Open letters claim to restore moral clarity; but too often they spread confusion. Open letters purport to express obvious truths; but recent events have highlighted the worrying tendency of the genre to be hijacked for counter-productive ends: to express obvious non-truths, for example, or — and this can be worse — non-obvious non-truths.

Some of the foregoing dangers are, we believe, inherent in the collective epistolary form itself. The trick, in crafting the perfect open letter, is to give maximalist expression to a minimalist position. Authors of open letters need to be selective enough in relaying the background “facts” of their case so as not to alienate potential signatories: these are celebrities we’re dealing with, remember, and therefore natural free-thinkers. At the same time, one has to give the letter enough moral phlegm to make it worth clearing one’s throat to put one’s famous name to it. 

The result — you might call it Maier’s Canting Theorem — is that the assessable argumentative content of an open letter is inversely proportional to a weighted average of the fame and number of the celebrities whose names are appended to it. In the place of explicit reasoning, in the course of which a position’s flaws and vulnerabilities are all too liable to be exposed, the reader of an open letter is treated to broad moral pronouncement, rendered in a high-committee prose style, and which tends to veer towards melodrama and alarmism. 

Needless to say, we, the undersigned, feel this chilling trend poses an existential risk to democracy, harms the most vulnerable in our society, and is likely to eradicate life on Earth as we know it.

OPEN LETTER: Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public. Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for… pic.twitter.com/QLQel0EC7N

— The New Statesman (@NewStatesman) October 21, 2026

Connoisseurs of the open letter have by now probably seen the above-described defects recently on display in the public tangle that The New Statesman has got itself into. In a letter whose length is robustly predicted by Maier’s theorem — being really more of a tersely-worded postcard with 158 signatures — the magazine denounces as unconscionable the recent “censorship” of the novelist Sally Rooney. 

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The facts of the case are well-known. Among the political causes close to Rooney’s heart is Palestine, and a group called Palestine Action. Rooney has pledged to use royalties to support the group — despite the fact that it was lately sanctioned as a terrorist group by the British government, making funding them an offense. We, the undersigned, cannot help but conjecture that Rooney might have got away with her wheeze — were it not for the fact that she announced her intention to break the law in advance, and in a manner almost designed to attract attention. Given the legal jeopardy, at any rate, Rooney’s publisher at Faber has decided, with the author’s consent, to suspend sales of her novels. 

Now, we do not wish to take a collective stand on the controversial question of whether Rooney’s silencing omens a sinister curtailment of the right to free speech. We only wish to note that, if a novelist’s right to free expression includes a guarantee that others must cooperate in activities which the author loudly declares will be used to raise funds for terrorists on British soil, Rooney may well have a complaint.

It is one of the rhetorical liberties taken by open letter writers that they sometimes pass off caustic jibes as concessive praise. We only wish to add, then, that the Statesman’s own letter exhibits, rather brilliantly, one further trick common of the form: that of smuggling in inflammatory speculations to the extra-epistolary text, which the signatories themselves might have preferred not to be implicated in. In this case, there is a somewhat daring analogy attempted between the fates of Sally Rooney and Salman Rushdie. Just consider, we are invited to reason: both write novels; both have had trouble selling them in Britain at one time or another; both… have the initials “SR”? (At some point, the brainstorming exercise takes a slightly feeble turn.) 

Still, we note that one further peculiarity of open letters is that, once they begin to attract enough ink below the line, they inevitably tend to be judged as much on the basis of those who notably fail to sign as on the basis of those who do. (That may be more a “feature” than a “bug” of the genre: the creation of an implicit cost to withholding assent being part of the form’s coercive effort to organize public thinking). Notably, though presumably he was invited to, Salman Rushdie did not sign.

These quagmires give only a merest hint of the varied trouble open letter writing can lead to. Though they pretend to give a voice to suppressed truths, too often they simply echo a preachy moral consensus. Though affecting nuance, their inevitably coarse-grained rhetorical style is a standing disinvitation to detailed engagement. Even well-intentioned interventions — the famous 2020 Harper’s letter championing free speech — can undermine their own cause in subtle ways. Having spent so much time throat-clearing about the threat of “right wing demagogues”, “Donald Trump”, and slavishly assenting to the need for more DEI, the Harper’s letter may have done more to underscore the inescapability of a woke consensus than it did to oppose it.

Or consider — if you can bear to — the glaringly avant-garde approach that Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project takes to his open letters. One recent exhibit, a letter in defense of Jason Arday’s right to evade media scrutiny, was a superficially well-reasoned account made about an utterly alternative reality. Arday, the 21,000 undersigned agreed, was facing “entirely false allegations of plagiarism”. There was “no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing” against him. The “baseless allegations” were therefore a “right wing” smear campaign. “Universities must ensure that excellence is protected and that every scholar is judged on the merit of their work, not the color of their skin,” the letter concluded, apparently without irony. If ever it is complacently assumed that the open letter lends itself to the service of clarification, then here is evidence that it is just as easily commandeered as a vehicle for the brazen propagation of falsehood.

