

Nor is there any downward cut-off point for “our current obsession with busyness”, as one researcher, Andrew Smart, describes it in his intriguing book Autopilot: the Art and Science of Doing Nothing. Smart observes, appalled, a genre of literary aids for inculcating the discipline of “time management” in children. (Time is not amenable to management: it just keeps passing, whatever you do.) Not allowing children to zone out and do nothing, Smart argues, is probably harming their development. But buckling children into the straitjacket of time management from an early age might seem a sensible way to ensure an agreeably docile new generation of workers.

If so, the idea has history. In 1770, an anonymous essay on trade and commerce was published in London. (It is now usually attributed to a “J Cunningham”.) In it, the author proposes that orphans, “bastards and other accidental poor children” ought to be made to labour in workhouses for 12 hours a day from the age of four. (He allows that two of these hours might be devoted to learning to read.) This will have the happy effect, the author argues, of creating a new generation “trained up to constant labour” and thus increasing the general industry of the population, so that future labourers will be happy to earn in six days a week what they currently make in four or five.

Cunningham’s proposed workhouses are also conceived to house (or, rather, imprison) adult vagrants and other so-far-incorrigible poor people. Existing workhouses are too luxurious, he complains: “Such house must be made an house of terror”. Only terror will make the inmates properly productive; the solution is “the placing of the poor in such a situation that loss of liberty, hunger, thirst . . . should be the immediate consequences of idleness and debauchery”.

Fear has not ceased to be a useful spur to productivity. A recent article in the London newspaper Metro reported that research had shown that “dedicated Britons” were “less likely to pull a sickie” than workers in Germany and France. The researcher claimed: “Strong employment protection and generous sick pay was empirically found to contribute to increased staff sickness in Germany and France.” It could indeed be that Europeans are slackers and Brits are peculiarly “dedicated”. Or it could be that Britain’s more “flexible” labour market terrifies citizens into struggling into work even when they are ill.

The reason sickness is undesirable is not that it causes distress or discomfort but that it results in what is often called “lost productivity”. This is a sinister and absurd notion, predicated on the greedy fallacy of counting chickens before they have hatched. “Workplace absence through sickness was reported to cost British business £32bn a year,” the researcher claimed in Metro: a normal way of phrasing things today, but one with curious implications. The idea seems to be that business already has that money even though it hasn’t earned it yet and employees who fail to maintain “productivity” as a result of sickness or other reasons are, in effect, stealing this as yet entirely notional sum from their employers.

It took a long time before the adjective “productive” – which once simply meant “generative”, as applied to land or ideas – acquired its specific economic sense, in the late 18th century, of relating to the production of goods or commodities. (The noun form is first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in which he writes of the “produc­tivity” of a growing plant.) To call a person “productive” only in relation to a measured quantity of physical outputs is another way that business rhetoric has long sought to dehumanise workers.

One way to counter this has been to attempt to recuperate the supposed vice of idleness – to hymn napping, daydreaming and sheer zoning out. Samuel Johnson is sometimes counted among the champions of faffing, perhaps simply because of the name of his essay series The Idler. Yet he looked sternly on occupying oneself with “trifles”, as he describes his dilettante friend Sober doing in one of those columns. The guiding principle of The Idler, as Johnson described it in the farewell essay, was to encourage readers “to view every incident with seriousness, and improve it by meditation”. So meditating seriously is not idleness. 

On the other hand, Johnson noted sagely in an earlier entry, one can be idle while appearing anything but: “There is no kind of idleness, by which we are so easily seduced, as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business and by making the loiterer imagine that he has something to do which must not be neglected, keeps him in perpetual agitation and hurries him rapidly from place to place . . . To do nothing every man is ashamed and to do much almost every man is unwilling or afraid. Innumerable expedients have therefore been invented to produce motion without labour, and employment without solicitude.” Does this not perfectly describe our modern saturation in fatuous busywork? 

David Graeber, the anthropologist and author of Debt: the First 5,000 Years, would also probably approve of it as a characterisation of what he calls “bullshit jobs”. In a recent essay for Strike! magazine, Graeber remarks on “the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations”, all of which he describes as “bullshit” and “pointless”. Their activity is to be contrasted with that of what Graeber calls “real, productive workers”. 

It is telling that even in such a bracingly critical analysis, the signal virtue of “productivity” is left standing, though it is not completely clear what it means for the people in the “real” jobs that Graeber admires. It is true that service industries are not “productive” in the sense that their labour results in no great amount of physical objects, but then what exactly is it for the “Tube workers” Graeber rightly defends to be “productive”, unless that is shorthand for saying, weirdly, that they “produce” physical displacements of people? And to use “productive” as a positive epithet for another class of workers he admires, teachers, risks acquiescing rhetorically in the commercialisation of learning. Teaching as production is, etymologically and otherwise, the opposite of teaching as education. 

Idleness in the sense of just not working at all, rather than working at a bullshit activity, was championed by the dissident Marxist Paul Lafargue, writer of the 1883 manifesto The Right to Be Lazy. This amusing denunciation of what Lafargue calls “the furious passion for work” in capitalist civilisation, which is “the cause of all intellectual degeneracy”, rages against its own era of “overproduction” and consequent recurring “industrial crises”. The proletariat, Lafargue cries, “must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a thousand times more noble and more sacred than the anaemic Rights of Man concocted by the metaphysical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. It must accustom itself to working but three hours a day, reserving the rest of the day and night for leisure and feasting.”

That sounds nice but why exactly should we do it? It is because: “To force the capitalists to improve their machines of wood and iron, it is necessary to raise wages and diminish the working hours of the machines of flesh and blood.” Workers should refuse to work so that new gadgets get invented that will do the work for them. Similarly, Bert­rand Russell, in his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness”, argued that technology should make existing work patterns redundant: “Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all,” he wrote. Somewhere, he is still waiting for that possibility to be realised.

One modern anti-work crusader who cleanly abandons any notion of productivity is Federico Campagna, whose recent book The Last Night is an exercise in poetic dissidence. In seeking their existential justification in work, Campagna writes, “Humans elected their very submission to the throne as their new God.” Those who resist the siren promises of labour are therefore the true “radical atheists” and should be glad also to call themselves “squanderers”, “egoists”, “disrespectful opportunists”, “parasites” and most of all “adventurers”. Campagna explains: “Adventurers, like all humans, live within a dream, in which they try to be the lucid dreamers.” Something like dreaming or idling, it turns out, is also now sanctioned by another arena whose popular rhetoric often lays claim to a kind of religious authority: that of neuroscience. 

According to Andrew Smart’s book Autopilot, recent (but still controversial) brain research recommends that we stare vacantly into space more often. “Neuroscientific evidence argues that your brain needs to rest, right now,” Smart declares on the first page. (It took me a long time to finish the book, because I kept putting it down to have a break.)

Smart’s evidence suggests the existence of a “default network”, in which the brain gets busy talking to itself in the absence of an external task to focus on. To allow this “default network” to do its thing by regularly loafing around rather than switching focus all day between futile bits of work, Smart argues, is essential for the brain’s health. “For certain things the brain likes to do (for example, coming up with creative ‘outside of the box’ solutions),” he writes, “you may need to be doing very little.”

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Smart observes, was not very “productive” in terms of the quantity of poems he produced in an average year. However, while pootling away his time, he occasionally experienced a torrent of inspiration and what he did produce were works of greatness.

This reminds us that it is not necessary to abandon the notion of “productivity” altogether. We all like to feel that we have done something useful, interesting or fun with our day, even (or especially) if it has not been part of our official work, and we might harmlessly express such satisfaction by saying that our day has been productive.

This ordinary usage encodes an ordinary wisdom: that mere quantity of activity – as implied by the get-more-done mania of the productivity cult – has nothing to do with its value. Economics does not know how to value Rainer Maria Rilke over a prolific poetaster in receipt of an official laureateship. (One can be confident that, while mooching around European castles and writing nothing for years on end, Rilke would never have worn a T-shirt that announced: “I’m doing work”.) And his life sounds like more fun than one recent Lifehacker article, which eagerly explained how to organise your baseball cap collection by hanging the headwear on shower-curtain hooks arrayed along a rail.

Perhaps I shouldn’t mock. All that time saved every morning by knowing the exact location of the baseball cap you want to wear will surely add up, earning you hours more freedom to hunt and hoard ever more productivity tips, until you are a purely theoretical master at doing nothing of value in the most efficient way imaginable. 

Steven Poole’s “Who Touched Base in My Thought Shower? A Treasury of Unbearable Office Jargon” is published by Sceptre (£9.99)

The newest generation of consoles is going to get us used to being constantly watched by cameras in our living rooms. This might not be how Microsoft would put it, but that’s what the effect of an always-on Kinect will be. People have been penalised for swearing, at themselves, in their own living rooms:

To clarify, that’s a man getting an in-game penalty in NBA 2k14 because he swore outside of the game. Other games have been found to have similar features. Players can toggle the game’s listening-in on or off, but the important point here is that it’s incredibly creepy, and it’s the default, by choice of the developers. The console offers that function, so games will use it.

Let’s look forward, then, to what we might see in the generation after this one. We’re probably going to have cameras that track us through walls. Researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed a system called “WiTrack” that uses radio waves to build 3D images of game players as they move throughout their home, even when they’re in other rooms.

It builds on an earlier system called “WiVi”, developed by some of the same researchers, that was a rough system for tracking people using the Wi-Fi on a typical smartphone. It works based on quite a simple, but clever, insight - the radio waves that a Wi-Fi device emits, like a smartphone or router, are deflected and reflected by objects they come across in just the same way that the radio waves used in radar systems do.

The resolution of Wi-Vi was pretty unimpressive - it could pretty much only tell you if something was moving closer towards you or further away - but it was an exciting idea. At the time, it was suggested that it could be used in hostage situations to figure out where people were inside buildings, or used by rescue teams to find those trapped beneath rubble in the aftermath of an earthquake.

