Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems
Billy Collins
Picador, 288pp, £9.99

The Hotel Oneira
August Kleinzahler
Faber & Faber, 96pp, £12.99

Aimless Love selects work from Billy Collins’s four most recent collections and includes 51 new poems. Collins, a New Yorker, is a former US poet laureate. He is hugely popular in the States and since his fans clearly like what they’re getting, he shows no signs of changing his formula. Each of his poems begins by noting an amusing or irksome aspect of everyday life: a hotel offering a “baby listening” service (a form of babysitting by phone); a pharmacist selling “bathtub families” (inflatable toys); or the way many young people nowadays say “I was like” instead of “I said”. Such occasions then inspire a few ironic and mildly surreal musings.

The means by which Collins achieves his effects are similarly limited. The pace is always accommodatingly slow. He avoids rhyme and metre, except for the purposes of parody. His line breaks and stanza breaks always coincide with sense pauses, giving the effect of chopped-up prose. Should Collins hit upon a striking image, he immediately spoils it by explaining it.

For example, having written “The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong/game of proofreading”, Collins evidently becomes anxious he has asked too much of his reader, so he adds a line: “glancing back and forth from page to page”. Elsewhere, he deems it necessary to remind the reader that a baby’s ear is “tiny”, that the sun is “dazzling”, that the American landscape is “hilly” and that marble is “hard”.

The pay-off, such as it is, comes at the end of each poem, to give a sense of closure. This usually takes the form of a reassuring return to normality after the poem’s flight of fancy; but if Collins is feeling daring he may end with a surreal image. Either way, the closure is usually signposted by the words “So” or “But”, or by a phrase such as “By the way...”, “It’s anybody’s guess...”, or “It may not be any of my business,/but let us suppose...”. To stage-manage a poem in such a clumsy way insults the reader’s intelligence, and for all the whimsy there is a sourness to this work. Collins clearly equates lack of ambition with humility and has contempt for more ambitious poetry: Dante, Donne, Keats, Yeats and “Irish Poetry” are all mocked and parodied. Aimless Love offers a diminished and diminishing view of art and life.

Collins and the New Jersey-born August Kleinzahler grew up on opposite sides of the Hudson River but the gulf between their work is much wider. Kleinzahler made the news two years ago for attacking the “appalling taste” of Garrison Keillor’s poetry radio show, giving special mention to Keillor’s fondness for Collins. Kleinzahler, it is fair to say, is not a populist poet. His principled avoidance of anything like a formula has kept his work fresh and risky.

Not all of the pieces in The Hotel Oneira work, but the hits far outnumber the misses and always come from unpredictable angles. In his subject matter and in his chosen forms, Kleinzahler keeps moving: his eye is drawn to trains, tank columns, parade floats and cruise ships; and his poems rarely have a centre – instead, you fall in step with him for a spell, passing through an experience before you know quite what happened.

The title poem begins with a sentence that hovers between tenses: “That was a heavy freight moved through last night,/and has been moving through since I’m back”. The grammatical uncertainty is fitting, for this is a poem about both temperamental and circumstantial restlessness: “There is going on just now a vast shifting of inventory/ from the one place to another. I can feel it, inside my head”. We are left guessing at the reasons for the speaker’s itinerant lifestyle: “There is a story here, but one I choose not to know”.

Kleinzahler isn’t interested in maintaining such a plain-spoken style for long and often approaches language like a connoisseur at a feast. “When the Barocco” celebrates the advent of the Spanish Baroque style: Woodwoses mingle with Styrians and Savoyards to a soundtrack of “passacaglias/ of birdsong”. Elsewhere, he extends his vocal range by adopting personas, such as the monkey in “Tuq-Tuq” (“Thass me, your jibber-jabbering Sulawesi booted macaque, most amused to be/braining rodents with fig-buds from up high . . .”), or using collage, as in “The Exquisite Atmography of Thomas Appletree, Diarist of Edgiock”, which draws on the journal of an 18th-century weather-obsessive: “Those Medicelestiall seas of Atmosphere,/a Mappa Mundi depeinted in clouds...”.

The opening poem in the sequence “Snow” describes a tank column moving through a snowstorm. The poem ends:

...Nothing blocks the way ahead. Nothing is gaining upon them from behind.
Their turrets judder in the fierce cross-winds.
This is a lacuna, whiteness, between what was
And what is about to become, in countless volumes,
In rack upon rack of grainy newsreel footage, history.

This is an unusually grand occasion for this poet but the focus is characteristic: Kleinzahler wants to capture experiences live, before they are recorded and mediated. He is always aiming for the moment of potential when something – in this case, history itself – is up for grabs. An impossible ambition perhaps but one that can produce thrillingly various results.

Paul Batchelor is a critic and poet. His collection “The Sinking Road” is published by Bloodaxe (£7.95)

If you’ve not yet heard the news about Marks and Spencer's toys, then I recommend you take a seat. From Spring 2014 onwards, all ranges will be rebranded using gender-neutral language. No more shall ‘Boys’ Stuff’ – planes, cars, marble runs and dinosaurs – be set against ‘Little Miss Arty’ fripperies – fairies, princesses and, um, handbag decoration kits.

The extremists at the Let Toys Be Toys campaign have had their way. Henceforth it shall all be one miserable, colourless, unisex landscape. Come April, you’ll exit the M&S Food Hall and find yourself in the toy equivalent of the GDR.

As a mother of boys, I’m obviously worried. If there is no longer to be a label telling me what ‘stuff’ is suitable for my offspring, how will I know? What if I accidentally purchase something that features the colour pink or, worse still, a flower? What if I buy something that I think is blue - only to open the package and discover it’s purple? What will that do to my little darlings’ sense of self? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Someone had to address this crime against gender stereotyping. Step forth the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley, noble defender of our children’s freedom to be told what they can and can’t play with for no apparent reason:

World goes a bit more anal and daft: "Marks and Spencer to make all its toys gender neutral" http://t.co/BImJu87SRM

— Tim Stanley (@timothy_stanley) December 18, 2013

Yes, world! How dare you be so anal and daft as to remove the phrase ‘Boys’ stuff’ from toys that anyone could play with! It’s almost as though imaginative play was actually supposed to be imaginative.

Other people are unhappy, too. Ryan Bourne of the Centre for Policy Studies, having helpfully nominated M&S for the ‘White Feather Award’ (for cowardice) points out that “some people don’t want society to fundamentally change”. That’s true. One day we’ll have girls playing with marble runs and the next the whole of society will be a cross between the Two Ronnies’ The Worm That Turned and that Nicholas Cage remake of The Wicker Man. Happy now, feminists? Honestly, just look at where it will all lead:

Hoping by next year M & S will abolish "female" and "male" clothing sections too. Just pile the clothes in one big heap so no one's offended

— Madeleine Teahan (@MadeleineTeahan) December 18, 2013

That’s right, because it’s impossible – absolutely impossible – for some things to be gender-specific without everything being gender-specific. If you don’t place everything in some arbitrary gendered category then . . . then, you know, it’ll all be bad.

You mark my words. We’ve been on this road to ruin ever since voting stopped being a ‘Boys’ Stuff’ activity and now look where we are: a situation in which a little girl might think it’s okay to play with a plastic dinosaur. I despair, I really do.

Of course, some people are happy about the M&S decision. Take Paris Lees, for instance:

This is great news, I had all my 'girl' toys taken from me as a child. Let kids play with whatever the hell they want http://t.co/8JLYU0LkQy

— Paris Lees (@ParisLees) December 18, 2013

Lees would say that, though, having recently written a brilliant piece for the Guardian describing her path from bullied child to transgender woman. In it, she adds more detail to what’s merely alluded to in her tweet.

It’s worth reading in full:

"Daren [Lees’ father] had made me gather up all my "girl" toys and put them in a box when I was sent to live with him. The boy-toys could stay – Pirate Lego and Mighty Max – but the Polly Pockets and Disney dolls had to go. You're not at your mother's now, son, he told me – and boy didn't I know it.

I'm still not sure if he thought it was unhealthy for his son to play with dolls or if he simply couldn't bear to be around it. Or both. He told me he'd given the box to Barnardo's, but when we went to look for it, the shop assistant told my mama that nothing like that had been handed in."

I find this heartbreaking but then again, what can you do? Humiliating a child and taking away objects that are of great meaning is, apparently, a necessity. Or at least it was. God forbid that all this should change now.

If we allow children the right to openly express their toy preferences – if we let them be themselves, without feeling ashamed - then there are nebulous bad things that will happen. I don’t know what they are, but with Marks and Spencer following Toys R Us, Tesco and others in their rejection of overt gender-specific labelling, I imagine we’ll find out soon.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Parents and guardians of all things gendered, stock up on your ‘Boys’ Stuff’ while you can.

Cott, though, wasn’t about to demystify her. As he makes clear in his introduction to this unexpurgated version of his interview, he was too much of a swooning acolyte for that. No sooner had he switched on his tape recorder than he was struck by the “munificence and fluency” of her conversation. Three hours later, when she’d finally finished – “I like the interview form ... a lot of my thinking is the product of conversation” – he was still eager for more. Five months later, he was summoned to her New York penthouse for another worshipful session, this time in her library, an “archive of longing” comprising some 8,000 books. “And in that consecrated spot, she and I sat and talked until late in the evening,” he writes, as if he were some spoony undergraduate who had been desperately hoping to get off with her.

By rights, Cott’s breathless introduction should prepare the reader for what lies ahead. Except that nothing could. Sontag’s verbosity, I was expecting; ditto her passion for obfuscatory theory, her narcissism and pomposity. But the way that Cott invites them is just too much. Those rare questions that don’t start with praise inevitably begin with him quoting her work sombrely back at her, as if it were written on tablets of stone. On the sole occasion that he ruffles her feathers – she dislikes his use of “mystique” – he doesn’t stick to his guns but rephrases his question, ever so humbly. The reader imagines him wringing his hands as he does so, Uriah Heep in a black polo neck.

What of Sontag? The discussion is wide-ranging, taking in such matters as her breast cancer (she was frightened but illness gave her moments of great clarity), Wilhelm Reich (bang on, she thinks, when it comes to emotions and the way they’re stored in the body as “anti-sexuality”) and Chuck Berry (like listening to The Bacchae). But it’s also painfully one-note; Sontag doesn’t do jokes or even irony. Occasionally, she will make the effort not to seem too clever, too grand, but this always backfires for the simple reason that her self-regard is ineffable. “I’m much more ignorant than most people think,” she tells Cott laughingly, when he asks if it’s true she reads a book a day. Her flirting is no less inept. “Don’t you think you’d write differently if you were all naked and wrapped in velvet?” she asks him. Clearly panicked, Cott responds by telling her that Haydn wore a ceremonial wig when he was composing.

What does the reader take away from this mind-numbing, self-referential encounter? Not a lot. It would not have been published in book form at all if the cult of Sontag didn’t continue to thrive on US campuses. And why, I wonder, does it? Even at her best, she is mostly muddle-headed, opaque, drunk on words whose meaning she seems not wholly to have considered. At her worst, a whiff of the charlatan rises from the page. All I can do is refer you elsewhere. The best thing I’ve read on Sontag is “Desperately Seeking Susan”, a 2005 essay by Terry Castle. Castle, who knew Sontag and was on the receiving end of some of her more graceless behaviour, certainly takes the piss. But she is also able to articulate Sontag’s “symbolic weight”. I wasn’t there, so it’s hard to imagine. But Castle is too shrewd to be wrong. “All those years ago one evolved a hallucination about what mental life could be and she was it,” she writes.

