CentreRight

There's a man lives down the road from me, he's psychotic, a paranoid sufferer from a schizophreniform disorder. How I know is this, that whenever I walk past his flat, his road-facing ground-floor window is pasted over with imprecations against a universe he knows is conspiring against him. How dare they use my words against me rails the one I saw on Sunday evening. In the pit of despair myself (a cat had gone missing - at least that adventure in human existence had a happy ending) for the first time I stopped and read, fully, this man's public account of his fantasy. He was complaining about a freesheet from the council which, to his tortured psyche, appeared to be mocking his fears about the world. Common enough among the mentally ill, this delusion.

Now. Why did this memory come to mind when the email from Esteemed Editor arrived in my inbox on Monday morning, as it did in those of all Centre-Right contributors: please write about what good shall come from ending Labour's period in government. Not sure why I thought of my disturbed Hackney neighbour at first, so I probed at it, poked it with my tongue like you do a shoogly tooth, because it certainly was the first image which floated into view, and it's stayed with me 48 hours now, locked up in this dump of a hotel outside Heathrow. In the pool this evening I kept wondering about my neighbour's life, and it's only 14 metres long this pool, so that was 120 lengths required, and I had the place to myself, which is both bliss and torture for a swimmer: a lot of tick-tocking for a captured mind. Tick-tock. Captured minds. A good enough subtitle to the ten rotten years of this rotten government.

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So you start with an idea and you build a system to operationalise that idea: anyone can see you need a machine to make the idea a reality, to furnish it with a corporeality, so that the idea can become flesh, can become a plastic simulacrum of flesh at least, can take hold, can deliver the New Jerusalem. One idea is We Will Abolish Child Poverty and to meet this estimable objective you build a machine, you give it a friendly-like name, like, like, Sure Start, and as with all machines, it takes inputs - children - and gives outputs - the abolition of child poverty. Only the thing is, with machines, that you need engineers to look after them. And by the nature of their task, it's not impossible, in fact it's highly probable, in fact it's a certainty, that the engineers will soon enough professionalise their work, that the smooth operation of their machine will take on a greater importance to them than any of the actual inputs to it. Boxes have to be checked (there's an analogy here with another recent systems failure of such horror I can't bear to think about it). Failures are within tolerance limits. Another input will be along in a minute anyway.