The home stretch of an open letter is the time to get expansive; and even in denouncing them we, the undersigned, do not wish to buck the form. Why do people set so much store by open letters? What epistemic authority are these bewildering lists supposed to exert over us? Someone who thought moral opinions more reliable when dispensed by motley bands of intellectuals would seem, on reflection, as mad as someone who thought all songs sound better when performed by Live Aid. Yet the appeal of the genre seems to rest on the strange assumption that when a missive has been jointly audited and solemnly endorsed by a mongrel committee of bewilderingly disconnected names, it enjoys some strange, placeless authority. “If Kneecap, Zadie Smith, and the Chichele professor of social and political theory can all agree on this one”, such letters seem to ask, “why can’t you?”.

Needless to say, in a world without open letters floating about, some might justly worry about where we are to get our opinions from, and how we are to verify that they are in good standing with the moral majority. We acknowledge that this is a serious problem. However, having consulted each other, we believe it best that everyone should think for themselves. 

The very familiarity of the situation provides a harmless holiday from political reality. Every autumn, politicians, their staffers and SpAds all rock up at one of the handful of provincial, fully disability-accessible convention centers within tolerable distance of London. Appropriately appalled by what they discover upon arrival, they quickly decamp to a heavily fortified conference zone. (Birmingham’s ICC has the reassuring further feature of being protected by an extremely confusing warren of canals that doubles as a kind of moat.)

If you play your cards right, you need never leave the militarized perimeter again. “Are you going to the GB News party later?” I ask one Kemi aide in passing. “That’s outside the secure zone, isn’t it? Feels a little risky” was his well-reasoned reply.

It is from behind these layers of police protection, airport-style metal detectors and assorted buffer zones that the members of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition take up their annual opportunity to reflect on the question of how well they and their policies are being received by the public at large. In this task they are helped by perhaps the most unrepresentative sample of humanity imaginable: the Tory party delegates. If the ICC’s acoustics were less muffled, the building itself would be a physically-realized echo chamber of sorts. As an exercise in controlled, unbiased political thinking, it is a hopeless environment to work in. “I would rather take advice from my valet than from the Conservative Party Conference,” Arthur Balfour long ago complained. Little has changed. Political reality feels a long way off.

The job facing journalists is, if anything, more absurd. For many of the press pack, remember, this is the end of a long and desperate Odyssey: carried on a river of bad white wine from the Reform conference in early September, via the Lib Dems and Labour, they have finally washed up here in Birmingham. Pros that they are, they begrudgingly press their distended livers against yet another pre-fab countertop and clutch at the array of pre-poured drinks on offer.

The journalist’s job, as it is widely interpreted, is highly impressionistic: an art half-heartedly dressed up in the language of science. It is to “take the temperature” — or, in modern parlance, assess the “vibe” — of the party, using the motley self-selected crowd assembled as one’s meager evidential base. It doesn’t help that one is always in the process of recovering from, or contributing to, another day’s hangover. Nor is one’s sense of mental equilibrium much improved by the vaguely Lynchian tableaus that constantly meet the eye at Conference — the lurid confusions of props and personages that seem like stills from a nightmare. Turn the corner and you might see Michael Fabricant chowing down on a meat feast in the atrium of Pizza Express, while Nick Watt scampers around in your peripheral vision. Later, you walk into a Young Tory drinks and confront Kemi herself stiffly hitting the decks from behind pimped-out dark glasses as a handful of the more photogenic young Tories gyrate at her shoulders.

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In this unsteadying environment, all kinds of mad theories and inferences are given an unwarranted free pass, many about the “Kemi bounce” the Tories are supposed to be enjoying. The “vibe” is said to be buoyant. Any positive development is alighted on as further confirmatory evidence. A flurry of distracted excitement meets the surprise arrival on day two of Jeremy Clarkson; but no sooner has he arrived than he punctures the mood. “A lot of people seem to have come dressed as seats,” he says, scanning the thinly populated upper echelons of the main hall.

In brazenly self-deceived mode, one CCHQ staffer speculates loudly that the visible improvement in the attractiveness of the young men in attendance, as compared with last year, is a surefire indicator of a coming recovery in the party’s electoral fortunes. I strain my eyes to see whether I can follow his reasoning. From what I see, I infer that the standalone mustache has finally made a fashion comeback (a long-awaited recovery, perhaps, in the face of the near-fatal countervailing influences on male grooming provided by AIDS and Adolf Hitler); but beyond that, little improvement is obvious.