For now, I am going to accept this judgement. Cott’s highly polished apple, on the other hand, I will now leave to rot in the cardboard box destined for Oxfam.

Mr Tiger Goes Wild (Macmillan, £11.99) by Peter Brown is my picture book of the year. Poor Mr Tiger is quietly miserable in a dull, grey city until he defies convention, takes off his clothes and ROARS in a colourful, Rousseau-esque jungle. The ebullience and subversion make this one you can stand re-reading to children of 3+, but even simpler is Petr Horacek’s Animal Opposites (Walker, £10.99), an appealing pop-up in which, say, Fat Pig is contrasted with Thin Meerkat, to the edification and entertainment of 2+ kids.

Alison Murray’s Princess Penelope and the Runaway Kitten (Nosy Crow, £9.99) has a kitten trailing a ball of glittering pink wool. A little princess chases it through a series of exuberant mishaps and rhyming couplets before winding up in just the right place. It is charming (and perfect for 2+), though the less privileged Celestine in Gabrielle Vincent’s touching Merry Christmas, Ernest & Celestine may be more familiar, as her imaginative father, Ernest, successfully provides a seasonal party on a limited budget (Catnip, £10.99).

For hungry readers, a riotously metatextual approach for 3+ comes in Nick Bromley and Nicola O’Byrne’s Open Very Carefully (Nosy Crow, £10.99) as the traditional tale of “The Ugly Duckling” is sabotaged by a crocodile, which chomps through the thick pages – and escapes. Michael Morpurgo’s The Goose is Getting Fat (Egmont, £5.99) tackles the awkward issue of where Christmas dinner comes from, as Charlie becomes increasingly fond of a goose his family intends to eat. Rooted in farm life, yet with a happy ending, this is an ideal stocking-filler for 5+.

Neil Gaiman’s Fortunately, the Milk . . . (Bloomsbury, £10.99) is a preposterous excuse from a forgetful father about why he almost forgot milk for his kids. Dinosaurs, aliens and pirates come into a shaggy dog story, for 6+, which is really about the creativity of liars. More heartfelt is Jackie Morris’s lyrical update of East Of the Sun, West of the Moon (Frances Lincoln, £9.99), about a poor girl who marries a white bear to save her family from poverty, only to discover that he is an enchanted prince whom she must save. Morris’s sensitive prose and illustrations makes this a spiritual journey into the heart of an unexpectedly feminist fairy tale.

From Greek myth to Celtic ones, Lari Don’s Winter’s Tales are retold with lucidity and humour, and her trolls, tinsel and heroes in hairy trousers are the right length to read aloud at bedtime to 6 + (A & C Black, £12.99). Meanwhile, Francesca Simon’s The Lost Gods (Profile, £10.99) takes Norse myth and religious scepticism to hilarious heights, satirising celebrity culture for 8+.

The Folio Society’s luscious editions of children’s classics make great gifts (£29.95 each). For teens, Alan Garner’s masterpiece about a family haunted by Welsh myth, The Owl Service, is given haunting new pictures by Darren Hopes and an introduction by Susan Cooper. Younger readers of 8+ should love George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, a glorious fantasy that influenced The Hobbit (also available from Hesperus Press, £7.99). Its sequel, The Princess and Curdie, is republished in a handsomely illustrated paperback (Jane Nissen, £7.99).

Deliciously eccentric and reminiscent of Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes, Katherine Rundell’s Rooftoppers (Faber & Faber, £6.99) has a musical girl and her adoptive father go to Paris in search of Sophie’s lost mother. Even more touching is Rachel Campbell-Johnston’s The Child’s Elephant (David Fickling, £9.99) whose African goat-boy saves a baby elephant from poachers and is in turn saved by it from a brutal life as a child soldier. Exciting, funny and sadly topical, it depicts the friendship between child and elephant with the conviction of a trained zoologist and the imagination of a poet, and is my children’s book of the year for 8-11s.

In Anthony Horowitz’s Russian Roulette (Walker, £10.99), its narrator escapes from the USSR to become a trained teenage assassin. Bleak yet uplifting, there’s enough violence to satisfy the most reluctant boy reader of 9+; the style is influenced by Dashiell Hammett. So, too, is Anthony McGowan’s comedy about a boy with mental problems trying to survive in a grotesquely dysfunctional school: Hello Darkness is an original, unsettling noir thriller for 12+ to devour. Girls may prefer C J Skuse’s wicked revamp of Frankenstein in Dead Romantic (Chicken House £7.99) as two lonely students attempt to create the perfect boyfriend – from a corpse. Also for teenagers is Daniel Finn’s Call Down Thunder (Macmillan, £7.99). A companion piece to his brilliant thriller Two Good Thieves, it’s a compelling story of a brother and sister’s quest to find their mother on the corrupt and dangerous fringes of South American society.

Sally Gardner’s Tinder (Indigo, £ 9.99) is my book of the year for teens. A retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Tinderbox”, it has young Otto escape death only to find himself haunted by werewolves, a witch and a beautiful woman. It’s a circular narrative by a modern-day Angela Carter, exploring the psychological injuries of war. Gardner’s remarkable prose is complemented by David Roberts’s exquisitely sinister illustrations; like Christmas, you can interpret its conclusion as both life-affirming and tragic.

Amanda Craig is a novelist and children’s books critic.

What does England want? What kind of country do we who call ourselves English wish to live in and be part of as good citizens, in an age of supranational institutions, of fluid, compound identities and of shared or conflicting sovereignties? Questions of national identity and purpose – especially for England, the dominant nation in these islands – will become even more pressing in 2014 as the September date of the referendum on Scottish independence approaches and we confront what seemed inconceivable only a few years ago, the possible break-up of the Union of Great Britain, with all the ramifications that it would have for the United Kingdom in the world.

Visit Scotland and you know an urgent and vibrantly self-questioning conversation is taking place. The Scottish elites – political, academic, journalistic, artistic, business – are grappling every day with fundamental questions of history, sovereignty, identity and culture. They are turning inwards but also looking outwards, daring to imagine what it might mean for Scotland to go its own way as a small nation in the world, bereft of all the supporting structures of the British state.

In England, by contrast, there is no such comparable conversation. Too many people, it seems to me, are either uninterested in the constitutional question or simply believe, or prefer to believe, that the Scots, when ultimately forced to choose, will opt for what they know. Certainly too many Westminster MPs – including many senior members of the Labour shadow cabinet – are complacent defenders of our existing constitutional settlement, the frustrations and inadequacies of which have left many Scots actively working towards separation and many English feeling disenfranchised and voiceless.

The last of England

As someone who was born in the 1960s, the son of wartime evacuees from London, I had a sense from an early age that England, or Britain (during my childhood the two nouns seemed to be interchangeable), was oppressed by a lost greatness. As my father grew older, he seemed to become ever more nostalgic for an England that no longer existed – or had never existed, except perhaps as a construct of the imagination. He spoke to me often about the war years and what it was like to have lived through the Blitz – his father refused to leave the house during air raids, even though other houses on their road were bomb-ruined and fire-destroyed. My paternal grandfather was a fatalist, and, as it happened, luck was on his side: he lived until he was nearly 90.

A sweeter, purer past

In Jeremy Paxman’s latest book, Great Brit­ain’s Great War, he writes that the end of the First World War was the point at which “the British decided that what lay ahead of them would never be as grand as their past; the point at which they began to walk backward into the future”.

I thought of these words last week when I went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Richard II, with David Tennant impressively foppish and camp in the title role, at the Barbican in London. The play is not only about the deposition of a foolish king who too late reaches a kind of anguished self-knowledge, but about England and Englishness and what it means to walk backwards into the future.

Shakespeare was writing at the end of the 16th century. Richard II, who was crowned king as a ten-year-old boy in 1377, was deposed in 1399 and died the following year. Yet listen to or read John of Gaunt’s celebrated speech – “This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle” – in which England is referred to as “this other Eden, demi-paradise”, and a question forms: is this what it means to be English, to be haunted by lost possibi­lities, to be banished from Avalon, which never did exist?

Throughout Richard II there are repeated references to English blood and to English soil. It’s as if an ideal of England has been violated. Richard, “unkinged”, dies at the end of the medieval period and Shakespeare is living through an Elizabethan golden age.

Yet there is a sense that the best is in the past; something has been irretrievably lost and those who came after the wretched Richard, including the Elizabethans watching and performing the play, are also walking backwards into the future. As Orson Welles once said: “I think Shakespeare was greatly preoccupied, as I am, in my humble way, with the loss of innocence. And I think there has always been an England, an older England, which was sweeter, purer . . . You feel a nostalgia for it in Chaucer, and you feel it all through Shakespeare.”

Welles is on to something here. The myth of America is all about making it new; about self-reinvention, about being the person you wish to be. It’s about the present and also about what you will make of the future. And the myth of England? This one is complicated – and it is bound up, I think, with living in the present as it relates to the past; to what has been. It’s not for nothing, as Welles said, that Camelot is the great English legend.

Statesmanlike surge

And so ends our centenary year. Our admir­able subscriptions manager, Stephen Brasher, tells me that in “20 years working on the New Statesman, I’ve never known a year like it”. It has been busy, for sure, and we as a team are delighted that we have been able to honour this great magazine in various ways – not least through publishing two splendid centenary volumes showcasing the richness and quality of our archive.

There were times in recent years when it looked as if the New Statesman would not make it. Once on life support, it has now returned to robust health. Our website traffic is at a record high, buoyant advertising revenue has allowed us to increase the number of pages in the magazine, the circulation is rising steadily, our app has been successfully launched, we keep getting great scoops and we will return to profit in 2014.

None of this would have been possible without the loyal support of our readers. I wish you all a happy Christmas and a peaceful New Year.

Parsifal
Royal Opera House, London WC2

Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique
Cadogan Hall, London SW1

Voltaire said that if God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him. But does that also hold true in the opera house? The director Stephen Langridge and his team at the Royal Opera have celebrated Wagner’s bicentenary with a Parsifal for a post-Christian world – a tale of redemption without a redeemer. There’s nothing shocking in that, perhaps; the inscrutable, layered symbolism of the composer’s “stage consecration festival play” has often prompted directors to recoil from spirituality. But if you take God out of the opera, then you have to replace him with something, don’t you?

Not according to Langridge. The motif of his conception is a giant white cube that dominates the stage space for all four hours of the performance. Sometimes opaque, sometimes tantalisingly open to view, by turns permeable and impenetrable, the cube is at once altar, prison, heaven and hell – an otherworldly touchstone of a space. At times it contains a hospital bed, home to mankind’s ailing monarch, Amfortas, and at others it acts as a sort of portal to the past, staging flashbacks of the opera’s prehistory. By the end, though, it lies empty. It’s a mark of the confusion of Langridge’s vision that this potentially powerful sleight of hand feels more like an evasion than an answer.

