CentreRight

You know that common-place assertion that one of the remarkable features of Jane Austen's novels is their failure to mention the Napoleonic wars? I read an essay by, I think, Margaret Atwood, which made the compelling point that Austen's failure to mention any political fallout of the tumultuous upset on the continent, other than by featuring a succession of military officers in romantic roles, is one of the keys to understanding her essentially Tory worldview. Well maybe.

I've been meaning to post onto CentreRight for days now, my head is full of stuff: about the Kirk in Scotland; about a book I've just re-read and what its author says about love; about a random act of beauty witnessed in the London Fields park on a sunny Friday afternoon, shortly before a random act of violence at the edge of the same park led to the death of another Hackney child in the early hours of Saturday morning. But any points to be made about any of these matters must, it strikes me, be of almost no general interest at the moment, as is the case for any political topic which isn't directly to do with the revolution sweeping the House of Commons.

If you were ever kind enough to be mildly curious about why I'm so grateful to be allowed to write here, it's because I think it may be important to try to shine a small light onto the politics of the everyday. I confess to no grand theory (other than love) and in fact distrust those who claim to have such a bigger picture, a phrase I detest. But the light from my shaky, amateur torch cannot begin to compete with the black hole of the Westminster carcrash, which is sucking every other story into its maw. Once light enters a black hole, of course, it never again escapes, and I wonder just how many topics, of perhaps national import, are being sucked in too, never to be seen again; topics, perhaps, which are being aired now precisely because their authors feel that they will escape proper public attention. 

Forgive the grammar of the title. I'm referencing the Obama slogan, and "Change in which I no longer believe" wouldn't resonate with it so much. Would that this were the only conundrum for the Tory supporter this morning.

Look, I'm no starry-eyed optimist, I probably have the lowest expectations possible of a Tory government. I'm not expecting white doves of peace to spontaneously circle Westminster on the arrival of DC at no.10, nor gazelles to leap from their wooded shade to nuzzle the laughing faces of happy children, nor, even, for much of the hideous legislation of the last 12 years to be unwound. I don't even expect the relationship with Europe to be sorted. When people get worked up about political issues, I don't. Not because I don't care. Just because I try to keep my expectations somewhere on the achievable part of the Want-Get axis.

Nick Cohen is my favourite writer of the Left, not least because he identifies and gnaws at the issues which the Left would rather he shut up about, most notably the tendency of some Leftist politicians (step forward Ken Livingstone) to fawn at the feet of clerical fascists whose views on women, social justice, homosexuality etc would cause the same politicians to organise a mass protest, were the clerics in question not seen as key to delivery of votes.

I'm feeling kinda mellow after the first al fresco lunch of the season, and I'm sat in the garden, flicking through websites, and I come across Standpoint, where I read Mr Cohen's most recent article, an article of such perspicacity and relentless hammering-home of revealed truth about the barren, pornographic heart of the Gordon Brown project that post-lunch sleepiness was banished.

Take this as an example:

Perfect, isn't it, and honest too (the 'characteristic' tendency of the Left to believe in their innate goodness). Like you, I'm sure, I've read many well-constructed articles which set out the reasons to be angry with Gordon Brown, but this one is in a league of its own, perhaps - and perhaps this is necessary - because Mr Cohen is a good man of the Left.

The whole article is here.

Most days of my professional life, I ponder the importance of coherence. That's because the concept has a very technical meaning - it has a life that escapes the bounds of its common English usage. Essentially, to be coherent means to make statements of induction ('What can I say about the Universe, based on these data in front of me?") which obey the calculus of probability. That probably sounds uncontroversial but in fact the dominant school of statistical inference resolutely refuses to obey what, for me, is one of only two laws of inference worth bothering about. Everything I subscribe to, in my working life, follows from obedience to a desire for coherent induction.

Well, and life would be dull indeed if it followed consistent patterns, no? Which is why Alice Miles' article in the Times this morning annoyed me a little. Ms Miles' view is that Tory policy is 'incoherent', a claim which she substantiates by saying that the Tories may increase spending on Health, but not on Education. Ms Miles' view, if I've understood her argument correctly, is that spending should increase on Education, but perhaps not on Health.