WiTrack, conversely, uses its own radio waves instead of Wi-Fi, meaning it can build up full 3D models of its immediate environment. Here’s more info from MIT:

WiTrack operates by tracking specialized radio signals reflected off a person’s body to pinpoint location and movement. The system uses multiple antennas: one for transmitting signals and three for receiving. The system then builds a geometric model of the user’s location by transmitting signals between the antennas and using the reflections off a person’s body to estimate the distance between the antennas and the user. WiTrack is able to locate motion with significantly increased accuracy, as opposed to tracking devices that rely on wireless signals, according to Adib.

“Because of the limited bandwidth, you cannot get very high location accuracy using WiFi signals,” Adib says. “WiTrack transmits a very low-power radio signal, 100 times smaller than WiFi and 1,000 times smaller than what your cell phone can transmit. But the signal is structured in a particular way to measure the time from when the signal was transmitted until the reflections come back. WiTrack has a geometric model that maps reflection delays to the exact location of the person. The model can also eliminate reflections off walls and furniture to allow us to focus on tracking human motion.”

If that's not enough, there's a video that walks through how it works:

Gamers can look forward, in theory, to a future Kinect-like system with WiTrack capability that can track them throughout their homes. You could lead a squad of soldiers into your kitchen, make a sandwich, and head back to the action in the living room. Or, more usefully, it could be deployed in care homes to detect when elderly patients fall.

It is also, as a bit of technology that can literally see through walls, quite creepy. Imagine the privacy headache that could arise if everyone in a block of flats could see through into their neighbours’ homes, and imagine the paranoia that people would have that the NSA was keeping watch on them (especially considering that we now know that governments have infiltrated games like World of Warcraft).

It's still hard to see quite how this technology could be rolled out in a consumer setting, but give it time and there are probably hints of what's yet to come here.

On 4 December, hundreds of police, some in riot gear, raided more than 25 premises in central London. Under the guise of looking for stolen goods and tackling trafficking and drug dealing, they raided the flats of prostitutes and turned them out on to the street. They invited members of the press to witness them taking women into custody and confiscating their money and possessions, all in the name of “saving” them from a life of prostitution.

Britain is not the only European country taking a tougher line on sex work right now. France has just passed a bill making it illegal to pay for sex, despite protests from prostitutes who say that laws criminalising clients make their work more dangerous, driving it underground. Germany, which has had progressive prostitution laws since 2002, is considering reversing them after a national debate on the issue. At a time when millions of women and girls across the continent are being forced to make hard economic choices – including prostitution – why does the biggest public feminist conversation still revolve around whether or not it is moral to have sex for money and whether doing so should get you locked up and deported?

The public shaming of sex workers has been a feature of the recent years of austerity in Europe. For the press, it’s a spectacle that plays well with readers drawn to a bit of titillated outrage. If you can’t get mugshots of the women, you can illustrate stories with stock photos of disembodied legs in miniskirts and heels, informing readers that this item will make them angry, horny, or both.

The recent raids in Soho were not the first occasion on which journalists and photographers have been invited by the police to cover the story. “What more clear signal do we need that the police are more interested in exposing these women than ‘saving’ them?” asks Melissa Gira Grant, author of the forthcoming book Playing the Whore: the Work of Sex Work. “How is their safety compromised now by these images and their spread online, as well?”

The story that is not being told in pictures of riot police raiding brothels is that the same police are authorised to keep a percentage of the cash they take from prostitutes. Under the Proceeds of Crime Act, money and valuables confiscated from sex workers – including anything set aside for rent, medicine and food for their children – get divvied up between the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the HMRC.

Worse, sex workers who are also migrants often find themselves turned over to the UK Border Agency (UKBA) following these “compassionate” raids. The English Collective of Prostitutes states that, during the recent Soho raids, “Some immigrant women were taken into custody on the pretext that they may be victims of trafficking, despite their protestations that they were not being forced to work.”

If tackling human trafficking is a priority, arresting the alleged victims, taking their money and handing them over to the UKBA seems like an odd way to go about it. Elsewhere, the public shaming of sex workers has a more explicitly political agenda. In Greece in the spring of 2012, the right-wing press ran stories blaming sex workers for the spread of HIV. The infection rate had indeed risen by 60 per cent in just one year – but not because of prostitution. Rather, the surge in infection was a direct result of swingeing cuts to the health budget, including the removal of needle exchange programmes.

We have been here many times before. It was Emma Goldman who first noticed, in 1910, that: “Whenever the public mind is to be diverted from a great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency.” The idea that the dangers and indignities of certain kinds of work can be separated from the economic circumstances of that work is a seductive one but, as Goldman reminds us, “What is really the cause of the trade in women? Not merely white women, but yellow and black women, as well. Exploitation, of course; the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labour, thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution.”

Most of the public conversation about the rise in sex work in Europe, particularly among poor and migrant women, assumes that it’s a consequence of immoral laws, immoral women, or both. The notion that five years of austerity, rising unemployment and wage repression across the continent might have something to do with it rarely comes up.

Separating prostitution from all other work and driving it underground does not just harm sex workers. It also allows people to imagine that just because they might be serving chips or wiping bottoms rather than having sex for a living, they are somehow preserving their dignity – they may be exhausted, alienated and miserable, but at least they’re not selling sex. Women who work as prostitutes do sometimes face abuse on the job – and so do women who choose to work as night cleaners, contracted carers and waitresses. The truly appalling choice facing millions of women and migrant workers across Europe right now is between low-waged, back-breaking work, when work is available, and destitution.

Even if we accept the shoddily supported notion that most women who choose to work as prostitutes do so because they have been traumatised in childhood, it does not follow that they should be stripped of agency, denied privacy, robbed of their possessions and arrested.

The public shaming of sex workers is a global phenomenon and too much of the media is complicit. The moral crusade against the sex trade, whether it is pursued by the police or by high-profile feminists who have never done sex work, serves the same function that it has always served. The problem with sex work isn’t sex, but work.

George Osborne's recent response to claims of a "cost-of-living crisis" by Labour has been to deny that there is one. In his Autumn Statement last week, the Chancellor boasted that, on his preferred measure, living standards were rising. He was duly rebuked by the IFS, which said that Osborne's metric "should certainly not be used in isolation" and confirmed that real incomes had fallen by around £1,600 since May 2010.

When Ed Miliband made this point to David Cameron at today's PMQs, Cameron's response was striking. Rather than quibbling with the figures, he conceded that "household incomes" had fallen but argued that this was not surprising after "the biggest recession in 100 years". In other words: blame Labour. He declared of Miliband: "His entire approach seems to be 'we made this almighty mess, why are they taking so long to clear it up'– well, we are clearing it up!" But while this line might have been effective in 2010, it is likely to be less so after three and a half years of the coalition (as Miliband noted). Conversely, blaming the living standards crisis on the last government, rather than denying it altogether, is undoubtedly a better approach for Cameron (whose biggest weakness is being seen as "out-of-touch" by voters) to take.

Miliband went on to press Cameron on his hint, in an interview with the Spectator, that the top rate of tax could be reduced from 45p to 40p under a Conservative majority government. The PM sharply replied that the top rate was still higher than in any year of the last Labour government but notably refused to deny that he hopes to cut it.  The possibility of Labour going into the next election proposing to reintroduce the 50p rate, while the Tories plan to reduce it to 40p, shows how much ideological ground is opening up between the two parites.

In response to Miliband's earlier questions on MPs' pay, ahead of IPSA's expected recommendation of an 11% rise tomorrow, Cameron went significantly further than before and said that unless ISPSA "thinks again", he "wouldn't rule anything out". When asked after the session whether this meant he would be prepared to scrap the body and hand control of MPs' pay back to parliament, the PM's spokesman said: "You've got his words. He's ruling nothing out." After being caught flat-footed by Miliband earlier this week (who called for cross-party talks on the issue), it now seems that Cameron will find some way to ensure the rise does not go through.

For me, it was the knives. For my mother it was the tea cup. Ordinary household objects that meant such dreadful things.

The cup came first. My mother, Sheila, now 73, asked her husband John, my stepfather for 30 years, to put a cup on a saucer. He couldn't. He waved it about, he put it somewhere else, he put it everywhere but where it should be. She had had worries before then, at his occasional lapses of memory. She joked about him having Alzheimer's as a way of warding it off. At that point she knew the joke was real.

Around that time he started banging his head, saying "What? What?" The neurologist told him what, in 2004, when my dad was 66. He actually said, "Good news. It's early onset dementia, not a brain tumour." Good news? "Yes, I could have said he only had three months to live." The inappropriateness of that neurologist's words set the tone for the next eight years of "care", where things got so bad, my strong, powerful mother seriously planned suicide.

She tried to find help. By now they had reluctantly left my beautiful childhood home in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire - to move to a small village near Wakefield where she thought my dad could wander off with less risk. She contacted the local Alzheimer's Society. They ran a day care centre, but although John soon needed someone to occupy him constantly - slowly he stopped reading, watching TV, socialising - he wasn't bad enough to tolerate sitting in a circle and throwing a ball around. He knew enough to know that he had suddenly become some kind of patient or problem, and of course he resisted.

After a couple of years, his vocabulary dramatically diminished. He tried his hardest to keep his words, writing every day in his diary. Those entries are heart-breaking to see, as the forms of the letters get shakier and shakier until there are no letters at all. This rapid disintegration of language - aphasia - makes us think now that he had another kind of dementia, but no-one diagnosed it and now we will never know.

The diagnosis of Alzheimer's was almost rote. He had dementia, so it was probably Alzheimer's. He had dementia, so he was prescribed Aricept, then other drugs that gave him angina bad enough for us to rush to A&E; others that gave him a near stroke; others that caused him - we think - to tip over while seated on the bed and cut his head, needing 14 stitches. The doctors were flailing as much as we were. It was trial-by-drugs.