His Grail Knights are anything but evasive. Often represented in quasi-Masonic robes and generic rituals, here the business-suited members feel disturbingly specific in their rites. What feels initially like a UN delegation takes a darker turn when, women banished, the knights assemble for communion. Their grail is no cup but an adolescent boy. Stripped down to a loincloth, his flesh is pierced, before the blood is distributed among the faithful. It’s a provocative image, taking the more sinister undertones of Wagner’s plot and thrusting them into the spotlight, more horrifying than any imagining. Later, daubed stigmata-like in blood, militants set out to do battle – but with whom? For what?

Things are rather more satisfying musically. The conductor Antonio Pappano’s account of the score is radiant and if the unfashionably slow tempos deny a clear sense of action or dramatic trajectory, they force us to surrender to the meditation of this all-but plotless opera. Textures unfold like the Flower Maidens’ petals (or like they might unfold if the seductresses hadn’t been transformed into Wags) and brass colours are gilded, glowing with a clarity that is absent from Langridge’s visual symbolism.

René Pape leads the cast as a genuinely noble Gurnemanz, achieving a clarity of diction and beauty of line that unfortunately eludes Angela Denoke as Kundry. Hers is a ravaged, battle-weary siren, rough around the edges and painfully tight at the top of her range. Her Act II encounter with Parsifal finds her tiring audibly, and although dramatically it is rather effective, musically it doesn’t quite achieve the ambition of Wagner’s swooning lines. Gerald Finley grows ever more surely into a Wagnerian with his intensely human Amfortas – his rounded tones set off by the acid brightness of Simon O’Neill’s Parsifal.

The cloying piety of Parsifal isn’t to all tastes and for anyone seeking salvation of a more bracing kind this month there was John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Also celebrating a major birthday this year (a mere 70 to Wagner’s 200), Gardiner shows no hint of tiring and may yet have his best performances ahead.

In a year in which we’ve heard an awful lot of Beethoven symphonies, Gardiner’s are still a must. The speeds are a whisker slower than in the past but strangely this seems to add to their intensity. Passages that once dashed past now have their pace anchored, generating that electric tension that exists only at the junction of breakneck release and restraint. The opening of the youthful Second Symphony never paused in its narrative, always on the move in search of answers. It found them in the highly characterised wind solos of the second movement – sardonic bassoon, cheeky flute.

The First Symphony was all calculated rusticity (musical shabby chic at its most artful), with syncopation battering against elegant phrasing, but it was in the Eighth Symphony that things came to a head with an opening Allegro Vivace that wound itself so far past frenzy that it had nowhere to go but into the sudden silences, lurches of tempo and musical non sequiturs that can often seem baffling.

Whether we call it salvation, redemption or resolution, both Wagner and Beethoven strove tirelessly after it in their music. Two musical champions entered Chapel Perilous this week but of them only Gardiner found what he was searching for.

Let the Right One In
Royal Court Theatre, London SW1

For those who like vampire stories, there have been plenty to choose from in the past decade or so. From the wise-cracking brilliance of of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the slightly more dubious charms of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books, night-loving bloodsuckers have dominated popular culture, reincarnated as gossipy cheerleaders, celibacy-loving teenagers and occasionally even something quite frightening. One of the most original versions of the legend, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 novel Let the Right One In, has now been adapted for the stage, having already appeared as both Swedish and American film versions.

All three adaptations remain more or less true to Lindqvist’s original plot: a young boy (Swedish in the novel and first film, American in the second, and now Scottish in the play) from a broken home befriends the girl who moves next door. She turns out to be an ancient vampire child, and yet their connection deepens and burgeons as they cope with school bullies, interfering parents, and murder investigations.

Both films relied heavily on the use of remote locations and long tracking shots to suggest the fatalistic, languid pace of the story and the essential strangeness of its central relationship. The National Theatre of Scotland has taken the bold step of trying to translate this to the stage.

This production is more than just an attempt to recreate what was a successful film and book: Jack Thorne’s adaptation turns Lindqvist’s story into an original piece of theatre that is by turns unsettling, horrifying and even occasionally funny. It is also extremely physical. In the opening murder, a walker is strung up by his ankles to be “bled”, like a pig being slaughtered; later on, one of the central characters is nearly drowned in a tank of water – an astonishing and terrifying feat of breath control from the actor.

A haunting, pulsing soundtrack by the Icelandic musician Ólafur Arnalds heightens the suspenseful atmosphere, although some of the accompanying movement sequences that are threaded between the dialogue are less successful. One, which looks something like scary tree-hugging combined with tai chi, is unintentionally comical and contrasts unfavourably with some of the other, more effective choreography.

All the action takes place among the (real) trees that make up most of the set, with the odd piece of furniture rolling in as required. Actors clamber in the branches at will, and the spaces in between are strewn with fake snow, suggesting a beautiful, sinister wintry landscape. It is here, while practising by threatening a nearby tree with a knife, that the young Oskar (Martin Quinn) first meets Eli. Played by Rebecca Benson with astonishing grace and precision of movement, Eli is the vampire child around whom all the action revolves.

Benson’s performance is riveting – she manages to convey Eli’s stilted, archaic mode of speech and jerky mannerisms without resorting to over-acting. The elements of vampire lore that Lindqvist honours – Eli burns in natural light, must drink blood to survive and cannot feel the cold – are woven cleverly into the physicality of her performance rather than requiring clumsy exposition. The most crucial of these is that while Eli is able to enter a dwelling uninvited, doing so will cause her to bleed through her skin until an invitation is extended.

Let the Right One In is gory in places, as you’d expect especially some of the bullying scenes verge. There are a few moments of genuine jump-in-your-seat shock when Eli attacks those who threaten her friendship with Oskar, but there is a far more insidious kind of horror emanating from her relationship with Hakan (Ewan Stewart), a much older man who occupies an ambivalent, unsettling role. So absorbing is this interplay that you are drawn into the ethics of Eli’s existence – she tries to avoid taking life but encourages Hakan to provide her with blood via the grisly murders he carries out in the forest.

The haunted, obsessive look in his eyes emphasises that although this is a vampire tale, it is principally a love story. Yet the words Eli speaks as she tries to tell Oskar what she really is will have you shivering long after you leave the theatre: “I’m not that. I live on blood. But I am not . . . that . . . Can I come in?” 

While Labour's "cost-of-living" offensive has allowed it to reframe the economic debate in its favour, senior figures in the party know that it will struggle to win a majority unless it can convince voters that it can be trusted to spend money wisely. As Ed Balls says in his interview in today's FT, "Unless we can show . . . that we’ve got a plan which will work, the public won’t think that we will solve the cost of living crisis". 

To prove that Labour does have such a plan, Balls has launched the first phase of his "zero-based" spending review today. A zero-based review differs from others by requiring every item of spending to be approved, rather than merely changes to a pre-determined baseline. In other words, nothing is off the table. Labour plans to scrutinise spending in every area, including those protected by the coalition: the NHS, schools and international development. The document contains the most explicit statement yet that the party will cut departmental spending in 2015-16 and will not borrow to meet day-to-day spending:

We will be cutting departmental spending in 2015-16 and not raising it, with no more borrowing to cover day-to-day spending

A Cause for Caroling; Lives in a Landscape
BBC Radio 4

A cute series tracing the origins and characteristics of the Christmas carol in Britain from its earliest medieval records (8-12 December, 1.45pm) concluded that they had been invented to “promote positive nostalgia”, as much for those in the streets and pubs as in cloisters – anyone seeking “refreshment in songs and other amusements”. Someone pointed out the beauty of the lyrics to old carol-lullabies such as “Lullay mine liking, my dear son, mine sweeting”, which was set to different themes countless times in an attempt to find the perfect tune.

The presenter and conductor Jeremy Summerly was particularly taken by the idea that carols were sometimes improvised off the back of one word and confessed that he’d been cycling around town extemporising “rejoice” like mad to make up a carol that sounded convincingly 1312. Off he went into a bit of humming, completely absorbed and happy in his own world, like someone eternally plopping a dollop of mashed potato next to some suet and steak pudding on his plate and then shuffling along the bench at high table for lunch.

There was something of the old-fashioned dip-pen and Victorian copperplate to his voice, even though he only sounded around thirty and would occasionally break out of his own little monologues to speak to other people with the incredibly deep attention of a spectator at Wimbledon.

As a presenter, he was in his way as natural as Alan Dein, who returned with yet more unmissable Lives in a Landscape (Wednesdays, 11am), travelling to meet a woman in Burnham Market called Helga, once wife of the country’s premier Cliff Richard impersonator. Now divorced, Helga – a kind of über-delightful Mrs Fezziwig – lets out her spare rooms to young people who agree never to keep guinea pigs but must take part in her annual Christmas entertainment (“a kind of Norfolk’s Got Talent”).

One of her residents, Wayne, is a scaffolder who likes to borrow her hairdryer. Alan sat on the floor in his room and listened to him play Nirvana covers on his guitar quite badly for some time, no more worried about the listeners getting bored or dying from a laughing fit than Summerly was. These are presenters without an agenda, just intelligently interested and sympathetically amused.

Lucan
ITV

All writers are thieves, robbing graves by night and even by day. As one myself, only rarely do I wag my finger at this form of kleptomania, but in the case of ITV’s Lucan (11 December, 9pm), written by Jeff Pope and based on John Pearson’s 2005 book, The Gamblers, I find that I’m unable to do anything but play the judge. This series – yep, it’s in two parts – isn’t a work of art. It’s a plodding, moderately well-acted thing (with one catastrophic exception, which I’ll come to in a moment) that treads thoroughly tired ground in the name of nothing but ratings. This makes it pretty cheap, in my view.

Meanwhile, Lord Lucan’s widow, Veronica, is still alive, as are his three children, Frances, George and Camilla. So, too, is Neil Berriman, son of Sandra Rivett, the nanny Lucan bludgeoned to death with a piece of lead piping on the night of 7 November 1974, in what appears to have been a case of mistaken identity (the earl was really hoping to bash in the head of his wife, from whom he had recently separated). How grim for all these people. They have my sympathy.

The series does, however, give us the opportunity to examine one of television’s greatest failings: its conviction that toffs aren’t really worth properly fleshing out, even that they might not be capable of deep feeling. I’m sure Lucan and his chums were ghastly: shallow, spoiled, vain, casually misogynistic. But couldn’t Pope have drawn this ghastliness with an HB pencil rather than a magic marker?

Several of the lines that Lucan (Rory Kinnear with one of Nigella Lawson’s eyebrows on his upper lip) was forced to splutter in the first episode were laugh-out-loud clichéd. It isn’t enough to throw in the odd “old thing” here and there, and then to sit back and assume that all the oiks at home will simply lap it up. They won’t. Yes, it’s well known that Lucan’s close friend, John “Aspers” Aspinall (Christopher Eccleston) – who ran the Clermont Club, where the murderous earl gambled away his fortune – kept a private zoo at home and was much concerned with the primacy of the male in the wild. But Pope barely let him open his mouth without making reference to the behaviour of primates, breeding and bloodstock. Meanwhile, the moronic Lucan sucked it up. He was Tarzan and Veronica was Jane, and Tarzan had to win. Was this really how his mind worked? I doubt it. However thick, I expect his mental processes were a lot more complicated than this.