An original claim to coherent reasoning, but not one I wish to dwell on further. Instead I want to thank Ms Miles for helping me put my finger on what has been irritating me about lots of Tory coverage for some time. 'What are your precise plans?', Mr Cameron is asked, endlessly. 'Will you cut x% from budget y in department z? Or z% from budget x in department y? or both? or, like, neither?'. I don't find this a particularly productive line of questioning, not least because Mr Cameron isn't fool enough to provide any hostages to fortune. More, though, it's because these questions are just surrogates, taking the place of the question which perhaps the interviewer isn't even conscious of wishing to ask: What Sort Of Ideology Will Drive A Cameron Government? I solidly hope that the answer to this question is 'None'. More than that. I positively desire David Cameron's government to be incoherent.

To my left, a vast chemical-green sign announces: Asda 24 hours. To my right, the cathedrals of Matalan and TKMaxx, squatting in unholy alliance. Behind me a functional block of Town Hall, facing down onto this Water Garden. Concrete benches amongst clipped box hedges with a few steaming ponds of non chemical-green water, where bloated goldfish gasp for air. A fat man is throwing bread to the fish, while his wife looks on, impatient: --Poor f*ckers don't get 'nuff food. It is lunchtime, after all.

Even concrete melts in springtime sun. Lie on my back and close my eyes, let the space behind my eyes be dazzled, so that when they reopen the scene is bleached of colour. Voices buzz over the hot, heavy air, like flies adrift on the gentle warm wind. --[Don't you] 'ckin ignore me! --Awright I see ya! They're laughing, really.

I had stopped to pick up a coffee at the shop on the park's edge. --You don't look like your facebook photo, I mean, you look like I remember you at school, no it's a good thing. You can see I've shaved mine a bit since then, I'm a no-photo man I am, I'm the most unphotogenic man goin'. I sneak a look at them both - life tourist - while I'm waiting for my coffee. He's talking rubbish. They're both beautiful, both late 40s. Something good is starting here, the woman is smiling fondly while the man babbles faster, incapable of not releasing information he's been carrying about alone, for too long. --I lost my dad last year, thing is I told him I loved him just in time. A first date? Not their last.

Ian Tomlinson  Not a victim of the protestors, who didn't shower him with bottles in order to prevent medical attention getting through. That misinformation must have been given to the press through some unintentional error, at the same time that the police forgot to mention that they'd carried out a vicious and unprovoked assault on Mr Tomlinson themselves.

The other G20 protestor, given a good beating. No-one's allowed to film the police any more, are they? These protestors were a terrible nuisance to those wonderful banks, who've done nothing but good for the country. 

Jean Charles de Menezes. Not wearing a bulky jacket, didn't vault the ticket barrier, didn't resist arrest, wasn't alerted by the shout of 'Armed police' which wasn't ever issued, in fact. Some sort of unintentional error again led to all that misinformation being placed in the media.

Happy Easter first of all.

Not a hugely important point, this, perhaps, but it is one, in the maelstrom of smeargate this morning, which the mainstream media seem to be either missing, or willfully ignoring.

I heard Lance Price at the start of that dreadful Radio4 Sunday morning 'current affairs' programme, in between the bells and whistles and garbled poetry with which R4 treats Sunday news reportage, saying that the Right dominates the blogosphere because Labour are in government. Several other commentators have made much the same point. The implication is that once the purveyors of filth at No.10 are ejected from office, the British blogosphere will henceforth be dominated by the Left, by a process of some sort of critical osmosis.

They're partially correct, I would guess, of course, but there's something else, something quite important, which I think the Left are congenitally incapable of understanding. And if they do grasp the concept, they are incapable of implementing its practical consequence. It is that the British blogosphere - dominated by Guido Fawkes (I bow), Iain Dale (hurrah) and, of course, our own dear ConservativeHome - while certainly favouring a centre-right worldview to various degrees, are utterly independent of the entity called 'The Conservative Party'.

Guido was as much an attack dog to the Tories over Caroline Spelman's nanny as he has been over the much more serious McBride affair. Iain has written, I think, that his political career may have suffered by the candour with which he reveals his political thinking. And ConservativeHome, the gift to the centre-right, was started by Tim (I believe) as a reaction against the moves by Michael Howard to disenfranchise party members. All these Goliaths (in terms of readership and influence) are, in the Establishment sense, more akin to David, speaking for themselves come what may.