We kept looking for help. After dozens of phone calls my mother found that she was entitled to an elderly carer's social worker, who was wonderful. We were entitled to some money and found carers through private associations. Plenty came and went. Over the years, there were social workers, health workers, care workers, doctors. But my dad resisted many of them, some were unsuitable, some didn’t come back. There was no consistency of care. In the end my mother got a few hours’ respite a week.

Anyway they were no use in the middle of the night, when he woke up snarling, terrified and terrifying. We tried to find respite beds in local care homes, to stem her exhaustion, but there were none, or the care homes were horrible. As soon as he became aggressive, the carers stopped coming altogether, for health and safety reasons.

My two brothers, my sister and I took him out as much as we could, while my mother was reduced to begging friends to come and visit. But although she had a close circle of good, kind friends, a number disappeared.

We tried to keep his mind busy for another 20 minutes, and then another, as we tried to calm the rages, the smashed television sets, the fear and panic of a man who had enough brain left to know something scared him, but not what.

My dad could still express himself in other ways, sort of. Almost to the end, his fingers still tapped out music playing on the radio. Once, when he had hardly any words left, we walked through our village churchyard and he said "eerie". I was profoundly shocked. If he had that word, did he have others trapped inside? Were we treating him like a child when he understood more than we knew?

But the disintegration said otherwise. I don't know if it was more distressing when he shouted and screamed at being washed and showered and helped to the toilet or when he stopped caring that people had to clean him, accompany him to the toilet, show him what to do.

This was a man who was always impeccably dressed, whose handkerchiefs were ironed. His personality and ability disintegrated as his brain rotted and shrank. My mother watched her loving husband look at her with blankness or contempt and sometimes hatred. And yet dementia is classed as a social condition, so that the state is not required to pay for long-term residential care. Calling it what it is - brain damage - is too expensive.

This is not a rant against the NHS. I've had plenty of arguments with my mother about its failings, with me defending it. But in the case of my stepfather, it didn't seem to know what to do. Society didn’t know what to do.

Six years after the teacup, I visited my parents' house and noticed that the knives were not in the block on the counter. For months we had suspected that things were worse than my mother admitted. It was obvious that she was exhausted, bereft and stressed. She was getting three hours sleep a night. We knew that he had locked her out of the house at 3am one day, so she was begging him in her nightdress to let her back in, but instead her previously loving husband pelted apples at her head, and spat words at her that he would have been mortified to use before, with pure hate. She called the emergency social services number. Answerphone. She called the police. By the time they turned up, my dad was peaceful, smiling at the constable who couldn’t see why she had been called.

My mother didn't tell us that he had struck her a few times, only sometimes accidentally, or that he tried to push her down the stairs as she clung to the banister. But the disappeared knives told me. They told me that the situation had become dangerous, that she was really scared.

At her lowest point, my mother made a plan. My mother, who had seen her first husband - my father - drop dead of a heart attack in front of us, who had then brought up two toddlers alone, a widow at 35. This strong, wonderful woman decided that the best thing for them both would be to drive off a cliff.

Before this could happen, someone luckily gave her the number for the helpline run by Admiral Nurses. I'd heard of them: they are the equivalent of Macmillan nurses for dementia, providing dedicated support to carers. But there were no Admiral Nurses where we lived, sadly. They would have made such a difference. Even so, my mother says the person on the helpline saved her life, because he understood exactly what she was going through, the fear, despair, and shock at your beloved husband treating you now with hatred, blankness or rage.

Not long after the knives, he grabbed the steering wheel while my mother was driving in the fast lane. The car had been the last place he felt calm. We knew then we had to section him. The final decision was made one evening, but a doctor was unavailable and my mother had to spend a night next to her husband knowing it was probably the last they would spend together. Ironically, after so many years of little sleep, she tried to stay awake, to stretch out the last hours.

I hate to remember that morning in May 2010: my mother sobbing and clinging on to him, police, social workers and a doctor we’d never seen before coaxing my dad into the ambulance, pretending it was a trip like any other, lying to him, trapping him like an animal. It was despicable and we had no alternative, because the only care available to aggressive dementia patients, at least where we lived, is to lock them up. We confine them in dirty, horrible 'assessment centres', and we drug them into dribbling passivity. There was nothing else on offer.

Over the next year, my dad was sectioned three times. He emerged briefly, because my mother hated every minute of him being there. She searched desperately for another solution. Eventually she found an expensive care home a few miles from their village that seemed kind and safe, and he went there, until he lashed out, of course. Instead of having a strategy to cope with aggressive dementia - hardly uncommon these days - the home had him sectioned again. They said he was a risk to other residents. My mother arrived with my brother at 2pm to find my dad drugged, slumped in a chair, covered in vomit and having messed himself. No-one had cleaned him up. They sat there until 11pm waiting for a police escort (all the police were at a football match).

Locked up again, he rapidly deterioriated. My mother visited every day, and still we couldn't stop the weight falling off him. She fed him high-protein food, but she wasn't allowed at meal-times, and there weren't enough staff to make sure he ate, or they weren't bothered. They said Alzheimer’s was causing the weight loss. Five stone of it. There was no stimulation beyond a TV. It seemed the only strategy there was to wait for them to die. It worked. In six months, this tall, fastidious, witty man was reduced to a stumbling, dribbling wraith, with bed sores and mysterious abrasions.

I am deeply ashamed of what happened to him. We were a strong, educated, knowledgeable family. Some of our family friends were top consultants, surgeons. If we couldn't navigate through it and find help, who can? Like so many carers, we ended up drained by the disease. Care homes wouldn't keep him. He couldn't be at home. There was nothing in-between. Even now I can't see what else we could have done.

Finally my dad was sent to casualty at Pinderfields hospital in Wakefield when his injuries – three large abrasions on his forehead, bedsores in his groin and behind his knee - turned septic. He was there for several hours, screaming and weeping before being put in a female ward for the night, then a side room. He had no idea where he was and there was no-one to tell him, just a shut door. We wouldn't do that to children but apparently it's fine for someone with less understanding than a five-year-old.

Finally he was put on a geriatric ward. There were kind and lovely nurses on this ward, and some who weren't. Another patient was aggressive and shouting, like my dad used to be before the drugs shut him up and shut him down, and an auxiliary once said loudly, "what a nasty old man”. My mother went to her and said forcefully, "don't say that. It’s the disease that is nasty, not the man." You would think anyone working on a geriatric ward - where three quarters of patients have some form of dementia - should know the difference.

My mother visited every day. After a week or so we noticed that his drip was switched off every time we arrived. Sorry, they said, and switched it on again. The next day, it was again off, and so on. Finally I read his medical notes and saw something like 'dying adult care pathway'. No-one had told us. We didn't know he was supposed to be dying. To this day I don't know how he went from ill to terminal without us noticing.

But we didn't protest, because his life was so diminished, and we were grieving and exhausted and stunned. What was the point of fighting for his life, for him only to be locked up again?

We stopped insisting on the drip. We stopped trying to feed him. He was heavily sedated and on January 4, 2012, with us all at his bedside, his breathing turned into bubbling by pneumonia, he died.

The nurses gave us all tea and sandwiches in another room so they had time to clean him. When we went back to his body, someone had laid a sprig of flowers on his chest. I will always be grateful for that small but huge act of kindness.

His death certificate says he died first of pneumonia and secondly of Alzheimer's disease. They could have listed another cause of death: a refusal to properly care for dementia sufferers, even when they are violent, and an equal inability to care for their carers. My dad died of dementia, but also because dying was the easiest way to treat him.

A fund-raising event to raise money for an Admiral Nurse in Wakefield will be held on March 9 in Leeds. For more information: http://night-to-remember.org.uk/

Although there are no officially declared candidates (with the exception of transport expert Christian Wolmar), it often feels as if the race to be Labour's next London mayoral nominee has already begun. David Lammy, Tessa Jowell,  Andrew Adonis and Diane Abbott are all positioning themselves to stand, with a regular stream of op-eds and other interventions.

In an interview with me in tomorrow's NS, Sadiq Khan, who was appointed shadow minister for London in January, hits out at what he calls "a beauty parade" and accuses his Labour colleagues of "playing ego politics". When I asked Khan why he withdrew from a recent Progress debate on the future of capital, which featured Lammy, Jowell, Adonis and Abbott (the first hustings in all but name), he told me:

I was told it was going to be a forum to discuss ideas about London and it was quite clear to me that it was actually turned into a beauty parade. I’ve got no interest in being involved in a beauty parade, or playing ego politics. It’s about me making sure that I do the job I’ve been given as shadow minister for London with the seriousness it deserves. I’m a member of team Labour. My obsession is to make sure we do the best we can in the elections in May 2014.

As shadow minister for London, Khan enjoys the advantage of being able to prepare the ground for a future mayoral bid without being accused of "ego politics". When I pointed out that he was viewed as one of the frontrunners for the post, he notably refused to rule out a bid: "If others want to flatter me and throw me those compliments, I’m not going to reject them, but my focus is definitely on the jobs I’ve asked been by Ed Miliband to do."

Defends the mansion tax against Lammy, Jowell and Abbott

Khan also criticised Lammy, Jowell and Abbott after they denounced Labour's proposed mansion tax as a "tax on London" (at the Progress event) and warned that it would penalise the asset rich but cash poor. He said:

All I say to colleagues, in the kindest, politest way is, 'actually, you look at the bigger picture. Are you in favour of trying to help those who own the least by giving them a new rate of tax at 10p? If you are, then ask yourself how you go about doing that.' What I’d rather do is work collegiately with senior members of the Labour Party to find a policy that works, rather than going for the cheap soundbite, which doesn’t really address the issue of making sure that we’ve got a fair tax policy.