Still, I might just about have bought it had Aspinall been played convincingly. Eccleston, though, is dementedly miscast, with the result that he has turned in a catastrophically bad performance – one of the worst I’ve ever seen. He simply can’t do posh. He has no charm and no insouciance. His voice sounds forced, every “h” a crazy fart of determination, every long vowel a constipated groan. So hard is he concentrating on his enunciation that he seems unable even to move freely – unless, of course, the stiffness is part of his idea of posh.

Like all Lucan’s pals in this version of the tragedy, Aspinall is convinced that Veronica is “unhinged”. After all, aren’t all women unhinged? Again, I’m sure this was in the air. But it strikes me that the countess’s class might have played a part in their loathing, too – her stepfather, I gather, ran a hotel – and this is something that the drama chooses not to explore, perhaps because to do so would involve nuance. Far easier just to line up the sexist boors, not a cigarette paper between them, and present us with a cabal. The public loves a cabal, especially a posh one.

Veronica herself is well played by Catherine McCormack, an actor of whom we see far too little. Anxious, out of her depth, battling to keep custody of her children; she is like thousands of women before and after, the only difference being that she lives in Belgravia. I also relished Jane Lapotaire’s slyly nasty turn as Susie Maxwell-Scott, the late wife of another of Lucan’s pals and one of Pearson’s sources (the tale is framed by his journalistic researches, so we see her mostly in widowed old age). Maxwell-Scott is portrayed as a traitor to her sex, happy now as then to throw Veronica Lucan to the lions (I’m speaking metaphorically, but the big cats were always on standby down at Aspers’s place in the country; perhaps it was to their cages that Lucan was hoping to take the mailbag that contained Rivett’s body). Her first loyalty is to her class. The barbarians are at the gates – or at least, a journalist is.

It was the first time I encountered real hatred, personal and yet indiscriminate. Her expression – cold, hard and impervious to anything I said or did – continues to haunt me. Staying in a stranger’s house in northern South Africa in 1992, a black servant – let’s use the honest word – handed me breakfast over a kitchen table. Though my thanks were met with a nod of habit, her eyes transmitted a different message: you and your kind, you are the problem, you are the enemy, you keep me here, you force this indignity upon me. However understandable, even inevitable, her feelings were, I’ve never forgotten how bad I felt.

My hosts were not rich but they were white and apartheid allowed moderately well-off white people to enjoy an extraordinary standard of living. That comfort came at a price, as I learned that day. I was 15, on a school cricket tour, and my teammates and I were billeted with the families of our opponents. Until that point in my life, if someone took against me, I’d always assumed that my behaviour must have been to blame. I can see now that this presumption, the feeling of being in control of one’s social destiny, is the ultimate luxury, an accident of fortune. But I knew that morning that I had done nothing wrong, failed nowhere.

So it hit me hard, that glare. Hatred doesn’t quite capture it. I knew that no amount of genuine concern and kindness on my part, still less charm or good manners, would make any difference to her opinion of me. I was hated because of my skin colour and the associations and assumptions that followed from that fact.

One deeply uncomfortable presumption was compounded by a second. That week, in the rugby-playing heartlands of Transvaal – where well-schooled manners, sporting talent and a competitive self-confidence count for a great deal – I felt oddly over-welcomed by some white hosts. It was as though they had decided to think well of me just from the look of me, not because I had earned it. This was unsettling, too. The presumption from one side that I was the wrong kind of person was not ameliorated by the presumption from another that I was the right kind of person. Instead, I felt pincered by the double prejudice.

A more subtly dispiriting experience quickly followed. We were given a guided tour of a well-known South African rugby ground, the epicentre of the white sporting establishment. I remember a plush boardroom with a huge mahogany table. Framed photos hung on the walls: some portraits were of great players, others of middle-aged administrators with slicked-back grey-black hair and dark-rimmed spectacles. The scent of cigar smoke came up from the thick carpet. What kinds of conversations had taken place in this room, I wondered? The spirit of the place was elitist and clubby in all the wrong ways. “Are you one of us?” it asked. “Do you belong here?” I did not. The whole atmosphere suggested a preoccupation with keeping out the “wrong” people, clinging on to control.

That was 1992. Though Nelson Mandela had been released from prison, his presence was nowhere to be felt in those rooms. Though always proudly competitive on the pitch, the culture of South African rugby remained intricately bound up with the institutions and power structures of the old order. That wasn’t true of all apartheid sports. Some sporting communities were instinctively more progressive than political circumstances revealed. That was not the case with South African rugby. Indeed, I would have been hard pressed in 1992 to think of a sporting culture anywhere less likely to embody the redemptive power of sport.

And yet, three years later, South African rugby gave modern sport a rare moment of grace and transcendence: Nelson Mandela standing next to the then Springbok captain, Francois Pienaar, and holding the World Cup trophy at the final at Ellis Park, Johannesburg.

Where many of his colleagues in the African National Congress despised rugby and all it stood for, Mandela saw that it could act as a metaphor for a new South Africa. When he pulled on the Springbok jersey, Mandela found the image that perfectly captured his political message of liberal reconciliation: if this can be achieved here, in rugby, it can be achieved anywhere. It was as if Mandela had walked into that boardroom, where I had sensed only divisiveness and exclusion, and turned the culture inside out.

Anyone with a reflective temperament who dedicates a substantial chunk of their life to sport eventually acknowledges an uncomfortable truth. Much of what sustained us when we were inside the bubble – results, tables, averages, pecking orders, who’s up, who’s down – is of little wider importance. Yes, it is important that you compete wholly, that you give unsparingly of yourself, but only because sport played without passion and conviction loses the validity of gladiatorial authenticity. But that your team won or lost last week, last month, last year? Like actors, athletes orchestrate a necessary suspension of disbelief.

It remains a play, that is all.

Very occasionally, however, sport does matter. This cannot be faked or arranged. It requires a sporting narrative to intersect with a wider social and political narrative – perhaps even for the sport to complete the story in some way. In hosting the rugby World Cup, the old white man’s game, Mandela saw the opportunity for a unique kind of triumph. If only “his Springboks” – what a concept in itself – could win on the pitch. And they did.

I’ve often wondered what would happen if I met that woman again. I like to believe there would be a different expression in her eyes, that the rage of the apartheid era will have softened. But I suspect not. Sport, even politics, can only do so much.

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

Simon Walker sounds almost apologetic as he leads me through the marble lobby of the Institute of Directors; one of his aims as head of the IoD is to attract more young members, so he’s quick to mention his plans to modernise its “grand” and “intimidating” Pall Mall headquarters.

On the morning of our meeting, the IoD had described government plans for men and women to share 50 weeks of parental leave as a “nightmare”. In recent months it has condemned a potential ban on zero-hours contracts as “misguided and extremely damaging” and labelled as “simplistic in the extreme” the TUC claim that if all employers paid the living wage this would save the treasury £3.2bn. But there was little in Walker’s early political career to suggest he would become spokesperson for an organisation easiest thought of as the union for bosses.

His first involvement in politics was as part of the left-wing movement opposing apartheid in South Africa, where he grew up. And when he first moved to the UK, in 1971 to study politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, he became chairman of the student Labour party. I had wondered if Walker would possess all the inflexible zeal of a late convert to the benefits of the unfettered free market but he’s more philosophical. He often illustrates his argument with quotations recited from memory. He reads a lot, he tells me at one point, and hardly ever watches television – apart from Borgen, the Danish series on coalition politics.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the media, politics and business, and if there were a Venn diagram I’d be happiest in that bit in the middle of all three circles,” he says. He’s applied this principle to a remarkably broad career. After leaving Oxford, Walker started work as a TV journalist in New Zealand. He became an adviser to New Zealand’s Labour Party in the mid-1980s, and then a lobbyist in London and Brussels before joining John Major’s policy unit in 1996. After Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide victory, he was appointed director of corporate affairs at British Airways, before moving to Buckingham Palace in 2000 as communications secretary to the Queen.

Walker says that growing up in apartheid South Africa had a decisive influence on his later career. He was raised in a left-wing household – his grandfather kept a picture of Stalin on his mantelpiece, and bound issues of the New Statesman with sections circled in red crayon and marked with comments such as “rubbish”. The left was the natural home for anyone opposed to racial segregation: “For many years the communists were the only political force that treated people equally,” Walker explains. When he signed up to the liberal, anti-apartheid Progressive Party, he felt like he was joining “a battle between good and evil”. “And it was. It was a truly pernicious system in a way that sometimes makes the arguments in Britain or New Zealand seem trivial in comparison.”

He found Britain in the Seventies a depressing place. “You did get the sense that Britain was going into a permanent decay, which I think was true,” Walker recalls. He didn’t hesitate when, during a debating tour to New Zealand, he was offered a TV job.

There is still footage online of one of his clashes with New Zealand’s prime minister Robert Muldoon in 1976. An almost impossibly baby-faced Walker doggedly questions Muldoon over Russia’s ability to carry out a strike on New Zealand, while Muldoon tries to read out prepared answers to a different set of questions. Even when Muldoon complains that he’s “not having some smart alec interviewer changing the rules halfway through”, Walker seems composed.

Off-air, he was also feeling increasingly opposed to Muldoon’s statist policies: “Over the next ten to 15 years, I lost all faith in the ability of the state to direct the economy,” he says.

Today he’d like to see the welfare state trimmed back and taxes lowered. He concedes that inequality is a “problem” and that there’s something “distasteful” about chief executives’ high pay, but he’s convinced that “if the government gets involved, it will just get it wrong”. This means that Ed Miliband’s plans to freeze energy prices and his comments on promoting “good business” haven’t gone down well. “The danger I see about more statist noise and left-wing rhetoric of a bygone era from a prospective Labour government is that it damages the attractiveness of Britain as an investment destination or a place to live,” he says, but he adds that the party’s “bark is worse than its bite”.

“The private equity market had no greater friends than Gordon Brown and Ed Balls,” he argues – Brown introduced the tax breaks that made it such a profitable industry and Balls “was extremely sympathetic to the problems of the City”. Boris Johnson, who the day before we meet had given his speech on why inequality is an inevitable consequence of unequal ability, has made an even better impression. London’s Mayor is “telling the truth and ultimately truth is the most important concept in politics, much more important than fairness or justice or other more subjective things,” he says. It is “obvious” that Johnson will be prime minister one day and he thinks that would be a good thing.

The only reason government should ever intervene in the economy, Walker tells me, is to set the rules and promote competition and transparency. When you don’t believe the state should intervene to redistribute wealth, promote good business practice or strengthen social safety nets, you need to display extraordinary faith in the markets, and Walker does. Underpinning his world view is a fundamental, unshakeable optimism. “Free market capitalism has made a greater contribution to human well-being than any political or social movement in human history.” Walker is promoting business with the same moral conviction with which he once opposed apartheid – a most unexpected journey.

20 DECEMBER 2013

SPECIAL 124-PAGE CHRISTMAS ISSUE

THE NS PROFILE: PETER WILBY ON PAUL DACRE

NICHOLAS CLEE: HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE AMAZON

ORWELL v ENGLAND: DAVID AARONOVITCH ON A RELUCTANT PATRIOT AND A GREAT LITERARY LOVE-HATE AFFAIR

RICHARD DAWKINS ASKS: WHAT MAKES US HUMAN?