I've not been able to bring myself to read all the details of the torture of the children in Edlington; it's too distressing. And I'm not going to write, here, now, that by itself this horror tells us everything we need to know about the state of Britain today.

But.

Reading the Times this morning I came across this response from Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary (with my emphasis):

Did I read that right? He's using this distressing story to attack the Conservatives? He thinks there's a move afoot to demonise all 'groups' of children (why 'groups', I wonder?).

The estimable Mr Edward Leigh MP wrote a fascinating article for Platform today, in which he describes science or secularism as the Paradigm of Certainty, a paradigm whose approach, he claims is: if we cannot prove something scientifically, it is not truth.

This is, of course, nonsense, and Mr Leigh is far too intelligent to believe it, though it is one of the typical claims made by the antiscientific who seek to make religious belief a central tenet of public life. Science is fine, they say, for those test-tubey things, or for, like, making medicine or bombs or whatever, but when it comes to like the real stuff, the deep stuff, the what-it-is-to-be-human stuff, science is inadequate, and we have to give over to religion (typically 'my religion', but this isn't the place to list the contradictions between these competing theories, all of which claim universal application).

Scientific discourse is not a solid set of practice; there are different schools in the philosophy of science. But none of them - none of them - make the claim to provide certainty, about (almost) any theory (see below), and nor do they ascribe impossibility to something which cannot currently be tested (I'm writing this in Italy so I'm even more aware than normal that the root of the word 'to prove' means the same as to test or to try: provare, to try, in Italian). To an atheist, it feels much more as though religious people are the ones who lay claim to certainties ("I don't know you; of course, ultimately, I cannot know you, but I know you are sinful", or "When I die I will come back to life, somehow", or "God is love").

She would take his money and probably end up running his business. He should go, of course, Mr Wheeler. There's no place in the Tory party for someone who thinks he can buy its policy. I would think this regardless of the manner in which the putative policy purchaser made the money with which he seeks to buy his policies; but I admit that the more I've thought about Stuart Wheeler (whom I am sure is in real life a charming and good person), the more the plot of Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw's (in my opinion) masterpiece, has re-occurred to me.

We (by which I mean the people who run our party) were, prior to Mr Wheeler's political, ah, realignment, in the position of Major Barbara herself. Should we take this man's money, and do good with it? Or should we reject it, on the basis of its provenance? Some few aspects of my presbyterian upbringing have stayed fast within me; chief of which is that I abhor gambling. The haunted faces of men, outside the numerous bookmaker shops that my impoverished borough boasts, is one of the most depressing in urban life. Yes, yes, I know, free will, no, of course I would not ban it, but look at the face of the man who has lost his money, again, and tell me you do not think: someone is making money from this misery. I cannot think good of this. No doubt this is a personal failing. That you can now lose money on more gambled outcomes than mere horse-races, without as much as setting foot in a bookmaker's shop, is not my definition of progress.

A couple of observations coalesced into something approaching a feeling of foreboding this morning.

I came home from St Petersburg yesterday evening, very tired, passport-clutching, shuffling my way to the front of the weary immigration queue, not very here-and-now to be honest. So I forgot that on top of my bald head was a flat cap, worn both to protect myself from the freezing temperatures of the Russian weather I’d just left behind, as well as to signal Hey! I’m into indy jangly guitar type pop music to anyone interested. These semiotic signifiers, eh! I handed my passport over to New Labour’s frontline of border protection, a young woman resplendent in the toy-uniform designed by John Reid to give the impression that some sort of control is maintained over the country’s porous borders.

-- Could you take your hat off, please?

-- Oh, sorry, yes of course.

But here’s the thing. As I’m pulling the cap off, I look at her properly. Her entire head is wrapped up in a Muslim scarf, with only her eyes, nose and mouth visible: no forehead, no scalp, no chin on view. Fair enough. But my head is practically naked by comparison. I wonder, and I don't know, but if I had a headscarf on, would I have had to remove that? We look at each other a bit, then share a giggle. She can read my mind very easily.

I'm working my way through some revision today, trying out the exercises in Alan Agresti's excellent 'Categorical Data Analysis', because I've foolishly agreed to give a talk in May at a conference, and supplied an abstract claiming that I'll show X, Y and Z, when in fact I've yet to do A, B or C, and I'm realising that I've forgotten nearly everything I was taught about categorical data all those long, lonely decades ago. So back to square 1.