On Boris Johnson's Thatcher lecture: "simplistic snobbery"

In response to Boris Johnson's recent Margaret Thatcher lecture, in which he argued, "Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2 per cent have an IQ above 130", Khan said:

"I took the trouble of reading the speech, as well as the soundbites, and it was a frankly offensive and ill-thought through speech for the mayor of London to deliver. For a candidate to be the next Conservative Party leader, I can see why a speech talking about the importance of having more grammar schools and rewarding the top 10% can be seen as an attractive speech. But actually, in a city where you’ve got cleaners, bus drivers, hospital porters, working incredibly hard, to make a speech talking about how the lowest 16% should basically just accept it, take it or leave it, and how those top 10% should be given automatic knighthoods, showed a lack of understanding about this city."

He added:

"Let me pose this challenge; if Barack Obama’s IQ was tested at age five, 11, 16 or 18, I doubt whether it would have been very high, he wasn’t necessarily a brilliant student, but he worked hard, he had aspiration, he reached for the top and he’s now president of the United States of America. Or if Nelson Mandela’s IQ had been tested three, five, seven, eight, 12...that sort of simplistic snobbery is not what we want the mayor of this great city to be talking about.

"What he should be saying is every child deserves to fulfil their potential, every school should be a good school, we want to make sure that everyone shares in the joys of London, whether it’s the arts, the culture, the theatre, the academics, every son or daughter of a bus driver, a cleaner, a hospital worker should recognise that the reason why your mum and dad people are doing those jobs is not because they’re not bright but because they’re very important jobs that need to be done in London.

"Give them pride in the work they’re doing. We are a London where we should be one city recognising that, to win the Olympics, the work of the construction worker was just as important as the work of Sebastian Coe."

Pick up tomorrow's New Statesman to read the interview in full.

While David Cameron changed tack at PMQs today and admitted that living standards are falling (but that Labour was to blame), it seems that Philip Hammond didn't get the message. The Defence Secretary told The Daily Politics:

I think living standards are starting to rise again after what has been a very, very difficult period with a huge reduction in our national income. I think everybody in this country understands that if our national income contracts by 7.5 per cent that has an impact on living standards.

But when challenged by Andrew Neil to name "any measure" that showed this, he was forced to concede:

I haven’t got a specific measure I can quote. But what’s happening is we are seeing a recovery in the economy, we’re seeing people benefitting from the measures that we’ve taken to increase the tax free personal allowance, to freeze council tax, to freeze fuel duties, so that those pressures on living standards where the government does have some direct ability are being managed. And, as the economy starts to grow again, we will see living standards continuing to recover.

The exchange continued:

AN:  Oh, continuing to recover, so you say they’re recovering, so by what measure are you using to justify the claim that living standards are now rising.

PH: Well, as our national incomes rise again, living standards will rise.

From "living standards are starting to rise" to "living standards will rise" in just one minute.

Unfortunately for the Tories, even under George Osborne's preferred measure of Real Household Disposable Income, which includes the incomes of charities and universities (and as the IFS warned, "should certainly not be used in isolation to measure how they [living standards] are changing"), living standards are forecast to fall this year. And even once they start to rise, they still almost certainly be below their 2010 level at the time of the general election.

13 DECEMBER 2013 ISSUE

NELSON MANDELA REMEMBERED – WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM SARAH BAXTER, JASON COWLEY AND ED SMITH

PLUS STEVE YATES ON THE NEW BIOPIC OF THE LATE ICON

COVER STORY: ALEX FERGUSON, THE LAST GREAT BRITON?

THE POLITICS INTERVIEW: SADIQ KHAN ATTACKS LABOUR MAYORAL “BEAUTY PARADE”

SHAKER AAMER ON WHY RUSSELL BRAND IS BANNED FROM HIS GUANTANAMO READING LIST

ANTHONY SELDON ON THE REAL ETON RIFLES: THE TRUTH ABOUT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR

PLUS

THE POLITICS COLUMN: RAFAEL BEHR ON WHAT DAVID CAMERON AND ED MILIBAND HAVE IN COMMON

SOPHIE McBAIN MEETS FAWZIA KOOFI, THE WOMAN WHO WANTS TO BE AFGHAN PRESIDENT

LAURIE PENNY ON THE PUBLIC SHAMING OF SEX WORKERS

TIM WIGMORE BUSTS GRAMMAR SCHOOL MYTHS

FRANCES WILSON REVIEWS TWO EYEBROW-RAISING HISTORIES OF

SEXUAL PERVERSION

HOW M R JAMES'S GHOST STORIES BECAME A CHRISTMAS INSTITUTION

AMANDA CRAIG PICKS THE BEST CHILDREN’S BOOKS OF 2013

NELSON MANDELA REMEMBERED

This week the NS remembers the life and considers the legacy of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. The NS editor, Jason Cowley, recalls his first visit to the country in 1998 when many were fearful of what would happen after Mandela had served his only term as president. But, Cowley asks, was Mandela “too willing to forgive his Afrikaner oppressors and too reluctant to challenge the corporate power structures that, on the whole, remained in place after the end of apartheid”?

The issue includes a reprint of a report by Sarah Baxter which appeared in the NS in April 1994 as South Africa stood on the brink of widespread violence following the assassination of Chris Hani, the leader of the South African Communist Party. The NS columnist Ed Smith remembers a visit to South Africa still earlier – in 1992 – when, as a 15-year-old on a school cricket tour, he felt “pincered by the double prejudice” of South African blacks and whites. Just three years later at the Rugby World Cup final in Johannesburg, writes Smith, Mandela saw how sport could transcend political divisions: “when he pulled on the Springbok jersey, Mandela found the image that perfectly captured his political message of liberal reconciliation”. Finally, Steve Yates talks to the film producer Anant Singh about the 18-year journey behind Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, the new biopic of the late icon.

COVER STORY: JOHN BEW ON ALEX FERGUSON

For this week’s cover story, the award-winning historian and NS contributing writer John Bew breaks one of his own cardinal rules – to avoid “the unnecessary intellectualisation of football, a simple game made complicated by idiots” – in order to consider “the political thought of Sir Alex Ferguson”. What values and attributes enabled a man who started life in the working-class shipbuilding hub of Govan, Glasgow, to enjoy a long, successful and highly paid career managing “the most popular and valuable sports team in the world”?

We are not used to individuals who combine professional dominance with such longevity. Most political careers end in failure. Ferguson was able to step down in triumph at the time of his volition after winning the Premier League, the last of 49 major trophies. Our statesmen are lucky to have ten years at the top – a time span not dissimilar to the career of the average footballer.  . . there has been no shortage of efforts to clone his creed. At the last count, more than 30 of his former players have followed him into management.

So can the highly successful “Ferguson formula” be replicated in politics, asks Bew?

The Ferguson formula is not transferable because he is a product of a British world that is almost extinct. What he embodied was a non-southern version of success, born in Britain’s industrial heartlands and tied closely to the values and self-image of the skilled industrial working class. The binds of family and community were the bedrock, particularly through hard times. Within this, there was room for individual force of will and the possibility of social mobility – through a combination of learned expertise and personal responsibility. . . This form of Britishness, which once had a natural home on the left, played a great role in the shaping of this nation but as a result of social, economic and political changes, it has dwindled and almost disappeared.

Bew concludes one of the secrets of Ferguson’s success is adaptability:

Both in his professional conduct and his personal world-view, Ferguson has demonstrated an ability to look beyond his immediate world without rejecting it. Indeed, he has harnessed the best qualities from whichever locale he has operated in but never followed a mantra to the point of subservience and superstition. More than anything, the defining characteristic of his managerial technique has been his approach to change. This has not simply been to accept it as a fact of life, but to anticipate and shape the future.

THE POLITICS INTERVIEW

SADIQ KHAN ATTACKS THE LABOUR MAYORAL BEAUTY PARADE AND EGO POLITICS

The shadow justice secretary and shadow minister for London, Sadiq Khan, talks to the NS’s George Eaton about his frustration with the London mayoral “beauty parade” and “ego politics”, why he thinks London needs 800,000 new houses and why he’s supporting the introduction of a mansion tax.

For Khan the three biggest issues facing the capital are:

“housing, housing, housing”. Having grown up on a council estate in Earlsfield, south London, before his father, a bus driver, saved enough to buy his own home, he tells me: “I understand how important council housing is. I actually think it’s got so bad that housing is the single biggest challenge facing London politicians of my generation.”

While Ed Miliband has pledged to build at least 200,000 homes a year by 2020 if Labour is elected, Khan points out: “The number of new houses we’ll need in London is, according to councils, 800,000 . . . it’s arguable that London could take it all. We’ve got big, big questions and no one’s talking about them.”

Is Khan launching his own pitch for the mayoral nomination, asks Eaton? Khan refuses to deny he has an interest:

“I think the job of a conscientious, hard-working shadow minister for London is to bring together the best ideas in the business and do this booklet. If I was running for the job of mayor of London, this would not be the time to be having long, deep discussions about the future direction of London, but I think it’s important for London’s future and for Labour’s future. I’m not interested in a beauty parade or a contest of personalities.”

Khan, who supports the introduction of a mansion tax, has little patience for Labour colleagues Tessa Jowell, David Lammy and Diane Abbott, who would block the shadow chancellor’s proposal:

“All I say to colleagues, in the kindest, politest way, is: ‘Actually, you look at the bigger picture. Are you in favour of trying to help those who own the least by giving them a new rate of tax at 10p? If you are, then ask yourself how you go about doing that.’”

Khan explains that frustration with the London mayoral “beauty parade” recently led him to pull out of an event hosted by Progress at which Jowell, Lammy and Abbott were speaking:

“When I was first asked to do the Progress event, I was told it was going to be a forum to discuss ideas about London and it was quite clear to me that it was turned into a beauty parade,” he says. In an uncoded rebuke to those already positioning themselves to win the mayoral selection contest, he adds: “I’ve got no interest in playing ego politics. It’s about me making sure that I do the job I’ve been given as shadow minister for London with the seriousness it deserves.”