PLUS

THE POLITICS COLUMN: RAFAEL BEHR ON WHY CAMERON AND MILIBAND FAILED TO MAKE PEACE WITH THE PAST IN 2013

ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH NAVIGATES THE ETHICS AND ETIQUETTE OF CHRISTMAS

CAROLINE CRIADO-PEREZ ON THE FEMINIST VICTORY THAT UNLEASHED A TORRENT OF VIOLENT MISOGONY THIS YEAR 

LUCY WINKETT FINDS THE REAL CHRISTMAS IN MODERN BETHLEHEM

MEHDI HASAN: LITERALISM PLAGUES ALL RELIGIONS, NOT JUST ISLAM (read the column in full below)

DAVID SEDARIS REMEMBERS HIS “BROKE AND COLD” WINTER OF 1983

THE REAL ANCHORMEN: DOUGLAS KENNEDY ON THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN NEWSREADER

 IAN STEWART ON WHAT OPTICAL ILLUSIONS TELL US ABOUT OUR BRAINS

THE NS PROFILE: PAUL DACRE

This week, Peter Wilby explores the Daily Mail and talks to friends and enemies of its infamous editor, Paul Dacre. What is the secret to Dacre’s success?

Everyone who has ever worked for Dacre, who has just passed his 65th birthday, praises his almost uncanny instinct for the issues and stories that will hold the attention of “Middle England”. No other editor so deftly balances the mix of subjects and moods that holds readers’ attention: serious and frivolous, celebrities and ordinary people, urban, suburban and rural, some stories provoking anger, others tears. No other editor chooses, with such unerring and lethal precision, the issues, often half forgotten, that will create panic and fear among politicians.

Former employees (who ask to remain anonymous) give Wilby an insight into the feared newspaperman’s ebullient management style:

Dacre has few social graces and even less small talk. His body language is awkward, his manner prickly. He seldom smiles and, according to one ex-columnist, “He doesn’t laugh, he just says, ‘That’s a funny remark.’” He treats women with old-fashioned courtliness, opening doors and helping them with coats, but is otherwise uncomfortable with them, perhaps because he was one of five brothers, went to an all-male school and has no daughters. He speaks gruffly, with a slight north London accent and an even fainter trace of his father’s native Yorkshire. He sometimes buries his rather florid face deep in his hands, as though exasperated with the world’s inability to share his simple, common-sense values. He became notorious for the ripeness of his language – so frequent was his use of the C-word, almost entirely directed at men, that his staff referred to “the vagina monologues”.

Wilby points out that while Dacre shows no signs of slowing down after two decades at the helm, his contract has been renewed for only one year. With Geordie Greig, the 53-year-old editor of the Mail on Sunday, rumoured to be waiting in the wings, what does the future hold for a Daily Mail without Dacre? 

Over the two decades of his tenure, the paper has seemed to defy time and gravity. He has no truck with the fashionable and transitory and he acts, in effect, as a one-man focus group. “The question asked about a story at the Mail,” says a former editorial executive, “is not ‘Will it interest the readers?’ but ‘Will it interest the editor?’”

His paper is suffused with a nostalgia for a lost Britain. The formula is unique and it will probably be impossible for a successor to reproduce it with anything like Dacre’s manic energy and conviction. Greig, an urbane and sociable Old Etonian and former Tatler editor who is descended from a long line of royal courtiers, would be a very different editor.

“If Dacre goes, it will be the end of the Daily Mail,” says a former columnist. “Dacre is a great man, in so far as journalism can produce great men. I know the left will be cheering when he goes but, believe me, the rich and famous will cheer more.”

THE POLITICS COLUMN: RAFAEL BEHR ON THE GHOSTS OF POLITICS PAST

The NS political editor, Rafael Behr, reflects on 2013 in his final column of the year and argues that for both David Cameron and Ed Miliband it was a period “in which hope of owning the future was sabotaged by an inability to make peace with the past”. Cameron, says Behr, allowed his party to indulge in 1980s nostalgia after the passing of Margaret Thatcher in April and appeared to move away from modernisation and towards the old “nasty party” image. Behr points out that:

. . . just as Cameron failed to move out of Thatcher’s shadow, Miliband missed an opportunity to define himself in positive terms against the past. With sufficient confidence (and support in the parliamentary party), he might have leapt free from New Labour ultras and hard-left reaction in a single bound. Instead, for much of 2013, it looked as if old factions were wrestling for control of the party’s identity, with its leader cast as a spectator.

It is the new wave of younger MPs that could help both parties shake off the past, says Behr:

More significant was the promotion of MPs who were elected for the first time in 2010 – Tristram Hunt, Rachel Reeves, Gloria De Piero, Emma Reynolds – “clean skins” who are neither scarred nor contaminated by New Labour-era civil war. Miliband’s hope is that this generation will help convince voters his party has a new, forward-looking agenda shaped by its current leader, when the Conservatives are determined to present him as a throwback to an unelectable past. Labour’s class of 2010 is marked by a capacity, lacking in many of their older colleagues, to view the strengths and weaknesses of Blairism without personal rancour. As one young shadow cabinet minister puts it: “Who gives a toss about all that baggage? We just want to win.”

On the Tory side, too, much hope is pinned on recent recruits. The lower and middle ranks of government are now stuffed with young MPs – Liz Truss, Matthew Hancock, Esther McVey, Sajid Javid. Like their Labour counterparts, they have a view of their party’s future that is not jaundiced by rigid nostalgia and historic resentments. Most do not fit neatly into categories of “moderniser” or “traditionalist”. They often combine social liberalism on issues such as gay rights with ultra-Thatcherite economics.

RICHARD DAWKINS ASKS: WHAT MAKES US HUMAN?

Following in the footsteps of Mary Robinson and Caitlin Moran, the former NS guest editor Richard Dawkins is the latest contributor to our “What Makes Us Human?” series, in partnership with BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show. Dawkins concludes that a thirst for knowledge is one of the defining human characteristics:

The human mind has reached out to the wider universe and far beyond the time constraints of a human lifespan. We now know that the world limiting our ancestors’ brief lives is a tiny speck orbiting a small star among some hundred billion stars, in an average galaxy among some hundred billion galaxies. We know that the world began 4.6 billion years ago and the universe 13.8 billion. We understand the evolutionary process that generated us and all DNA-based life.

There’s plenty that we still don’t understand, but we are working on it. And the urge to do so is perhaps the most inspiring of all the unique qualities that make us human.

PLUS

From the archive: Kingsley Martin meets Winston Churchill in 1939

The food critic Felicity Cloake on the joy of things in aspic and caviar Swiss rolls

Ed Smith on why real ambition sometimes means eschewing worldly success

Caroline Crampton on the choristers who work all Christmas

A Christmas poem by Carol Ann Duffy and short story by Sarah Hall

Stuart Burrows on the spectacular 2013 comeback of The Great Gatsby

A crêpe jambon, oeuf et fromage is Will Self’s meal of the year

Sophie McBain meets an east London hipster who moonlights as Santa

Rachel Cooke on what to watch on TV this Christmas

Yo Zushi meets Soho’s regular drinkers with festive traditions of their own

*

To purchase a copy, visit www.newstatesman.com/subscribe 
or visit the App Store

The influx of world leaders and international celebrities for Nelson Mandela’s memorial service and funeral must be straining South Africa’s resources. Perhaps the poor folk in Soweto and elsewhere feel pride that so many great figures arrived to pay homage. But it is rather patronising of us to assume that is so. I suspect they would prefer the money to be spent on improved housing, schools, health services and water supplies and would see these as a better memorial to Mandela.

What a pity that, in his last will and testament, the great man didn’t insist that his funeral was for South Africans only and instruct the Camerons, Obamas, Winfreys and Bonos to miss out on a giant photo opportunity and stay at home. Judging by the singing during speeches at the FNB stadium in Johannesburg, many ordinary South Africans would have approved.

Batting away the critics

Mandela, whether or not he was a saint, was above all a politician, capable of reversing long-held principles when necessary. Consider, for example, the remarkably hasty rehabilitation of South African cricket. For years, the anti-apartheid movement, supported by the African National Congress (ANC), battled to isolate South Africa and stop overseas teams going there.

The ANC rejected the argument that sport was separate from politics. Even when the government grudgingly allowed racially mixed teams, the ANC said that while apartheid remained in the wider society, non-whites could not compete on equal terms. There could be “no normal sport in an abnormal society”.

After his release, Mandela himself lobbied for South Africa’s readmission to international cricket and sent ANC officials to Lord’s to plead its case. Success came in July 1991, only weeks after the main pillars of apartheid law were repealed and with democratic elections still three years away. Before the end of the year, South Africa was playing internationals against India. The largely white team, with token non-whites, was almost identical to the one that played an English rebel touring team, led by Mike Gatting (now president designate of the MCC), in 1990, amid mass protests. Mandela’s political goal was to secure white assent to a peaceful handover of power. “Sport is sport and quite different from politics,” he explained, in defiance of everything anti-apartheid activists had said for 30 years.

Brighton to bath

My role in the struggle was insignificant and inglorious. In April 1964, as the Rivonia trial concluded, I was a first-year student at Sussex University. Overnight, we marched 53 miles from Brighton to London, singing “Balls to the Bourgeoisie” and other ribald revolutionary songs, to join a Trafalgar Square protest rally. I carried a banner but, being 19, not an umbrella or any protection (including sturdy shoes) from what proved to be the biggest downpour to hit mid-Sussex in a century. Wet, filthy, exhausted and in my case barefoot, we reached our destination in no mood to listen to speeches.

A fellow student rang Westminster School, which he had left the previous year, and pleaded with the housekeeper for baths. She magnanimously granted this privilege to three of us but only after we listened silently to a 15-minute pro-apartheid lecture in which she said the Rivonia defendants should be hanged. We then treated ourselves – student grants then being munificent – to a first-class train journey home on the Brighton Belle. None of us, I guess, would have managed well on Robben Island.

Co-opting Mandela

Mandela became like Jesus in that his name was invoked to support all sorts of improbable causes. In the 1980s, Tory ministers introduced the first legislation allowing schools to opt out of local authority control. At a dinner, a teachers’ union leader, opposed to the policy, lamented to me how a school near his home was among the first to take this route. “And,” he gasped, “it’s called the Nelson Mandela school. Surely they’ll have to change the name.” I pointed out that Mandela, then still in prison, probably held no opinions on “opted-out” schools. My interlocutor was having none of it. “It is impossible to think,” he declared, “that such a good man would want his name associated with such wickedness.”

Have a proper gander

I have been sent a copy of Dare You?, an anthology of Gothic writing by 12- and 13-year-olds at Richmond Park Academy, south London. The stories are riveting and surprisingly sophisticated, suggesting the authors have drawn deeply on the traditions of Gothic fiction. Read this – you can buy it for £4.99 – and you will never again believe the propaganda against state schools.

“To get finance for an independent movie, a big one like this, there are only ever ten movie actors in the world,” says the director, Justin Chadwick. Anant Singh interjects: “For this role, there were only five.” Chadwick and Singh are describing their journey towards making Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, the new biopic of the late icon.