I'm finding it hard to concentrate though, and I'm loving the solidity of the word 'categorical' more than I'm into the statistical methods deployed to investigate such structures. My mind keeps wandering. I'm rolling 'categorical' around my tongue, and thinking of making a few such assertions. I feel an imperative to do so. Sorry.

It's as much Emily Thornberry's fault, this, as my inability to get to grips with multinomial likelihoods. She's the Labour member for South Islington, quoted in the Sunday Times this morning as saying: The richest have done best out of the good times. Now times are difficult, that needs to be shared. And who could argue with that? Ms Thornberry's idea is that 'the rich' should pay a higher proportion in tax now, to show they're feeling our pain. But who, exactly, is rich?

According to the Office for National Statistics, who released Labour Market statistics just last month, median public sector pay rose by 4% in 2008, while the private sector equivalent was 3.1%. This isn't a blip: it has been the trend since Labour came to power. Average pay in the private sector is now less well remunerated than in the public sector. These figures were the latest I could find on the ONS website, and so they don't take account of the news of those, such as the brave-minded men and women at companies like LDV, who are cutting their hours and their pay in an effort to stave off unemployment. To be  specific: the weekly median level of full-time earnings in the public sector was £523 per week in April 2008. In the private sector the figure was £460 per week. These figures are gross, i.e. before tax.

Hackney, Sunday morning: two men flicking through the papers

-- What do you, ah, think about this Julie Myerson woman?

-- Who?

-- You know, this woman novelist, she's written a book about throwing her son out the house for taking skunk?

“Alarm” quoted in The Independent today at the recent success of the BNP in a series of local government by-elections, most recently, and spectacularly, in the hitherto safe Labour ward of Swanley, in Sevenoaks, Kent. Well, of course I share that alarm, we all do - though I imagine the quality of the alarm has a more hysterical quality among Labour councillors, fearful of losing their seats. But I don’t share any of the surprise.

My partner K is an electrician, a properly qualified electrician, who gained his certificates through a three-year apprenticeship and then honed his skills in sixteen years with the RAF. Nearly five years ago, we set up home together. We had a choice about location: either K could move to Hackney, where I lived, or I could move to Saudi Arabia, where he was working. Not much of a difficult decision, that one! So here we are, comfortably happy in Hackney.

But K had to find a new job. This is what we found. That over the last few years, the wages on offer to skilled working men have been drastically reduced. Only a fleeting acquaintance with market economics is required to tell you why this should be. A sudden and vast influx of ‘similarly’ qualified artisans has significantly reduced the pay packets of native workers. Well, that’s understandable, and only an idiot would try to promise, Canute-like, to roll back that tide, by making fatuous remarks about providing ‘British Jobs for British Workers’. Oh.

Which made you more sick? The distraught face of Jade Goody, staring defiantly, yet with terror apparent, from the pages of the press, accompanied by the unavoidable phrases of faux-sympathy by the writers of the many, many articles about her diagnoses? Or was it, rather, the reaction of the professional carrion-feeders, rather than the original actor in this very real drama, which made the gorge rise in your throat? You know, people like Max Clifford, dripping sincerity, ubiquitous in (and the cause of, the cause of - this cannot be emphasised sufficiently - the man who is the cause of, who makes his living from) the unending coverage of Jade Goody’s illness, with his heart-tugging promises to raise as much money for Jade’s sons as possible - by selling the rights to broadcast every properly private moment left to her? 

Perhaps you were sickened by the mock not-me-guv look on the face of Britain’s youngest dad, our very own babyfather, posed by the photographers into a caricature of paternal care? He certainly deserves his place in the nation’s photo-album, as a Lesson To Us All. That’s why his images are so artfully arranged, of course. No subtext going on there! And who's that peering out from behind the attendant media frenzy? Why, of course, once again, Mr Max Clifford.

Iain Dale highlighted one of those funny (as in amusing) US websites the other day, where you answer questions (eg "Do you think that it's good to kill some people?") and are provided with a 2-d map showing where you live, politically, on a left-right and authoritarian-libertarian pair of axes. (Of course I came out almost boringly bang in the centre, though perhaps a tad too far to the left to justify writing in a place called 'Centre Right'. It's a big tent though, innit?) All good fun - try it for yourself - but it made me wonder about the limits. What are the limits to your own political space? How many dimensions (moving beyond 'left/right') do you think span that space?