SHAKER AAMER ON WHY RUSSELL BRAND IS BANNED FROM THE GUANTÁNAMO READING LIST

In a column dictated to his British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, Guantánamo Bay detainee Shaker Aamer, who has been behind bars for 12 years without being charged of any offence, explains the eccentricities of the Gitmo censorship policy:

Clive Stafford Smith comes to see me every three months or so. I ask him to bring me books. When I am allowed to read, it lifts – for a short while – the heavy gloom that hangs over me. Clive amuses himself (and me) by testing what the censors will let through. It is difficult to identify any consistent or logical basis for the censorship: in months gone by, I have been allowed to read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago did not make it through.

On his most recent visit in October, Clive gave me a list of the titles he had dropped off for me, so I could let him know later what had been banned by what I prefer to call the Guantánamo Ministry of Information. One was Booky WookTwo by Russell Brand. I understand that Brand uses too many rude words. I suppose you have to be amused by that: the US military is solicitous of my sensitive nature, and wants to protect me from swearing. These are the same people who say that all of us at Guantanamo are dedicated terrorists

THE NS ESSAY: ANTHONY SELDON IN DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC-SCHOOL RECORD IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR

In this week’s NS essay, Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College and author of “Public Schools and the Great War”, challenges the long-held assumption that rank and file soldiers suffered more than public school-educated officers in the First World War and that the horrors of the trenches were exacerbated by a pervasive public-school ethos.  

They [public school men] died at nearly twice the rate of the other British soldiers who fought in the First World War. Yet today, the common view is that deluded public school products were responsible both for the folly of taking the country into the war and fighting it with shocking callousness towards the ordinary soldier.

Public schools are firmly in the dock, accused of the contradictory positions of utilising clinical efficiency in killing and of amateur incompetence and other-worldliness. . .the time has come for a fresh look. Were the top commanders as uniformly inept and callous as widely believed? Were the generals acting out some public-school fantasy, or were their decisions coloured more by their prolonged exposure to the uncompromising military strategy of the time? Were the junior officers, whose thinking was powerfully shaped by their recent experience of school, shallow and unfeeling? Were the schools homogeneous authoritarian factories, or did some produce sensitive and rebellious young minds? Was the “public school ethos” what it has been made out to be?

Seldon finds many officer products of schools such as Eton, Wellington, Radley and Uppingham did their utmost to serve the men in their care. He finds, too, that “public school alumni served their fellow men as doctors and chaplains” and “were often in the vanguard of criticism of the war”.

THE POLITICS COLUMN: RAFAEL BEHR ON WHAT CAMERON AND MILIBAND HAVE IN COMMON

As the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) rules MPs deserve an 11 per cent pay rise, NS political editor Rafael Behr argues in this week’s politics column that “voters may be more receptive to the case for well-paid politics if they thought they were getting a more representative set of recruits for their money”. Yet neither of the leaders of the two main political parties have anything like representative backgrounds, Behr argues. Even though they come from very different social backgrounds, both David Cameron and Ed Miliband grew up in political families and were always destined for political careers:

The differences between David Cameron and Ed Miliband are vast enough to obscure the one thing they have in common. They both went into politics because it seemed like a natural thing to do – a feature that also distinguishes them from the majority of the population.

Both men are products of rarefied social spheres that made a career in Westminster obvious and available. Cameron, Eton educated and aristocratically connected, became a Conservative. Miliband’s upbringing at the top table of North London’s Marxist intelligentsia propelled him in the opposite direction. Talent explains their subsequent progress but neither man set off on a path marked by resistance.

PLUS

The tech columnist Ian Leslie on why politicians and geeks find it so hard to work together

Will Self on the “new cobblers” written on modern sweatshop clobber

Caroline Crampton on the jump-in-your-seat shock of the vampire play

Let the Right One In at the Royal Court

Rachel Cooke on Susan Sontag, the Dark Lady of American Letters

Science columnist Michael Brooks on why it’s so hard to make money from Quantum physics

*

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There are many images of our home planet taken from space, and they rarely fail to put things in perspective. Yet, have you ever seen our planet, from space, in motion?

The video above was taken by Nasa's Juno probe as it flew past us on 23 October. That grey mass to the left of the screen at the start, drifting right, is the Moon, orbiting the blue Earth. This is what it would look like to approach the Earth in a spaceship. It is incredibly cool. (And that music? That's a composition by Vangelis, the guy who did the soundtracks for Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire - Nasa has good taste.)

Juno, as its name may suggest, is on its way to explore Jupiter. It launched in August 2011, with enough momentum to reach as far as the asteroid belt before gravity pulled it back in towards the Sun - all part of Nasa's plan. As it reached the Earth again and skimmed past it received a gravity boost of a further 7.3km/s relative to the Sun, which should give it the velocity needed to reach Jupiter on the other side of the Solar System by July 2016. Once it's in orbit there, it will study the gas giant's clouds, and what's beneath them.

The video Nasa made of Juno's flypast opens with the probe roughly a million kilometres from Earth. The Moon's orbit is roughly 385,000km, which explains why the Moon shoots off to the right as Juno moves inside its orbit. Juno actually spins as it's flying along, twice per minute, so this video is a sped up one with two frames captured per minute of the same angle by Nasa engineers.

In other "things flying closely past the Earth" news, asteroid 2013 XY flew through our neighbourhood this morning:

It's probably between 30 and 70 metres across, which is considerably larger than the 15-20 metre Chelyabinsk meteor of February this year. And, best of all, we only spotted it five days ago. That's not a lot of warning for something potentially destructive (though, just to emphasise, there's no chance of this thing hitting us). Still, it goes to show just how big space is, and how little of it we know about, even in what we might consider our local community.

Former Mirror editor Piers Morgan told Rebekah Brooks that he knew what her splash was in January 2003 because he had been “listening to messages”, the Old Bailey was told today.

Morgan was attending a dinner party for Andy Coulson’s birthday at a steak restaurant in Balham, south London when the comments were made.

Appearing over video link from the United States, witness Ambi Sitham said there was a “pointedness” to the exchange between Brooks and Morgan.

Sitham was giving evidence on day 30 of the hacking trial.

The court heard that Sitham was a media lawyer and attended the party with her then boyfriend who was a close friend of Coulson.

Read more of this story at pressgazette.co.uk

So Scientologist Luisa Hodkin can have her dream wedding. The Supreme Court's decision to recognise Scientology as a religion - and its ceremonies as "religious worship" for the purpose of marriage law - won't delight those who regard Scientology as an exploitative cult or a money-making scam. But today's ruling is more than just a victory for followers of L Ron Hubbard's controversial church. In allowing Luisa Hodkin to get married in a Scientology chapel, the court had to abandon earlier, rather narrow definitions of what constituted religion and worship in favour of something much less clearly articulated. And that may turn out to have significant implications.

The bar on the legal registration of weddings conducted according to the rites of the Church of Scientology dates back to the Segerdal case of 1970. In it, the Court of Appeal led by Lord Denning decided that the Church of Scientology couldn't constitute a religion for legal purposes because it was insufficiently focussed on "reverence to a deity". It was, thought Denning, more akin to a philosophy. Nor were its ceremonies religious, he went on, because Scientologists did not "humble themselves in reverence and recognition of the dominant power and control of any entity or being outside their own body or life".

Denning admitted that some well-established religions, for example Buddhism, might not easily pass the test of "reverence to a deity". But he regarded that as an "exceptional case".

The clear message in today's judgement is that these definitions of religion and worship, based as they are largely on the Christian model, are no longer appropriate in a religiously plural society. Ideas about God, noted Lord Toulson, were more properly the stuff of "theological debate" than questions for the law to unravel. Instead of worrying about whether or not the object of veneration of a group calling itself a religion fits into conventional ideas of what a god is, Toulson adopted a fairly ad hoc test. For him, religion was to be described, rather than defined, as "a spiritual or non-secular belief system, held by a group of adherents, which claims to explain mankind's place in the universe and relationship with the infinite, and to teach its adherents how they are to live their lives in conformity with the spiritual understanding associated with the belief system".

Scientology, whatever you think of it, ticks all these boxes. Slightly more controversial, to some, was Toulson's comparison of Scientology to Buddhism, in that both systems aim at achieving enlightment. Buddhism has an Eightfold Path, while L Ron Hubbard's system is "aimed ultimately at complete affinity with the eigth dynamic or infinity". It's worth noting here that the judgement takes its information about Scientology entirely from materials submitted by a minister at the chapel that requested registration, Laura Wilks, rather than, say, the more critical account recently published by the BBC's John Sweeney. It was an analysis of marriage law rather than the pros and cons of David Miscavige's international organisation.

An important question, at least in 1970, was whether what goes on in a Scientology chapel (or anywhere used by a group calling itself a religion) constitutes religious "worship". The law governing marriage was explicitly concerned with worship rather than the definition of religion - hence Lord Denning's concern with "veneration". The Supreme Court rather sidestepped this issue. It declared that the previous concept of worship was "unduly narrow" but failed to define worship at all, beyond the somewhat tautological definition of "religious service" or "religious rites and ceremonies." So worship is whatever religious people do when they get together ... "to enquire any further would be the province of theology rather than law".

Importantly, Toulson insisted on keeping a distinction between religion and non-religious or secular philosophies. Religion did not require supernatural beliefs, but it did imply a belief that there was "more to be understood about mankind's nature and relationship to the universe than can be gained from the senses or from science". This is potentially highly significant. Recent law - for example, in the Equality Act 2010, or in the understanding of freedom of belief under the Human Rights Act - has tended to elide the distinction between religion and other philosophical world-views. In 2009, for example, a judge held that an employee's deeply-held belief in the danger of catastrophic climate change should be protected under anti-discrimination legislation as being akin to a religious belief. 