It is 18 years since Nelson Mandela indicated that he would like Singh, a South African producer and fellow veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, to have the film rights to his autobiography – the same length of time as Mandela spent on Robben Island. Eighteen years in which the screenwriter William Nicholson says he “met most of the big black actors” with a view to inviting them to play the title role. Denzel Washington was interested, and then Morgan Freeman looked promising – until he signed up to play Mandela in Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s 2009 dramatisation of the pivotal 1995 Rugby World Cup.

“You approach actors, they look like they’re going to do it, then they don’t. You can lose two years doing that,” says Nicholson, who wrote 33 drafts of the film. Some of these had two Mandelas, one young and one old; some told his tale in flashback; some ended with his release from jail.

“To a certain extent they were too reverential,” Singh says. “It wasn’t gripping. But also, Mandela’s life is so grand. Which bits do you put in, which do you leave out?”

The version released into cinemas goes in a straight line from the 25-year-old Mandela (played with luminous power by Idris Elba) to his presidency and the split from Winnie (Naomie Harris), whose beefed-up role symbolises how wrong things might have gone if the wiser Mandela had not prevailed. Nicholson says: “Winnie represents one response to the struggle, which is to go violent; Mandela represents the other, which is to go towards forgiveness and reconciliation.”

Other than with events surrounding the 1989 killing of Stompie Moeketsi, in which Winne was implicated – “Too complicated,” Nicholson says; “you couldn’t do it in less than ten minutes” – the film doesn’t flinch from portraying Winnie’s flaws. It shows her as a young woman thrown into hell and emerging with a ferocious spirit. Singh watched the film with her and says she is happy with her portrayal.

“She always pushed for violent reforms, as we’ve said. I had a discussion [with her] before we started, where I said, ‘I’m going to show you in this film, whatever is true; I’m hiding from nothing. But when you see the film I believe you will come out very strong.’”

Whether the audience shares Singh’s view of Winnie or not, it is on Idris Elba in the part of her husband that all eyes will be fixed. Three inches taller and a great deal broader than the man most of the world first saw as a septuagenarian, Elba looks like he’d have excelled at Mandela’s favoured sport, boxing. He is also believable as the young lawyer who loves music and dancing and women – too much for his first wife – and who, though an activist, exudes a joie de vivre, until the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 convinces him that the days of marching and banner-waving have passed.

In otherwise mixed reviews, Elba’s performance has won unanimous acclaim. He excels as the wounded cuckold of later years, his face by now buried in prosthetics. (“Is that me?” Mandela laughed when Singh showed him the stills.)

Yet many have criticised the film as ponderous, weighed down by the momentousness of its material. Although that is a harsh judgement, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is undeniably old-fashioned. The vogue for new historical biopics is more micro than macro, isolating a crucial chapter in the subject’s life (think Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, or Invictus or The King’s Speech) rather than telling the panoramic story in the manner of Gandhi, Long Walk’s most obvious comparison.

“If you do it starting with an older man and flashing back and coming forward, you’re doing something people may think is contemporary film-making, but you’re losing the moral growth,” Nicholson says.

The day after we spoke, the film had the most dramatic UK premiere possible when Mandela’s death was announced during the screening. Singh had told me the previous day that the former president’s poor health had prevented him attending the premiere in South Africa. “But it’s great we have the film done while he’s alive, even though he’s not able to sit with us and watch it,” he said. And of the 18-year haul to getting the story into cinemas, Singh said: “You get on with it and try your best. Pieces fall in, pieces fall out, the script isn’t working, but you hang in there.

“As Madiba says, it seems impossible until it’s done.”

It is hardly surprising that parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee – which consists of MPs and peers hand-picked by the Prime Minister – is fast becoming the Government’s white-washing body of choice. Despite its purported role in providing scrutiny and oversight of the intelligence services, it is in fact far more often a cheerleader than a watchdog.

Worse still, it has completely missed the major scandals of the past decade, which it was meant to guard against: a full three years after UK agents were intimately involved in the 2004 kidnap and ‘rendition’ to torture of Gaddafi opponents– pregnant wives and young children included– the ISC gave our spies a clean bill of health. There is “no evidence that the UK Agencies were complicit in any ‘Extraordinary Rendition’ operations,” they wrote happily in 2007– without any apparent awareness that three years previously, MI6’s Sir Mark Allen had cheerfully congratulated Gaddafi’s spy chief on the arrival of the “air cargo” – Mr Belhadj and his wife Fatima Boudchar – and stressed that the intelligence that got them there “was British.”

More recently, a member of the ISC was forced to admit in Parliament that the Committee only examined the issue of Prism – GCHQ’s mass surveillance programme – “after the Guardian revelations.”

As if it wasn’t bad enough that this ‘oversight’ committee only hears about the activity of those it oversees via the newspapers, it has also proved to be hopelessly prone to a starry-eyed attitude towards our security agencies. As a result of his habit of acting in the press more as a spokesman for the agencies than as their watchdog, ISC Chair Sir Malcolm Rifkind has come in for criticism from some unexpected quarters. Former Conservative Defence Secretary and ISC Chair, Lord King, described his decision to swiftly endorse the work of GCHQ after the Snowden revelations as “unfortunate” while ex-MI5 chief Stella Rimington has said“I’m not sure that Malcolm Rifkind going on the telly and saying we’ve scrutinised all this and it’s all OK, is enough.”

So this week’s U-turn by the Government, which has now abandoned its commitment to an independent, judge-led inquiry into UK complicity in torture in favour of ‘inquiry-lite’ conducted by the ISC, will perhaps come as no surprise to the cynical. This is a committee which can be relied upon to be deferential to the point of blindness. One needs only look at their recent much-hyped “grilling” of the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – a damp squib which was memorably described as a “total pantomime” by one Tory MP after it emerged that all three security chiefs were provided the questions in advance.

This pattern of restricting oversight of the security services to the warm embraces of the ISC is also borne out by the Home Secretary’s recent veto of a request by the Home Affairs Committee to question MI5 boss Andrew Parker. It also comes in the same week as Sir David Omand, ex GCHQ boss, says that spy chiefs should not answer to parliament.

So we should not expect much from the ISC’s inquiry, should it materialise. Which is a shame, as I did expect more from Mr Cameron’s political self-interest.  In July 2010, he made a personal pledge to hold an “independent Inquiry, led by a judge,” to “look at whether Britain was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees”. He was not alone – Foreign Secretary William Hague, Cabinet Office Minister Ken Clarke and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg all made the same pledge. That pledge, made to the public and to Parliament, now lies in tatters. There is no excuse – the circumstances which the Government cited in shelving the judge-led detainee inquiry are still the same. If anything, the findings of Sir Peter Gibson’s report, published today, show that the demand for real accountability of our security services has grown even greater.

Clare Algar is Executive Director of Reprieve, a not-for-profit organisation which fights for the rights of prisoners. 

While the world feigns indifference at the news that there is to be a new deputy leader of the Lib Dems, following Simon Hughes's elevation into government (pretend all you like, but I know you care really), the party is buzzing with speculation about who will get the nod.

It’s a limited field – essentially Lib Dem MPs who are not part of the government– and already several names are being mooted. The right are pushing Jeremy Browne and already have a #teamjezza hashtag running. The left are pushing the activists' favourite, Julian Huppert. Everyone’s wondering if Tim Farron will have another go (and if he needs the bother). And of course there’s the endless amusement the election of Nick Harvey would provide, given it does appear Nick Clegg is not his absolute favourite person. What fun their daily catch-ups would be.

But all of those folk, and most of the other names getting mentioned in dispatches – Duncan Hames, Stephen Gilbert, Andrew George  - have one thing in common. They’re blokes.

Now, it’s easy to overstate the Lib Dems' 'women issue'. After all, we have numerous highly effective female ministers (Jo Swinson, Lynne Featherstone, Susan Kramer). We have some fantastically talented women in the party outside Westminster like Kirsty Williams, Leader of the Welsh Lib Dems or Sharon Bowles MEP, the first Liberal to chair the EU Economic and Monetary Affairs committee. And in candidates like Jane Dodds, Kelly-Marie Blundell and Layla Moran, we have accomplished women standing in winnable seats.

But the fact remains that just seven of our 57 MPs are women (two of whom are standing down in 2015) and we haven’t put a women into the cabinet since taking office. We need to find ways of raising the profile of women in the party in Westminster.

What a brilliant opportunity this is take a step in that direction – and elect one of the two eligible women MPs who could stand for the deputy leader role – Tessa Munt or Lorely Burt. Both are highly respected amongst the grassroots. Both would benefit from the boost in profile the job provides (and let’s not forget they are defending sub-1,000 majorities). And in one fair swoop, we’d have a future female leadership candidate in place. It seems a fair swap for the PPS roles they both currently fulfil.

There’ll be a lot of politics going on right now in Westminster, with soundings being taken and promises made. But I hope Tessa or Lorely grab the chance to stand. And I hope one of them wins.

Richard Morris blogs at A View From Ham Common, which was named Best New Blog at the 2011 Lib Dem Conference

Illustration: Ralph Steadman

What defines Alex Ferguson? Success. How does one achieve success? Now, there is a question.

It is understandable why we might look to Ferguson for the answer. He has been the dominant figure in the national sport for the past three decades, presiding over arguably the best known and most successful of British cultural and commercial institutions. His name is entwined with the lives of megastars such as Ryan Giggs and David Beckham, both of whom have described him as a “father figure”. He steered Aberdeen to improbable domestic and European success in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1986, he arrived at Manchester United to awaken a slumbering giant. By the time he left the club in May this year, United were not only the most successful team in England but the most popular and valuable sports team in the world. His second book of memoirs, Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography, launched in October, is one of the fastest-selling books in British publishing history.

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. Managers have an ever-decreasing shelf life. Newcastle United’s Alan Pardew is now the second-longest-serving manager in the Premier League, having been in the job for just three years. When the longest-serving manager, Arsène Wenger, first arrived at Arsenal in 1996 as a relative unknown, Ferguson had already spent a decade in charge at Manchester United and had been a manager for a continuous period of 22 years. 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.

Are there lessons from Ferguson’s success that can be transferred to politics or business? Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell liked to seek Ferguson’s counsel from time to time but were more interested in the association with success than his views on policy. A couple of years ago, the Economist suggested that Ferguson “could reasonably be described as Britain’s Steve Jobs, given his unorthodox, talent-obsessed and sometimes bruising approach to making something beautiful”. In the October issue of the Harvard Business Review, Professor Anita Elberse – following a series of interviews with the man – presented “Ferguson’s formula” as a case study of successful management.

Yet a “lessons learned” approach to Ferguson’s career is a largely speculative exercise. As Ed Smith recently noted in these pages, as much as any guiding precepts, Ferguson possesses skills that are innate to the individual – a force of personality that defies categorisation and cannot easily be replicated. Just ask his replacement at Manchester United, David Moyes. At the time of writing, Moyes’s team languishes in ninth place in the Premier League table.

Ferguson was always at his desk at United’s training ground by 7am. A Stakha­novite ethic of hard work was a crucial commodity but also an obvious one. His view of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: the Story of Success suggests a suspicion of any grand theory. The book “could just have been called Graft,” he writes in his new autobiography. “Hard Graft.” He continues: “People try to apply to football the usual principles of business. But it’s not a lathe, it’s not a milling machine, it’s a collection of human beings. That’s the difference.”