Whether down on their luck or high on their own supply, when too many Tories gather in one place the behavioral default tends to be a kind of campy self-send-up that offers little opportunity for informative generalization to the country at large. In absurd homage to Jacob Rees-Mogg — who is in high demand following his triumphant YouTube confrontation with Tucker Carlson — young men scuttle about in oversized double-breasted suits and unflattering haircuts. They lark around next to a cardboard cutout of a warm-ale-swilling party chairman Kevin Hollinrake and his (presumably Right-wing) black Labrador. The widely-celebrated centerpiece of conference, and the cutting edge of CCHQ-inspired humor, is a mock British Museum exhibit that lampoons the previous two years of Labour government through the medium of tapestry.

Optimists remark that the “vibe” is more self-confident than last year’s. To others, the notable absence of the fractious troublemakers who now prefer to booze with Nigel at Reform conference is an unsettling sign that the Tories have become narrowly pedestrian, comfortably middle class and overwhelmingly Southern. That said, the Reform-coded fringe events seem notably fuller than their ploddingly centrist alternatives: turning up to one on the “Boriswave”, I find the venue full and operating a one-in-one-out policy much more discriminating than anything the Tories ever imposed at the country’s border.

The problem with trying to infer anything much on the basis of Tory conference is that for every pre-conceived theory, either exultant or pessimistic, there is an available metaphor. For the optimists, the bullishly pinstriped Thatcherite cosplay being indulged in and campily-named defense initiatives like the “Britannia shield” are taken as signs of renewed political vigor. For defeatists there is no shortage of equally potent material — for instance, the full-sized military drone that is suspended mid-tailspin from the ceiling of the main hall for “Defense day” and hangs there throughout the under-attended proceedings.

At one point, Sir John Curtice turns up to a fringe event (“Back in the Game?”) run by the cross-party think-tank Demos to remind the more extravagant vibe-detectorists in the audience that, their excitable theories notwithstanding, the Conservatives are currently averaging 20% in the polls. That is, they languish several points behind where they found themselves in 2024, when they suffered their worst defeat in history. 

There may be no alternative but for political party conference season to incubate these sorts of escapist political fantasies. In this context, the fantasies are probably also fairly harmless. The greater danger seems to be when comparable distortions creep into policy, where the specific method of flight from reality that comes easiest to both main parties is to seek refuge in in-house nostalgia. In his continued railing against the past “40 years of neo-liberalism”, and in his insistence that the political clock must be cranked back, Andy Burnham is in the most literal sense anti-progressive: a rhetorically talented Left-wing sentimentalist. His proven ability to make the Cabinet applaud and weep like North Korean news announcers conveniently conceals the fact that his existing policy platform is a piecemeal array of petty redistributionist interventions dressed up as something more visionary: a resuscitated Help-to-Buy housing scheme, £2 bus fares, VAT off electricity bills, and a fanciful pledge to end rough sleeping. Even if considered well-intentioned rather than time-wasting distractions, the parochial scope of these policies hardly seems well proportioned to the priorities of a modern, national government.

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As Badenoch took to the stage on Wednesday, the overwhelming strategic temptation was to accept the terms of Burnhamism’s backward-looking framework in the expectation of a victory on the same nostalgic terms. With Burnham invoking the pre-Thatcherite Seventies, the obvious reaction is to advocate for a return to the Eighties and the free-market-fueled Thatcherite boom it brought with it. Many, after all, if they visualize this Burnhamite Britain for even a moment, can imagine or recall how drab it actually was. In anticipating a “battle for the soul of this nation” of a kind not seen “for more than half a century”, Badenoch seemed at times to welcome an ideological contest litigated along these broad historical lines. Over the course of the conference, depending on their tolerance for party political theorizing, Tory delegates skimmed or studied “The Right Way”, Badenoch’s 100-page pamphlet produced in self-conscious imitation of Mrs Thatcher’s own 1976 mission statement. 

It would be much better if the differences between Burnhamism and what, for the time being, is called “Kemistry” could be developed without so much recent historical allusion being projected onto the debate. Though there are real obstacles within her own party ranks to doing so — the eccentric shire traditionalists, veto-playing Nimbyists, and triple-lock-addicted pensioners — what Kemi Badenoch really needs to do is out herself in historically-unhedged terms as a genuine “progressive”. 

That needn’t mean favoring the kind of progress that Tories of 50 years ago imagined; nor should it mean “progressive” in the moribund woke sense of that term; but a progressive in the only sense that counts — in the sense of someone who actually promotes cultural, political and economic progress. The manipulations and errors of gender ideology, which Badenoch opposes, are, after all, just as much a part of broadly anti-progressive politics, as are the impositions of the over-regulated administrative state advocated by Burnhamite Lefties. In both cases, it is part of their deeper deception to present as advances what are actually catastrophic regressions. 