The British Humanist Association has argued that its members face discrimination because it is unable (in England and Wales) to conduct legally valid weddings. Thus, unlike religious believers, humanists can’t get married according to their own values or beliefs, which in most other respects qualify for equal legal protection. Humanists can, of course, avail themselves of civil ceremonies, choosing their preferred words, music and readings - so long as the legal formalities are observed. A key contention made by the BHA, however, is that the ban on any religious content in civil ceremonies must apply to humanism on the grounds that it is a belief system. A BHA submission to Parliament suggests that “some registrars are using this interpretation to threaten hotels and the like that they may lose their registration as approved premises for civil weddings if they also host non-statutory humanist weddings”.

But that doesn’t seem to be Lord Toulson’s understanding. His explicit reason for defining religion so as to exclude purely secular philosophies is that the latter are already fully catered to under the rules for civil marriage. Unlike religious believers, they are free to adopt any form of ceremony they see fit. If the ban remained, however, Scientologists would be prevented “from being married anywhere in a form which involved use of their marriage service”. They would therefore be “under a double disability, not shared by atheists, agnostics or most religious groups. This would be illogical, discriminatory or unjust.”

After winning a last-minute concession during the passage of the Same Sex Couples Act, Humanists in England and Wales may well be given the right to conduct their own marriage ceremonies. Which is fair enough. But if humanism is not akin to a religion for the purposes of marriage law, which is the clear implication of Lord Toulson’s ruling, it’s not clear why they should be allowed to conduct weddings while members of other non-religious organisations (such as fan clubs, political parties or sports associations) have to go choose between a church and a civil registrar.

Some would say that the whole concept of religious registration of marriage is a hangover from an earlier era when the church claimed dominion over people’s family and sexual arrangements. Following today’s ruling, the law no longer insists that a religion has to include belief in God. This must however raise the question of why a concept so nebulous and elastic should give rise to the ability to proclaim, with binding force, that two people are legally married.

The differences between David Cameron and Ed Miliband are vast enough to obscure the one thing they have in common. They both went into politics because it seemed like a natural thing to do – a feature that also distinguishes them from most of the population.

Both men are products of rarefied social spheres that made a career in Westminster obvious and available. Cameron, Eton-educated and aristocratically connected, became a Conservative. Miliband’s upbringing at the top table of north London’s Marxist intelligentsia propelled him in the opposite direction. Talent explains their subsequent progress but neither man set off on a path marked by resistance.

For Labour, the comparison is abhorrent. Viewed from the left, there can be no moral equivalence between Cameron exercising the ruling prerogative of his class and Miliband answering the vocation of his secular creed. This righteous indignation has been amplified by Nelson Mandela’s death. For a Labour generation that grew up in the 1980s campaigning against apartheid, today’s veneration of the late ANC leader lends a retrospective moral victory to a decade of political defeat for the left. Margaret Thatcher won all the domestic battles but she was wrong about South Africa. While the Tories were making excuses for white supremacists, Miliband was meeting heroes of the Struggle at his parents’ dinner table.

Cameron was sensitive enough to this blot on the Conservative record to apologise for it in 2006, which confirms that the “modernising” instincts of his early years as leader were sounder than many in his party now suppose. Few voters choose a party for its historic stance on African liberation movements but Cameron understood that support for Mandela had entered British culture as a badge of transcendent values at a time when the Tories were disliked for understanding only material costs.

Now, in abandoning modernisation, he has chosen to concentrate on what seems like good short-term politics – winning the game at Westminster – at the expense of explaining how he thinks politics itself can be good.

That case badly needs making. This week MPs’ tributes to a man who embodied politics as self-sacrifice ran concurrent to a less edifying debate about their own status as salaried professionals. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) thinks an 11 per cent pay rise is in order. Plenty of backbenchers silently agree but their leaders cannot acquiesce at a time when politicians are reviled and everyone else on the public payroll has seen their wages cut or frozen. Cameron has a neat formula for making it clear that MPs are not immune to austerity – “the cost of politics should go down”.

No one wants to be governed by people who are only in it for the money but very few British politicians are. The greater problem is how many of them get into it without experience of doing anything else. In that respect, the differences between Cameron’s and Miliband’s backgrounds are smaller than the career politician label that unites them. Voters might be more receptive to the case for well-paid politics if they thought they were getting a more representative set of recruits for their money. Labour does better than the Tories or Lib Dems on that front but the advantage is slight. Conservatives suffer from their image as a club for the moneyed elite but Miliband’s party is judged to be exclusive in a different way – more a talking shop for do-gooders than a mass movement for working people. The polling agency Britain Thinks recently asked swing voters to imagine a “Mr Labour” figure at a party. They described a shy vegetarian, sorting through the CDs without choosing the music. “Mr Conservative” was brash and arrogant, in an expensive suit, drinking champagne.

Downing Street thinks Mr Conservative has the edge over Mr Labour in one vital aspect – people don’t elect a prime minister to be their friend. The Tories think voters can be swayed by the view that their hard-headed policies rescued the economy and that all gains would be squandered by their weak-willed opponents.

Miliband has scored points with his campaign on the cost of living, playing to Labour’s strength as the party that voters rate higher when asked who better “understands ordinary people”. He still faces doubt, including in his own party, that this empathy is the basis for credible government. The Labour leader’s inner circle has a clear sense of his “One Nation” project as a vision for weaving social justice into the fabric of economic policy. Most Labour MPs are much hazier about what it means in practice. One Milibandite frontbencher estimates that only 10 to 20 per cent of his parliamentary colleagues could easily articulate their leader’s philosophy.

That is a higher proportion than the number of Conservatives who could tell you what Cameron believes. The difference is that the Tory leader seems content to lack vision as long as people think he has a grip. He calculates that voters who despise all politicians will choose a party that shrinks government to fit meagre resources over one that has noble intentions and no way to pay for them.

The Labour leader’s friends say he aims to do much more than tinker at the margins of a dysfunctional economy. He wants to be a great moral reformer but he is running out of time to inspire people with more than just a feeling that he has noticed how expensive life has become.

In an election fought on making numbers add up, Mr Conservative has the advantage of looking like an accountant. Mr Labour’s big heart may not help him much more than his vintage “Free Nelson Mandela” T-shirt. Cameron is comfortable arguing that the cost of politics must come down. Miliband has the harder task of arguing that the value of politics needs to go up.

1. Ed Miliband can only create a fairer Britain with Europe's help (Guardian)

Labour's energy price freeze must be the start of a wider battle with organised capital – but the party can't win on its own, says Peter Wilby.

2. Cameron must shake up the No 10 shambles (Times)

The Prime Minister should follow Obama’s example and put an enforcer at the heart of his government, says John McTernan. 

3. Mandela has been sanitised by hypocrites and apologists (Guardian)

The ANC liberation hero has been reinvented as a Kumbaya figure in order to whitewash those who stood behind apartheid, says Seumas Milne. 

4. Universal Credit: politicians always pay a price for trying to change the world (Daily Telegraph)

Obamacare and Iain Duncan Smith's visionary Universal Credit are both struggling, but only the latter may prevail, says Peter Oborne. 

5. The Liberal Democrats are not lurching to the left or the right (Independent)

Unlike the Conservatives, our long term fiscal approach will be informed by the need to maintain good public services, says Danny Alexander. 

6. No one is immune from Beijing’s power (Financial Times)

Foreign companies once had much leverage, but the new reality is that China has the whip hand, says David Pilling. 

7. Who will win the Ukrainian tug-of-war? (Times)

The country really is at a crossroads: one path points to the EU, the other to one dictated by Russia, writes David Aaronovitch. 

8. If our politicians were brave enough, they would follow Uruguay's lead and legalise cannabis (Independent)

For the criminal underworld, the "war on drugs" is an extraordinary money-spinner, writes Owen Jones. 

9. Give Lady Ashton the credit she deserves (Daily Telegraph)

It’s hard not to suspect that gender has played a part in the treatment of the EU’s power broker, says Sue Cameron. 

10. Why do private schools still attract the most memorable teachers? (Guardian)

It's not surprising that Alan Bennett's The History Boys is Britain's most popular play, writes Martin Kettle. The unfairness within our education system endures.

Labour is denying that there has been any change in its stance on a third runway at Heathrow after the FT reported that Ed Miliband had "abandoned his implacable opposition". A party source told The Staggers: 

FT suggestion Labour changing position on Heathrow is wrong. Position unchanged. Ed sceptical. We await Davies [Airports Commission]. 

But while the party is some way from endorsing the project, which will be one of those shortlisted by the Airports Commission (chaired by Howard Davies) in its interim report next week, a shift has unmistakably taken place. 

When Miliband won the Labour leadership in 2010, having threatened to resign as Energy Secretary over the issue during the last government, he made it official party policy to oppose a third runway. As then shadow transport secretary Maria Eagle said in 2011: "The answer for the south-east is not going to be to fall back on the proposed third runway at Heathrow. The local environmental impact means that this is off the agenda." Yet now Miliband is merely said to be "sceptical". In the recent reshuffle, Eagle, a strong opponent of a third runway and a strong supporter of HS2, was replaced with Mary Creagh, who has adopted a neutral stance on the Davies Commission. She said recently: "No party can say now that it will implement its recommendations when we simply don't know what the costs of any proposals will be. Obviously the Conservatives and Lib Dems haven't made any such commitments."

This shift is, among other things, a victory for Ed Balls. We know that the shadow chancellor favours a third runway because he's told us. As I noted earlier this year, asked in the "quick fire" section of a Times interview whether he favoured a "third runway or HS2", he replied: "third runway". That Miliband is now willing to consider a third runway shows how the gap between them has narrowed since they were in government together.

As Damian McBride recalled in his memoir: "The first time I ever heard Balls say anything remotely negative about Miliband was at the end of 2008, when the latter effectively threatened to resign from the Cabinet if a decision was made to build a third runway at Heathrow.

"Balls was genuinely outraged that Miliband could ignore the need to expand airport capacity just for the sake of his reputation with the green lobby and his own political positioning."

The Liberal yearbook for 1909 records that many MPs of that party were members of the Eighty Club. This was not a traditional London club – it was founded shortly before the 1880 election for “promoting Liberal education and stimulating Liberal organisation”.