In May, when news broke about his retirement, the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, suggested on the Today programme that the man who had managed Manchester United for 27 years could be considered “the greatest living Briton”. However, there is another way of looking at Ferguson: not as the greatest living Briton but as the last authentic example of that phenomenon.

What constitutes “greatness” is highly subjective but the idea of a “great Briton” – if momentarily revived at the 2012 London Olympics – evokes something of yesteryear. This is not least because of the fragmentation of the United Kingdom and the drift of Ferguson’s Scottish countrymen away from a sense of collective identity that they once shared with similar communities in England or Wales.

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. It was a creed grounded in the specific locale but – and this was particularly notable in Ferguson’s case – it could transcend both sectarianism and provincialism. 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.

***

Ferguson’s stated political stance is on “the left of the Labour Party”. In his youth, he acquired “not so much a range of ideological views as a way of seeing life, a set of values”. He has never been a close follower of contemporary politics and the opinions he expresses are not uncommon among tribal Labour supporters.

Parents, background and upbringing, to Ferguson, maketh the man. “How can it be class war to say the guy went to Eton, or that he was part of some dreadful right-wing social club at Oxford?” he has said of David Cameron. “Where you come from does matter, you know. His policies are about helping his own sort.”

On Margaret Thatcher, as one might expect, he has stronger views: “The images of decay and neglect have remained with me and I have never ceased to curse the Tory government for vandalising the National Health Service . . . Her policies ruined people’s lives and stripped them of their dignity.” He counts his dying mother’s poor experience in an NHS hospital in 1986 – the year he took over at Manchester United – as an important moment in reaffirming his belief in the importance of the state’s role in public services.

Ferguson has a predictable preference for substance over style. In the run-up to the last election, he declared himself rather perplexed by the media’s drooling over Nick Clegg’s performance in the leadership debates. “He was fine and spoke well enough but I was no clearer what he was about than I was at the beginning.”

Beyond that, Ferguson refuses to be drawn into specifics. Despite his friendship with Alastair Campbell, who interviewed him for this magazine in 2009, he makes no pretence of knowing the secrets of electoral success. His major contribution to Labour’s 1997 campaign was to suggest that Tony Blair employ a physiotherapist on his “battle bus” in order to keep his muscles limber.

Intuitively, Ferguson is more Brown than Blair. “I know people go on about him being a dour Scot and not having Tony’s charisma and so on but I think maybe the country needs a bit of that dour Scottishness,” he once said of Gordon Brown. He also expresses his admiration for another of that dying breed – a Scottish Labour titan – John Smith. Yet he has no complaints with the Blairite path. “His positioning was correct,” he writes in his autobiography, acknowledging the importance of Blair’s charisma.

His loyalty is to the Labour Party as an institution – as the representative of the working man – rather than to an individual or a specific programme. He seems mildly horrified by a suggestion that he once advised Blair to get rid of his troublesome chancellor. In stressing the importance of his total control of Manchester United, he claims to have kept his comments general, rather than commenting directly on the Blair-Brown rivalry.

Ferguson has often used the word “socialist” to describe himself – a label that is as little used in contemporary British politics as it is understood. The story of his background in the once bustling shipbuilding hub of Govan, Glasgow, has often been told. His father, Alexander, and younger brother, Martin, both worked in the shipyards. As he tried to make the break into professional football, Ferguson worked as an apprentice toolmaker at an engineering firm and acted as the shop steward, once casting the deciding vote to lead his colleagues in an apprentice’s strike. At the time, he was informed that his mother prayed every night that he had not become a communist. Ferguson found the suggestion preposterous.

***

It seems no coincidence that three of the great British managers before Ferguson – Matt Busby, Jock Stein and Bill Shankly – were all raised in the Scottish working class (though in mining districts, rather than shipyards). In temperament and his fierce visage, David Moyes is the most comparable modern incarnation of this creed. However, it is notable, as Ferguson has pointed out, that he is from Bearsden, a relatively affluent suburb of Glasgow. Moyes’s assistant Jimmy Lumsden has something of a Govan connection, having been born just a mile from Ferguson’s place of birth.

In 2010, Ferguson spoke at the funeral of the Glasgow trade unionist and fellow Govanite Jimmy Reid, who led the “work-in” of shipbuilders on the Clyde in 1971-72. Most of all, he admired Reid’s discipline and leadership of the campaign. There was no vandalism, hooliganism or “bevvying”; it was a dignified attempt to save the jobs of thousands of highly skilled working men. As Ferguson put it simply, “We were producing craftsmen par excellence – why should we give up on them?”

The world that Ferguson evokes – of a skilled industrial and manufacturing working class – has been in rapid decline for decades. Yet even in its heyday, the section of the workforce to which he belonged was sometimes referred to as a “labour aristocracy”. Some Marxists disparaged it for not being inclined to proletarian revolution and for having failed fully to develop “class consciousness”, partly because it received higher wages than unskilled labourers. On the other hand, these skilled labourers also formed the vanguard of the trade union movement in the United Kingdom – mobilising in defence of a system of apprenticeship, in which the key to one’s progression was learning one’s trade at the feet of an expert and honing those skills through practice and graft.

The irony of modern football is that it is one of the few worlds in which the apprenticeship system still (just about) exists, albeit in a drastically altered form. Modern Britain is a place where the word “gaffer” is more likely to be uttered by a multimillionaire footballer than a factory worker. Skills are passed from one generation to another “on the job”, in a way that no longer happens in most industries.

One could push the logic further. For all the sniping at the extreme wealth of modern footballers, you could say that it is one of the few areas of modern British life where working-class boys with unfashionable accents achieve top-level professional success. It is a world that is entirely open to a version of merit that does not depend on educational achievement (something that Ferguson, to his chagrin, never attained in his school days).

This is all the more notable as changes to the education system over the same period have done little to enhance social mobility. It is a small but not insignificant fact that Manchester United’s star intellectual – Jonny Evans, who holds nine GCSEs, all at A* or A – is a product of Northern Ireland’s grammar school system, which is still based around a version of the eleven-plus.

It is this odd ethos that Ferguson has somehow preserved at Manchester United and managed to maintain, despite the commercial transformation of the game. “We were working class. The boys today aren’t. Some of them might think they are, but they’re not. Their fathers and their grandfathers might have been, but times have changed,” he said in 2011. “What you have to do, though, is make them believe in working-class principles, to make them think like they’re working class. You have to make them realise the privilege of working. I tell them working hard all your life isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.”

If he has a criticism of the younger generation, it is not directed at the wealth they enjoy but their flashiness – anything outside football that deflects them from a proper attitude to their work.

***

It is not just the players who have become multimillionaires but Ferguson, too. Nor has he been afraid to use his elbows to reach the top (as was once said of his playing style). The charge sheet of hypocrisy has been laid at his door.

From the outside looking in, it seems hard to reconcile his accumulated personal wealth with his professed socialist principles. His mansion in Cheshire is called Fairfields, after the shipyard where his father worked, and his first racehorse was called Queensland Star, after a ship that his father had helped build. For some, the two do not sit naturally together.

Michael Crick’s 2002 Ferguson biography, The Boss, painted an unflattering portrait of a manager who ruled by fear and bullying and who was at least partly driven by a desire for financial gain. In a recent interview with Channel 4 News, Jon Snow asked how Ferguson could reconcile his socialist principles with his unwillingness to criticise the Glazer family, his “rampant capitalist” employers at Manchester United.

“The rat race is for rats,” Ferguson’s friend Jimmy Reid once said, at his inaugural speech as rector of Glasgow University. “We’re not rats. We’re human beings.” In the same year that Reid led his “work-in”, during the 1972-73 season, Ferguson, in the twilight of his playing career at Falkirk, had been the spokesman for a “mutinous crew” who threatened to strike against the management over wages. As a young manager at St Mirren, he is reported to have asked the chairman for a Jaguar on the grounds that a less successful counterpart at Motherwell had one. In If You’re Second You Are Nothing (2006), a joint biography of Ferguson and the great Liverpool manager Bill Shankly, Oliver Holt suggests that the fundamental difference between the two men was that Shankly was not so seduced by the trappings of wealth. As late as 1999, Ferguson ended his first autobiography, Managing My Life, by strongly stating his opinion that his wages at United had not reflected his importance to the club.

Yet Ferguson does not admit any contradiction or even recognise it. In his view, a desire to be paid what one was worth was – and is – not an ignoble instinct. It was inherent to the rationale of the trade union movement in the first place. He recalls, interestingly, that the US firm in which he trained as a toolmaker was more intolerant of union activity than many of its competitors but paid higher wages.

More broadly, British socialism was not driven by a desire for equality or a taste for “levelling down” but by the conviction that skill and hard work deserved esteem, protection and renumeration. To be rewarded for exceptional hard work or outstanding skill was not a betrayal of where one was from, but the ultimate testament to the rules of life that one learned there.

***

As a fraternal creed, socialism had another important quality. It transcended the other modes of identification that could force working-class communities to turn in on themselves. In this respect, another central theme in Ferguson’s life and family upbringing was an acute awareness of the scourge of sectarianism.

Both he and his father were raised as Protestants; both married Catholic women. Notably, his father, whom Ferguson describes as a “humanitarian socialist” who moved away from religion in later life, spent time in the shipyards of east Belfast. There, he also played for the (predominantly Protestant) shipyard workers’ team Glentoran alongside the great Peter Doherty, who went on to manage the Northern Ireland team that reached the quarter-finals of the 1958 World Cup.

Alex Snr supported Celtic, despite raising his family less than a third of a mile away from the Rangers’ home ground, Ibrox Stadium. As the chairman of the local Celtic supporters branch, “Big Fergie” organised buses from the supporters’ club to Parkhead but banned the singing of IRA songs on the premises. Indeed, he even forbade the wearing of tribal colours in his own home (to the extent that his younger son, Martin, had to hide his Rangers scarf behind the toilet cistern).

Alex Ferguson personally experienced the sharp end of bigotry. Though he was a lifelong Rangers fan, he believes that he was poorly treated as a player at the club when it became known that both his mother and his wife came from Catholic backgrounds. “Since sectarianism is at the centre of that blood feud,” he has written of the “Old Firm” rivalry, “it is not something on which Scots can congratulate themselves.”

Alongside this anti-sectarianism was a larger view of what made the British nation and its component parts – a view that was once unremarkable, but now seems strangely antiquated. It is easier to understand if we consider Ferguson as a man whose self- image was forged in one regional power base (Glasgow), who was attuned to the importance of others (such as Aberdeen and Belfast) and whose great career success coincided with – and was linked to – the cultural and economic revival of another (Manchester). The last part of this story is one of the themes of the recently released film Class of ’92, the tale of “Fergie’s fledglings” – Ryan Giggs, Nicky Butt, David Beckham, Paul Scholes and Gary and Phil Neville – who came to prominence against the backdrop of a revived Manchester music scene in the early 1990s.

That is not to say that Scottishness is any less a part of Ferguson’s identity. He is said to have “Scotland the Brave” as a ringtone on his phone and regularly invokes Scottish qualities of determination and drive. Yet unlike Jimmy Reid, who moved from the Communist Party to the Labour Party and finally to the SNP, Fergie remains committed to both Labour and the Union. “I won’t change that ever. I’ve never been tempted to go to the National Party,” he says. He admits to being surprised by the success of Alex Salmond but believes that Scots will ultimately opt for Union at the forthcoming referendum. “I really hope they don’t win the argument,” he says of the nationalists. “I feel very strongly that Scotland does better by being part of the UK.”