I'm not going to try and reinvent the draft statement of conservatism. In any case, I suspect that the dimensionality of political affinity stretches way beyond anything that can be summarised in a space that can be drawn in two dimensions. But, while you would be hard pressed to say I am x cm to the left of zero on the left/right axis, I do think, sometimes, you come across an event which you know exists beyond your own upper limit of acceptability. I've read of two such events this morning.

The first is the most alarming & was most eloquently captured by Douglas Murray in his post yesterday, so I won't repeat much. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders has been denied entry into the UK, because the Home Office says it wants to stop those who want to spread extremism, hatred and violent messages in our communities from coming to our country. I know nothing about Geert Wilders but I know this: that in denying entry (or attempting to deny entry; one hopes that Mr Wilders will come anyway) to an elected member of the Netherlands' legislature (the Netherlands!), our government has forfeited its right to be viewed as merely corrupt and incompetent. I don't think it's inappropriate to view this act as sinister and deliberate. We're no longer conducting a still semi-theoretical discussion about what might happen if the wretched ID card is ever introduced. We're witnessing the government using executive authority to ban entry of an individual who has committed no crime other than to make a film of which the Justice Secretary disapproves. This is beyond the limit of what should be tolerated in a government: a government of the political party, moreover, which turns blind eyes to any number of preachers of hate (Livingstone & Qaradi, remember) and which saw fit just a few days ago to bend over backwards to lavish praise on the Prime Minister of a country which still harrasses and tortures its political dissidents.

Suppose you're on a game show and you reach the final stage, Select-a-Door. You have to choose one door out of three possible doors. Behind one is the jackpot prize (dinner with Michael Portillo, for example); behind the other two the booby prize (dinner with me and Michael Portillo). What's your chance of picking the winner? 1/3, right? Now, suppose you pick Door 3. The host - Noel Edmonds, of course - says to you OK, I'll help you. Behind Door 1 is one of the booby prizes. Do you want to stick with Door 3, or switch to Door 2? What should you do to maximise the chance of success? Switch, stick, or it makes no difference? (Answer at the end).

Most people not only answer this question wrongly, they feel so certain in their error that they react with anger to the correct solution. This is just one reason why I strongly welcome yesterday's announcement, that Carol Vorderman is to lead a taskforce for Michael Gove, to investigate ways to improve the teaching of maths in Britain's schools. Of course, given that I have a fondness for frayed corduroy trousers, prefer to cut my hair myself, and bought a very sensible anorak from Tesco to celebrate going to university, you might think well he would say that, wouldn't he? He's a maths geek.

But there are less esoteric reasons to welcome the announcement. Quite simply, an understanding of mathematical reasoning is, together with literacy and historical awareness, one of the most important gifts that a school can impart to its pupils. Why? I can see at least two main reasons: national scientific endeavour, and electoral literacy.

Labour's introduction of legislation, with the aim of protecting gay people from incitement to hatred, has already achieved its expected aim. It is one of the few successes of this dying administration. It has delivered everything which ministers and their advisers wanted of it. Yet the act will never attain the statute book. A contradiction? No.

I am not a cynical being, but I'll overcome my proclivity for optimism, with which I was born, and against which counselling has proven ineffective, to study the heart of this wretched proposal, to peer into the manipulative hearts of those who propose it. It's sole purpose is to shore up Labour's vote in the liberal, educated middle-class, to act as a reminder to them of everything they disliked about the last Tory government.

Indulge me for a moment, and don't argue with the proposition that a large proportion of educated people really did dislike the Tory party a few years ago. David Cameron has been markedly successful at making the Tory party their natural home again. The law is for the Margaret Drabbles of this world, who think it's usually best to be on the side of good things, and see kindness as one of life's immutable good things. They tend to know and like lots of gay people, and so are supposed to draw the inference 'This act will protect my good friend X. So I am in favour of the Act. Moreover, I'm in favour of the people who propose it, and against those who vote against it'. The legislation is designed for nothing more than to give editorial writers at the Guardian the reason they need to decide not to write leaders of cautious favour about David Cameron. Insidious, isn't it?