Its president in 1909 was Robert Reid, the first earl Loreburn, who had been MP for Hereford (1880-85) and Dumfries Burghs (1886-1905). Election to the club was by ballot only and the annual fee was a guinea. In 1887, its unity was shattered by the Home Rule question and Liberal Unionists resigned in a body. The club was wound up in 1978.

The Ninety-Five Club was formed after the defeat of 1895 to encourage “the younger men of the party” and was the first to propose “one member, one vote” for the Liberal leadership.

When I meet Norman Baker in the Regency Café, MPs’ greasy spoon of choice in Westminster, he is busily devouring a large portion of buttered toast. The Liberal Democrat MP is refuelling for another day in what he calls “enemy territory”. Baker’s appointment as Home Office minister, after three and a half years at the Department for Transport, was the most contentious of the recent reshuffle. The promotion of a man best known for suggesting that the British security services may have covered up the murder of the government scientist David Kelly was said to have left his boss, Theresa May, “spitting tacks”.

Baker does not attempt to hide the extent of his disagreement with the Home Secretary, describing the atmosphere as “hostile”. “It’s no secret that the Home Office is quite a political department and that the Lib Dems and the Tories probably have more challenges in reaching common positions in that department than in many others,” he tells me. “I think the Conservatives will probably say that because of the external threats we have to have more security than liberty and we have to sacrifice a bit to achieve that. We start at the other end; [we think] that liberty is a precious thing and it’s always possible for someone to say, ‘Give me some of your liberty and I’ll give you more security.’ And going down that road is quite dangerous.”

When I ask him whether he would like to see an inquiry into the allegations of mass surveillance by the British and US intelligence services, he replies without hesitation: “Yes. In my view, it’s perfectly reasonable for the Guardian to raise questions about the balance between the state and the individual to take account of the fact that technology has moved on a huge amount and the law was drafted when we didn’t have the means of communication we do now – Skype and everything else – and the capacity of the security services, or the Americans, to engage in trawling for stuff.”

It is just 13 minutes before I succumb to the temptation to ask him whether he still favours a new public inquiry into Kelly’s death. So exercised was Baker by the event that he stood down from the Lib Dem front bench in order to devote a year to writing a 424-page book (The Strange Death of David Kelly) on the subject. “People who attack it by and large haven’t read it,” he says. “And I’d like them to come back and deal with the facts, if they want to deal with the facts, ten years on, but I concluded in 2007 that it was unfinished business and nothing much has moved since then.” Will he use his new berth at the Home Office to lobby for an inquiry? “What would have to happen is: the Attorney General would have to reopen the inquest, which was absurdly curtailed. So that’s a matter for him.”

He adds: “The fact that there was no coroner’s inquest appeared to be of no interest to the collective media; I just find that absolutely astonishing . . . People can look at the evidence and draw their own conclusions. All I would say is in 2003, we had a situation where the prime minister of the day lied to parliament about the case for war . . . and then people say to me, ‘You should believe everything the government said in 2003.’ I’m sorry, I don’t buy that.” Does he believe the Iraq war was illegal? “I’ve got to be careful what I say as a minister, haven’t I?” says Baker, in a moment of self-awareness. “There are many who believe it to be illegal and they’ve made quite a strong case.”

The conversation turns to the subject of tuition fees. Earlier this year, the Liberal Democrat conference passed a motion supporting the £9,000 cap, with Vince Cable telling delegates: “We and the other major parties are not going to go back to free tuition.” But Baker – who admits that “the only time in government that I’ve come close to resigning” was when the Lib Dems broke the “Vote for Students” pledge and backed rises in tuition fees – maintains, “Education should be free.”

“I’m very conscious that people of my generation benefited from free education. I come from a poor background, unlike most people in government, and I couldn’t have got where I was without a really good state education. I’m deeply grateful for that and I couldn’t have done it had I had to pay a lot of money for it, so I feel particularly uncomfortable with the idea of charging for tuition fees as a principle.”

Baker’s Liberal Democrat colleague Nick Harvey recently suggested that Labour had “already won” on account of the number of 2010 Lib Dem voters who had defected to the party but Baker forecasts another hung parliament in 2015. “I honestly think that the party with the biggest chance of being in government after the next election is the Lib Dems. Because I don’t think either of the two [other major] parties can get past 330.”

While refusing to say whether he would rather partner with Labour or the Tories, he tells me that he has “a lot of time” for Ed Miliband. “He seems to me to want to try to articulate a position which is different to what came before – I’ve always got time for that. And I think he’s prepared to take the odd gamble, which is right in politics.” He adds, rather immodestly: “As someone who pushes boundaries and envelopes all the time, I like someone who does the same thing. I think that’s good about him.”

Having risen to number two at the Home Office, Baker clearly aspires to hold even more senior positions in another coalition with the Tories or with Labour. Should the man who believes that the state is in the business of covering up the murders of its enemies end up serving ten years in government, his fellow conspiracists will surely cry, as Winston Smith does to O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “They’ve got you, too!”

France is rich in rivers, which is fortunate: grapes, like people, need water to survive, and survival would be a considerably less interesting project in a world without grapes. One of my favourite French words is arroser, to water: it is, appropriately, a word fertile in meanings, not to mention the rose blooming at its centre. So you can arrose (water) your grapes, arrose (baste) your chicken, or arrose (drink to) your anniversary. If you are the river Rhône, you can arrose (run through) cities from Geneva and Lyon to Avignon and Arles, facilitating most of those other definitions while you’re at it.

The Loire is France’s longest river, arroser-ing grapes from Melon de Bourgogne, the Muscadet grape, near Nantes on the Atlantic coast, via Cabernet Franc and Chenin Blanc around Tours to the Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir country south of Orléans; I’m fond of it and respectfully grateful for its generosity. (If you’re in London, nip in to Green Man & French Horn, where the extensive wine list dedicated to the Loire is certainly cause to raise a toast – or, as the French say: ça s’arrose!!)

But my favourite river is the Rhône. Maybe it’s the history: the Greeks were cheerfully making wine in southern France but it took the Romans to follow the river north, conquering and planting as they went. Maybe it’s the fact that the Rhône heads through elegant Syrah country and into the sunlit lands around France’s Mediterranean coast, with their wonderful juicy, expansive Grenache/Syrah/ Mourvèdre blends. 

This is a trajectory that appeals to me: I adore the Syrahs of Hermitage and Cornas but I too have a tendency to move from sophisticated restraint towards primitive exuberance as the evening wanes, and Gigondas and Chateauneuf-du-Pâpe are warmer wines than their northern brethren in every sense. And if you want value – and if you’re going to cast off your northern restraint, then it’s that or bankruptcy – Rhone specialists Yapp Brothers have several wines, including a Domaine Maby La Fermade 2011 from the cruelly overlooked Lirac area, that are under £13 and entirely delicious.

Why do I love the Rhône so? Maybe, being the British-born daughter of Australian Jews whose families had been abruptly expatriated by Russians, Poles and Germans, I’m drawn to another outsider: the Rhône’s source is in Switzerland and the ferocity that can be the flipside of its generosity is not, somehow, very French. Henry James, in 1882, described “the big brown flood, of uncertain temper, which has never taken time to forget that it is a child of the mountain and the glacier . . . at Avignon, I observed it in the exercise of these privileges, chief among which was that of frightening the good people of the old papal city half out of their wits.” The Rhône is a grumpy foreigner with an over-developed sense of entitlement and occasional bursts of benevolence, mostly directed at vineyards. I can’t think what it is we have in common.

Still, my bias is less narcissism than simple hedonism, delight at three of my great loves – France, sunshine and big red wines, aromatic with pepper or parched herbs – in one place. And while my wits have frequently been laid at Lady Rhône’s wet feet as an offering, she has never scared me half out of them. Even when raging, she’s never hostile – she may drown your grapes but it won’t be personal and there would be no grapes here to drown without her. 

The Rhône Valley is scattered with amphitheatres but the Roman seeds that flourished were cultural and viticultural, and if you love France – and despite its irritations, how can one not? – you must be grateful to what waters her and us. The south is fertile with beauty and when you can’t admire it in person you can open a Rhône wine and do so at a distance. Surely if anything, anywhere does, ça s’arrose.

Next issue: John Burnside on nature

Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life 
Nina Stibbe
Viking, 336pp, £12.99

“Few men,” wrote Montaigne, “have been admired by their servants” – and even fewer women, he might have added, by their nannies. Over the centuries, the relationship between employer and domestic has spawned a rich tradition of social comedy, from Plautus’s clever slaves and Shakespeare’s subversive household retainers to Mozart’s Figaro and P G Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster. Which brings us, in a roundabout fashion, to Nina Stibbe.

About Nina’s life before and after her career as a nanny we know tantalisingly little. In the brief introduction to her collection of letters to her sister, Victoria, written while she was working for Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books, she reveals only that she moved to Camden Town from Leicestershire in 1982, aged 20.

MK, as she is called in the letters, lived at 55 Gloucester Crescent with her two sons: Sam, then aged ten, who suffers from Riley-Day syndrome, and the nine-year-old Will. Stibbe wasn’t to know it but, several years before she arrived in Gloucester Crescent, its denizens, who included Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, the literary editor Claire Tom­alin and her partner, the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn, had provided comic inspiration for the cartoonist Mark Boxer, who satirised the crescent’s rarefied atmosphere in his cartoon strip The Stringalongs.

Nina was unawed by the well-known neighbours, though she was fascinated by their eccentricities. She fearlessly identifies Jonathan Miller as an opera singer (“People were always saying, ‘Have you heard Jona­than’s Rigoletto?’ to each other, and he’s got a very deep voice”) and provides a devastating thumbnail sketch of Alan Bennett: “You’d know him if you saw him. He used to be in Coronation Street. He’s got a small nose and Yorkshire accent ... He’s very interested in history but he’s rubbish on nature.”