There is a sense that he regards Scottish nationalism as something of an indulgence – an immature position. While his nationalist friend Sean Connery tells the story of one of Ferguson’s young sons refusing to swap his Scotland shirt with a Brazil fan at the 1982 World Cup, Ferguson labelled it simple “boyish patriotism”.

***

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. It has been evident in his early embrace of player rotation, innovations in training and sports science and perhaps above all in his repeatedly avant-garde choice of assistant manager.

Lurking behind it is an ingrained fear of failure and also a recognition, such as that which dawned on Clydeside in the 1970s and 1980s, that the world around you moves faster than you expect. “You say I’ve changed?” Ferguson once said as his relationship with his former captain Roy Keane broke down. “I hope I have. I would never have survived if I hadn’t changed.”

By such means, he has been able to transcend his immediate historical context while so many of his contemporaries were left behind or consigned to a previous era. The list of those who fell by the wayside is long: George Graham, Howard Kendall, Howard Wilkinson, Kevin Keegan, Graham Taylor and Kenny Dalglish are but a few.

Alongside this, another defining feature of Manchester United under Ferguson was that the core ethos of the team radiated outwards. The club was not geared to stifle, shadow or mimic its opponents. He was never a tactician in the mould of the great Italian coaches. In order to craft his teams’ identity in his image, Ferguson has often spoken of his need to establish complete “control” over his staff and players. Of all the criticisms levelled against him, he is perhaps most vulnerable and sensitive to the suggestion that he occasionally put control over loyalty. “Loyalty?” says Roy Keane. “He doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

In the recent Channel 4 interview, Snow suggested to Ferguson that this obsession with control – which had led to fallouts with Keane, Beckham and others – was perhaps a little “Stalinist”. Ferguson, understandably for a man who has read Simon Sebag Montefiore’s books on the Soviet dictator, recoiled. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “that’s a bit extreme.”

There is, however, something reminiscent of Lenin in his approach: an emphasis on the absolute importance of leadership to drive the revolution that he instituted at Manchester United (not to mention the network of informers in the town’s watering holes who told him of the whereabouts of some of the heavier drinkers at the club).

***

As I read this article back to myself, I realise that I am breaking one of my cardinal rules – to avoid the unnecessary intellectualisation of football, a simple game made complicated by idiots. But permit me one final indulgence in an effort to capture an elusive creed: what historians might call “the political thought of Sir Alex Ferguson”.

It is to apply what the French political philosopher Louis Althusser called a “symptomatic reading” in his attempt to understand Karl Marx. That was not simply to take Marx at his word but to examine what he left unsaid or unstated in a text: to draw out the implicit meaning of his thought and to consider both the silences and apparent contradictions within it.

So to the chapter in Ferguson’s second autobiography on “outside interests”. Aside from a passion for horse racing and vineyards, the catholicity of his reading tastes confirms the picture of a well-travelled and intellectually curious man. In addition to books about dictators, he has a library of works on “great men”: Mandela, Churchill, Mountbatten and even Gordon Brown’s workmanlike biography of James Maxton, the Clydeside socialist MP.

Above all, it is American history that dominates his intellectual interests. Muhammad Ali is his sporting hero. John F Kennedy is the politician who most fascinates him, closely followed by Abraham Lincoln. In his recent book and in interviews, he recalls a range of serious studies that he has read in the past few years: The Best and the Brightest by the Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam on the origins of the Vietnam war; Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life: John F Kennedy 1917-1963; Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (also a favourite of President Obama); and Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War Era by the Princeton University professor James M McPherson, whom he has met. In addition to a copy of the autopsy report of JFK and a collection of audio lectures on the civil war sent to him by Gordon Brown, he has works on Kissinger, Nixon, Rockefeller and Carnegie.

Ferguson, who owns a flat in New York, admires America’s “energies and vastness, its variety”. He speaks of the role that Scots have played in the shaping of both the United States and Canada, where they found outlets to “better themselves” and demonstrated their “determination to get things done”. The US – not unlike the world of football – can be an unforgiving place, but to Ferguson it is an arena in which heroism, bravery, hard work and the force of will can be rewarded.

Ultimately, with Alex Ferguson, what we are left with is a hybrid world-view, somehow combining the shipyard socialism of Govan and a pioneer’s version of the American dream. It may not pass the test of consistency or socialist purity, but it is not without a certain allure. l

John Bew is an award-winning historian and a New Statesman contributing writer

Sometimes it seems that clamping down on tax avoidance is the gift that keeps on giving - because no one really knows the scale of the problem, politicians can be very optimistic about the amount of extra revenue that can be generated. Danny Alexander claimed at this year’s Liberal Democrat conference that a clamp down would provide as much as an extra £10bn a year for the Exchequer by 2015. This is more than rhetoric; the government has been spending some of this additional money already. The commitments in the Autumn Statement to fund policies like the extension of free school meals and the freeze in fuel duty are balanced out by increased tax revenues from reducing avoidance. If those revenues can’t be found, then  the government will have to borrow more, raise taxes or make spending cuts elsewhere.

Today’s Public Accounts Committee report puts the Treasury’s claims on reducing avoidance in perspective. The committee concludes that HMRC "massively over-estimated" how much unpaid tax it would collect from UK holders of Swiss bank accounts. HMRC has only managed to collect £440m so far against an estimate of £3.12bn given in the 2012 Autumn Statement. In the light of these criticisms, it seems sensible to take a step back and interrogate HMRC’s figures.

HMRC makes a calculation of the 'tax gap' every year to guide its work on reducing evasion and avoidance. The gap is the difference between the amount of tax that should, in theory, be collected, set against what actually is being collected. Calculating it is very hard; by definition we don’t know exactly how much evasion or avoidance is going on, but HMRC has developed some analytical techniques by which to do so. 

What would a realistic reduction in this tax gap look like? As the chart below shows, the 'gap', as a percentage of total liabilities, declined from 8.3% in 2005 to 7% in 2012. Since 2008, the reduction has been more modest, falling from 7.6% to 7%.

Chart 1: The tax gap as a percentage of total liabilities

Source: HMRC 2012, ‘Measuring tax gaps 2013 edition: Tax gap estimates for 2011-12’, p.4

What does this mean for the future? As the UK economy begins to grow again, the likely total tax liabilities will increase, so even if HMRC does not reduce the relative size of the tax gap there will be additional revenue for the government to spend. While the size of the gap will continue to decline, it is unlikely that we will see a huge reduction. Between 2010-11 and 2011-12, the tax gap as a percentage of liabilities only came down 0.1%. If things continue at this rate, the gap will be 6.8% of the total estimated tax bill by 2014-15.

So how realistic was Alexander’s claim of "clawing back" £10bn a year to 2015? If we assume that the total tax liabilities will increase 10% per annum until 2014-15 (a very generous assumption) then to reclaim an additional £10bn a year the tax gap would have to fall to 5.2% of the total tax bill. This represents a 34% increase in the effectiveness of HMRC: implausible at the best of times, but doubly so given that HMRC is facing a further 5% cut in its budget over this period.

Chart 2: Actual size of tax gap vs. target tax gap

Source: SMF &HMRC 2012, ‘Measuring tax gaps 2013 edition: Tax gap estimates for 2011-12’, p.4

Perhaps recognising this challenge, George Osborne reduced the target from £10bn per year to £6.8bn in total over the next five years in this year’s Autumn Statement. That’s a massive reduction in ambition and it seems that Osborne expects HMRC to get less effective relative to the current trend in performance. If the current trend was kept up, HMRC would bring in an additional £13.1bn; so the Chancellor appears to now share the Public Accounts Committee’s scepticism, expecting it to do only half as well in closing the tax gap as it has been doing.

Arthur Downing is a Researcher at the Social Market Foundation

I wrote a really good column about a month ago. The joy was unconfined as I put it away, finished it all off – what a surge of emotion – so naturally I jumped in the air, ran round my room, then I tore off my shirt and rushed topless down the stairs.

The grandchildren, who were sitting drawing with their coloured crayons and eating muesli, their favourite occupation, carried on drawing and eating muesli, too young of course to understand how it feels to score a really good column. I went out in the street, looked for a crowd to jump into or even someone to hug. The postman was coming out of No 9 next door, so I jumped into his arms: what a fright he got, spilling all his Christmas cards. It was only then I realised how cold it was. I started shivering and couldn’t find my shirt or get back into the house, so had to ring the bell. My wife wouldn’t open the door. Eventually she appeared at the front window, holding up a yellow card, freshly coloured by the grandchildren.

I do so understand how players feel when they have scored a goal and I think it is really rotten that the ref always gives them a yellow card, two of which leads to being sent off, which is so unfair. What harm are they doing? How else are modern players meant to show their feelings?

In the old days, you walked back to the centre spot, perhaps the captain gave you a quick handshake, and that was it, on with the game. I have images in my mind from the 1960s of Bobby Moore with his shirt off, but this was after a game, swapping shirts with Pelé, en route to the dressing room.

Now we have all this emotional cuddling and kissing, not like traditional Englishmen. By the left, as my dad would have said, set the dogs on them. Either you have a group love-in, when they all pile on top of each other, often the whole team. Injuries do happen and it can take ages to unravel them, yet a ref never penalises them – oh no. Or you have an individual clutching his badge, which is totally phoney, as you know they will be off in the morning, given a half decent offer, or pointing at the name on his back, which is just showing off.

But when a single triumphant player takes his top off, he’s in the book. Why does he do it ? A need to wave something, feel free and naked, show off his toned torso, or just because he has seen others do it? That bit-part Morrocan player Oussama Assaidi, who came on for Stoke last week and got the winner against Chelsea in the 90th minute, had his top off in seconds and probably didn’t mind a yellow. A moment of glory, unlikely to be repeated.

But star Prem players do it as well, unable to help themselves. They don’t, after all, get many chances to let free. All those millions, the monster gated mansion, three top of the range motors, all the girls they can eat and yet they get so little joy.

Look at them, such miserable sods, bags under their eyes, weighed down with stress and pressure. So come on, we must allow them to celebrate that miraculous moment when the point of all their hard work and training, discipline and sacrifice, is at last achieved – the scoring of an actual goal. And yet they are not allowed the simple act of shirt-removing.

Oh it is so cruel. How they must envy those Geordie chaps at Old Trafford last week who spent the whole game half-naked, despite the bad weather, cheering on their heroes beating Man U. How did that start – fans stripping off? I don’t remember it in the past. Copying the goal-scorer? Proof they are tough and true supporters, unbothered by the cold? Showing off their torsoes? Ironically, as they are mostly lardy.

They don’t get penalised for doing it, which is good – in fact, I think they should be rewarded. Now that football is getting another £1bn from BT, where do you think it will go? Into the pockets of the players and agents. Yet it should go to the fans, if it is true as Barclays tell us that we are football. Reduce all ticket prices. With free tickets for topless fans.

Right, that’s another one done. No triumphant display this time. Boring, midweek away-draw sort of column ...