Rome

I move away from the guide-lady. I've already had a row with her, anyway. I asked her if she'd seen i Prigioni in the Accademia in Florence, surely the most powerful sculpture in existence. It is thirteen years since I stood in front of them, but I hear their whispering still. It is possible to fall in love with a statue. Anyway, she told me, yes, she'd seen them; they represented Michelangelo's belief that to get close to God, you have to chip away at all the unnecessary stuff of your existence, until all that's left is perfection, rising from the dust. I thought this was nonsense and told her so. I don't know how you can look at Michelangelo's statues and think about God. I look at them, and I think about Man. Walking away from my group I can hear the guide gleefully pointing at a picture of Plato and Socrates: They are in limbo! Limbo! and I'm thinking Don't you dare diss my heroes and pull the earpiece and her voice from my head, thinking, as usual, that Forster was right (I abhor Baedeker. If it were up to me every copy would be flung into the Arno). I enter the Sistine Chapel.

Maybe it was my new noise-cancelling headphones that gave me the courage to act, even if they make me look like a psychotic cyberman.

Maybe it was residual irritation at an article by Tony Travers, wrong-headedly claiming that no-one cares about Boris' pledge to reintroduce the Routemaster.

Maybe it was just that I'm beyond fed-up with the roadworks on Bishopsgate, which make the journey between the penultimate and final stop at Liverpool Street an arduous, tooth-grinding twenty-minutes-if-you're-lucky nerve-shredder. Who can say? But the worm finally turned.

What you do is this. While your bus is stationary, next to a pavement, politely ask the driver to open the door. When he refuses, reach up and press the red button marked DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON. THIS BUTTON WILL OPEN THE DOORS. Exit via the open doors. Breathe deep the heady air of liberation from one small claw of the control-freaks' machinery.

But what if you'd been hit by a cyclist? an open-mouthed colleague asked in horror. Well. I somehow managed to leap onto and off of Routemasters for about a decade without once flinging myself into the path of anyone else. What Professor Travers doesn't understand is the symbolism of the Routemaster. It's not (just) that they were and must again be a London icon. They were also a subconscious signal that we are adults and can make our own decisions. They must be returned to our streets. I don't need anyone else to tell me when it is and is not safe to step onto a pavement.

There's this woman, right, and she's almost naked, as am I, of course, only three tiny strips of ridiculous nylon covering our modesties, but we're grinning at each other, and it's so cold, feet like bricks: bricks, that is, which are able to feel and transmit pain, and I'm thinking, far from the first time, what on earth am I doing here? Why don't I just lie down in the corner like the bloke in that old hypothermia advert from the 70s? and these and similar thoughts fill my mind, dizzy-loud thoughts, until, bliss, they're annihilated by the shock of entry into the water. You know what I'm thinking. Wash me, thoroughly. I get a few lengths of this bliss, until the deeper, stronger, background thoughts loom up to the front of mind, looming the way that the other swimmers appear, suddenly, out of the mist: physical, inviolable, the collision course with consciousness.

And the looming thought I can't rid myself of this morning is: What Is A Conservative? I blame The Editor of this website, for producing lists which my paranoia tells me are designed to prove that, whatever makes a Tory, I am not that thing. But I am (that thing). So what's up? And can I do any better?

So. Dodge the slow bloke and turn. What made me a Conservative? and then maybe we can extrapolate from there. The immediate reason was exactly that - reason - coupled with adolescent fury. I was so incensed that there could be people alive who could not understand Thatcherite logic (control money supply, defeat inflation, ditto Scargill, lower taxes, Laffer curves, the lot), incensed in the way only a 15 year old can be, incensed to the extent that I would lie awake at night, grinding my teeth, aghast at the absurdities broadcast by The World Tonight, that I joined the North Ayrshire Young Conservatives. And then spent 23 years losing, gradually, bit by bit, almost all of that youthful certainty. So primary conclusion: ideology isn't a Conservative thing. Everyone (I think) agrees with that, but I suggest it goes a bit further. A Conservative is someone who understands that politics is not mathematics, and outcomes cannot be deductively proven given a finite set of policy inputs ("Pull Lever X and Get Outcome Y"). This is my first (anti)axiom of Conservatism: political plans do not deliver desired outcomes. Other stuff will happen. Only an optimist or a socialist believes otherwise. (The corollary of this axiom is that a Conservative detests the politics of the machine, but I've maybe banged on enough about that).