Bennett is a fixture at No 55, forever popping over for supper and, to Nina’s irritation, criticising her cooking: “Very nice, but you don’t really want tinned tomatoes in a beef stew,” he complains. “Who’s more likely to know about beef stew?” Nina remarks tartly. “Him (a bloke who can’t be bothered to cook his own tea) or The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook?”

There seems to have been a fair amount of culinary tension on Gloucester Crescent. While Wilmers was prone to random supermarket shopping (“I think she copies other people who know what they’re doing”), returning with quark, bulghur, lychees and turkey mince, Nina favours the use of tinned soup in casseroles. She can’t be doing with fresh herbs (“The cookbook says tarragon is misunderstood. Not by me. I understand it. It’s horrible”) but cautiously experiments with balsamic vinegar: it “looks like medicine but is nice”.

Along with food, fashion is something of a leitmotif. Nina is only moderately interested in her own appearance (she rarely wears shoes) but has a keen eye for the eccentricities of MK’s turnout. There is her startling foray into thick, black eyeliner, a look copied from her new best friend and LRB colleague, Susannah Clapp: “Fucking Ada! She looks even worse than Susannah.” A new tweed coat isn’t a success, either: “MK looks tiny inside the coat ... Saw her in Inverness Street yes­terday ... The coat looked like it was moving along by itself.”

After a couple of years, Nina began an English degree at the Thames Polytechnic, about which she had mixed feelings: “Why do people like Shakespeare? I wish I did. I’ve tried but I don’t.” On the bright side, at a performance of plays by Samuel Beckett at the Lyric Theatre, she heard muttering and turned to see the playwright sitting behind her: “It was like seeing a unicorn or a Borrower, or like when I saw that snake in the crocosmia.”

Alan Bennett couldn’t have put it better. Indeed, so fleet is Stibbe’s turn of phrase and so sharp her ear for dialogue that at one point I decided that there was no such person as Nina Stibbe and that this brilliantly comic volume was a jeu d’esprit by AB, artfully disguised as a 20-year-old nanny.

The Bennettish use of the word “mardy” (meaning sulky, out of sorts) seems a dead giveaway, along with the mysterious aura of melancholy that surrounds such apparently inconsequential snatches of dialogue as this, on MK’s misguided purchase of flowery loo roll (“Looks nice until you use it”):

Me I don’t like the rosebud toilet paper.
MK I know, I know.
Me It’s worrying.
MK I know. I didn’t think it through.

Questions of authorship aside, I doubt there has been a more sparkling collection of letters published this year.

Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-Colonial Britain
Camilla Schofield
Cambridge University Press, 381pp, £65

Enoch Powell remains a disturbing figure even from beyond the grave. In February 1998, shortly after his death, there were public protests at his lying in state in the Chapel of St Faith in Westminster Abbey, a privilege accorded to him as a warden of the adjoining parliamentary church of St Margaret’s and a regular communicant at the abbey. In 2007, Nigel Hastilow, a Conservative candidate for a West Midlands constituency, was forced to resign after declaring in a regional newspaper, “Enoch Powell was right”; in 2011, commenting on the summer riots, the historian David Starkey caused a furore for insisting that Powell had been “absolutely right”.

Camilla Schofield’s central theme is that he was not, as many on the left believe, “a timeless monster” but a product of Britain’s post-colonial history, a nationalist whose nationalism arose out of the ruins of the empire. But was his nation England or was it Britain? From 1974 to 1987, Powell represented a constituency in Northern Ireland – South Down – as an Ulster Unionist MP. A Unionist owes allegiance to Britain but Powell spoke more of England than he did of Britain. That is because, as Schofield points out, his conception of Britain was one in which England was dominant. Powell was as unwilling to recognise that Britain was becoming multinational as he was to recognise that it was becoming multiracial.

The England that for Powell held hegemonic sway was a white England, since skin colour was “like a uniform”. “The West Indian or Indian does not,” Powell insisted, “by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or an Asian still.” So a non-white person could never be truly English.

The “rivers of blood” speech of 1968 – when Powell, quoting Virgil, spoke of the Tiber “foaming with much blood” in consequence of immigration – was delivered in opposition to Roy Jenkins’s Race Relations Act. Powell deplored how the act would prevent a white landlady from refusing to accept non-white tenants. What for liberals amounted to the removal of discrimination was, for Powell, discriminatory against the English.

In the Britain of the immediate postwar years, memories of our finest hour helped to placate concerns about the loss of British power and muffle ideological debate. In the 1960s, however, the old certainties began to dissolve as traditional authority structures came under threat from militant trade unionists, Celtic nationalists, feminists, rebellious students and advocates of sexual liberation.

To those who felt threatened by the un­ravelling of the postwar settlement, the war years appeared a golden age. Only white people, some Powellites falsely claimed, had fought for Britain. So it was that the wartime experience came to be entangled with racism – in the words of one of Powell’s correspondents in 1968, “I never saw one coloured person at Dunkirk.” Powellites remembered the war but forgot the non-white soldier. Those who had sacrificed so much during the war were now, it appeared, being sacrificed by a liberal political establishment that was out of touch with popular needs.

Schofield distinguishes Powellism and its aim to restore historic structures of authority from Thatcherism, which was a transformative project. Yet Powellism was the first sign that popular alienation and disillusionment were pushing voters not to the left but to the right and, from this point of view, it was a precursor of Thatcherism. The true revolutionaries of the 1960s proved to be not the trade unions or the students but the shopkeepers and aspiring members of the working class who supported Enoch Powell and went on to vote for Margaret Thatcher.

According to Schofield, Powell sought to replace an empire based on white supremacy with an England based on white supremacy. She distorts, I think, the idea of empire. In practice, no doubt, the empire did often incarnate white supremacy. However, its ideology was opposed to racial domination.

As early as 1854, the British condition for establishing representative institutions in the Cape Colony was that there be a “colour-blind” franchise subject to a financial quali­fication but not one of colour. In 1897, the then colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, told representatives at the colonial conference “to bear in mind the tradition of empire, which makes no distinction in favour of, or against, race or colour”.

In 1914 and 1939, many Africans and Indians volunteered to fight for an empire that, in theory, they rejected. Admittedly, imperial practice often failed to conform to the high-minded principles laid down in Westminster and Whitehall; nevertheless, the germ of the multiracial Commonwealth lay in the colonial policy of British governments in the 19th century.

By the 1950s, High Tories were using imperialist arguments to reject proposals to restrict non-white immigration. “It would be a tragedy,” declared the then colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, in 1958, “to bring to an end the traditional right of unrestricted entry into the mother country of Her Majesty’s subjects and quite unthinkable to do so on grounds of colour.”

Powell, therefore, was being very un-Tory in rejecting the multiracial Commonwealth and a multiracial Britain. Both have been, despite some blemishes, success stories – so much so that almost all of the African and Asian former colonies chose to join the Commonwealth; meanwhile, in Scotland, members of ethnic minorities are now more likely than the white population to identify themselves as “British”. It is odd that the former Conservative foreign secretary Douglas Hurd claimed that Powell had “the gift of prophetic utterance”. Most of Powell’s prophecies (and in particular his prediction of a racial war in Britain) have proved spectacularly wrong. 

Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-Colonial Britain is written with clarity and insight. Its central thesis is not, perhaps, as original as Schofield imagines, being not wholly dissimilar to that put forward by other chroniclers of Powell’s career – notably Simon Heffer, whose magisterial biography Like the Roman is dismissed by Schofield on the strange grounds that it is “highly empirical”. Heffer’s book, however, is over 1,000 pages long, a veritable doorstopper, and Scho­field offers an incisive, shorter account that many will find sufficient.

Vernon Bogdanor is professor of government at King’s College London. His books include “The Coalition and the Constitution”

The G8 summit in London yesterday, which pledged to develop a cure or treatment for dementia by 2025, was seen by many as a welcome recognition of a public health problem that has been overlooked for too long. According to the Alzheimer’s Society, 44 million have Alzheimer’s globally, and this is expected to increase to 135 million by 2050.

Alzheimer’s is already having a painful impact on the UK, where around 80,000 people suffer from the disease, and many more are affected. Rose George wrote a moving piece for the New Statesman yesterday about the impact that Alzheimer’s can have both on the victim and on their loved ones. For me, as for many readers, it struck a chord – reminding me of my grandfather’s illness, and my grandma’s valiant struggle to cope when social services failed and close friends stayed away. In Europe we struggle to care for dementia sufferers and their families – and in much of the rest of the world, things are much worse.

The Alzheimer’s Society estimates that 71 per cent of dementia sufferers in 2050 will be in poor to middle income countries. While rates of dementia in high income countries are set to rise by about 30 per cent, in China this is 70 per cent and in Sub-Saharan Africa the estimated rise is by 257 per cent. In low to income countries this also means that the ratio of dependents to non-dependents is set to rise more sharply than in the wealthier countries.

On top of this, Alzheimer’s sufferers  in low income countries are even less likely to be diagnosed than their counterparts in wealthier countries. In high income countries only between 20 and 50 per cent of cases are diagnosed, but one study in India suggested that around 90 per cent of cases are not officially recognised. This is another barrier to low-income dementia suffers accessing medical care, and means that their condition is likely to deteriorate faster.

The Alzheimer’s Society estimates that the overall cost of the disease in 2010 amounted to one per cent of global GDP (equivalent to the economy of Indonesia or Turkey) or $604bn. Most of this money is currently being spent in high-income countries (where admittedly, there are currently more diagnosed cases).

In the future, what will matter is not only that G8 countries pledge to research new treatments and provide more support to Alzheimer’s sufferers at home, but also that they address the overlap between Alzheimer’s and poverty. Will Alzheimer sufferers in low-income countries access the next-generation of drugs? Who will support those living in countries with little public healthcare, in households below the poverty line? Anyone who’s been affected with Alzheimer’s in the UK will struggle to imagine things being harder, but in parts of the world the impact of dementia will be even worse.