The Pope has said that saving people from homosexuality is as important as saving the rainforests ... something like that was the first thing I heard this morning, weaving my way back to consciousness, to the headlines on Today. I look at Keith. He looks at me. Is the tea ready?

Yes, this is going to be personal, but I don't think that matters, in fact it might be important. Some Christian leaders say these things, I think,  because - unlike the wholly wonderful Archbishop of Canterbury - they think that a focus on the bigger picture is more important than consideration of individuals. When the leading Vatican official in October described homosexuality as a deviation, an irregularity, a wound I imagine he was thinking of the bigger picture, and not about all the individuals he must know who are physical manifestations of this deviation, this irregularity, this wound.   

The bigger picture goes something like this: God determined that we would have two genders, and that only single couples formed from one of each of those genders would sexually couple, and then only for the reason of reproduction. Therefore, any deviation from this pattern is a sin, is sinful, and ... this is where it breaks down a bit ... homosexuality is particularly wrong, almost uniquely so in the universe of pathology, probably because it mimics a bit too closely for comfort the ideal model. I've written elsewhere that we make too big a fetish of our biological variability, and that such a fetish leads to the growth of Identity Politics (one thing the Pope and I can agree upon).

OK but let's give the Pope's ideas a go. Let's do a thought experiment. Turn left. Rewind the clock. Let's start the day again, but without the homosexuality:

The Pope has said that saving people from homosexuality is as important as saving the rainforests ... something like that was the first thing I heard this morning, weaving my way back to consciousness, to the headlines on Today. I look at Keith. He looks at me. What are you doing in my bed?

Tim posted a piece on Tory Diary, regarding speculation at Westminster that an early election is imminent. I know, I know, why would you care what I think about the potential date of an election? But I think the early speculators are wrong.

Brown will wait as long as possible. The Quietus, remember? There is no benefical electoral outcome available to hundreds of Labour MPs; the only thing left for them to do is claim their salaries as long as they possibly can. Until the electoral waters close over their gaping, empty heads.

From this morning's Times:

Did officer Charlie 12 shout the words “armed police” at Mr Menezes before firing? Jury’s answer: no

Did Mr de Menezes move towards Charlie 12 before he was grabbed in a bear-hug by officer “Ivor”? Jury’s answer: no

The officer said Mr de Menezes had moved aggressively towards him and made him fear he was in mortal danger. Passengers said they did not see any such action.

And on the damning list goes. Nearly everything which the Met told us at the time of Mr Menezes' death, and subsequent to it, has been shown to be untrue. We already knew that the officers concerned were allowed to write up their notes on the incident together, to ensure that their accounts coincided with one another; now we know that their version of what happened was not believed by the jury which heard their evidence.

You don't always get the chance to right a wrong. Last week I was approached outside Liverpool Street station by a young man, who asked me for money. Not unusual and I generally donate a pound or two, whatever's in my pocket, but that morning I was rushing and I did that frazzled smile thing, the apologetic gosh I'm sorry I'm in a rush thing, eyes elsewhere, sorry mate not just now, can't you see, I'm a busy person with a proper job. The trouble was, the young man had an infection, and his face was swollen, and he was in distress, and I walked on and caught my train, and this was wrong, this was a failure.

Well. I just saw him again, doing the rounds at Cafe Nero, outside the station still. It's freezing cold and raining. His face is better though. This time I bought him coffee and asked him about himself, because I have a fear that people like him - Pawel - can go for days without any proper human interaction. My biggest fear is loneliness and I project it onto the homeless (another failing, I know). His English is very poor, and I'm guessing that's why he's not managed to make a go of it in England. He wants to go home. Of course he does. I gave him some money. I know, I know. Who was I really trying to help? Is a moment's fragmentary connection any more use than no connection at all? I have to hope that it's so.

There must be many such men in London now, washed into our country on the crest of Euro-expansionism, only to find that the streets here are paved with misery. More soon, with the construction industry in decline. My favourite novel this year was The Road Home, by Rose Tremain, about one such immigrant. At least that story, being fiction, had the capacity for a happy ending. I hope Pawel's real story does too.