The phrase “Right-wing progressive” is of course incongruous enough to the modern ear that it strikes some as borderline infelicitous. Part of the rhetorical victory that the Left has won in recent decades is to establish an unearned but powerful monopoly on the very notion of progress. The act of reversing such a rhetorical power-grab is one Machiavelli famously argued might require an effort of “rhetorical redescription” on the part of a skillful leader. In the later chapters of The Prince — where he recalls the use of the Roman rhetoricians’ technique of paradiastole — Machiavelli alludes to the expedience of redescribing vices as virtues in the effort to take control of powerful concepts for one’s own advantage. 

Though the practice can clearly be deployed to, as it were, “Machiavellian” ends, it is one no leader intent on remaking the political weather, for either good or ill, can easily do without. With backward-looking political nostalgics to their Right and Left in the form of Reform UK and Labour, the Tories might find that claiming to be Westminster’s true future-oriented “progressives” might be their best shot at political survival. But that kind of reimagining is difficult to achieve over the course of a few days in a heavily fortified echo chamber in Birmingham. 

Of course, there remain some ubiquitous animal behaviors whose fitness-enhancing value remains a true mystery. Why, for instance, do creatures ever panic? That is, why do they fail to respond in a well-controlled way to environmental threats; why do they muddle important considerations and unimportant ones; why do they sometimes “act-out” or fail to act at all when the stakes are at their very highest?

One has only to look at the two mesmerizing examples of political panic put before us by the Labour Party this week to see how vividly dysfunctional a reaction it is. Politicians rarely face such a clear-cut test of their survival instincts as Keir Starmer did on Tuesday — a reckoning, moreover, largely of his own orchestration. No. 10 strategists apparently toiled long through the weekend to ensure his latest reset speech — his 10th? his 20th? — would see off his challengers.

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Surely, faced with the political equivalent of a fight-or-flight threat to his life, Starmer’s reaction would not be the familiar rehearsal, adenoidal in sound and spirit, of a few pre-announced policies and coma-inducing oratorical leitmotifs (“I’ve learned a lot in the first two years in the job. In terms of the policy challenges our country faces…”)? As it happened, like a creature paralyzed by the overwhelming odds against it, Starmer didn’t even attempt to deviate from his tried-and-tested soporific style, whose only appeal at this stage must be its sheer familiarity: a flat, dull, self-derivative piece of oratory. In a truly courageous piece of spin, a listening Labour party apparatchik ventured that he had never heard Starmer speak so “personally” about his background. Ah, yes, Keir Starmer: famously unwilling to use his working-class background as a rhetorical crutch and positively cagey about his father’s mystery profession.

Alongside panic manifesting as overthought underreaction, we have witnessed panic as mindless overreaction. By her own admission, the backbench MP Catherine West hadn’t even looked up her own party’s internal rules before initiating her assault on the Starmer premiership. Still 100 or so of her colleagues signed onto her aimless plan — apparently insensitive to the consideration that whoever replaces Starmer is highly likely to be worse, not least in some of the very same respects that he is already bad. To panic is often to regard action — any action at all, even those that make things worse — as better than failing to act at all.

Philosophers have recently become interested in the idea that groups, as well as individuals, might have mental states — and, therefore, that actions and behaviors might be attributed to them too. In Westminster’s strange ecosystem, one such creature is the lobby: the political media itself. Its unusual, apparently counter-adaptive trait is to thrive on panic. The combination of rolling news coverage, diabolically amplified by the restless Sauron’s eye of X, may as well have been designed to initiate the equivalent of speculative runs on politicians’ political capital. Always on the alert for the first tremors of chaos or collapse, its standing inclination is to direct its disordered attention to every fresh twist of the news cycle. To the chronically online, there is a special sense attached to a “good day” on X: it is one in which, by a kind of dispersed psychological alchemy, the site seems to act as a single collective intelligence — achieving a kind of flow state in which a steady stream of breaking news and claxon emojis melds seamlessly with parody, self-reference, and a commentary providing an instantaneously memeified parallel reality. Has two-tier Keir become two-year Kier? Is No. 10’s sexy lectern man getting a good night’s sleep before his next big outing? Has the prime minister appointed Myra Hindley as children and safe-guarding minister as part of is latest ingenious reset? Wouldn’t it be oh-so-funny if Samantha Niblett, champion of Labour’s ill-conceived “summer of sex” campaign, becomes the “69th” MP to disown her prime minister? The chains of mutual-reference and random association are akin to the thoughts of a disordered mind: the significant and insignificant competing for shared space. When the Johnson government was brought to its brink, ministers were resigning faster than they could be feasibly replaced: the speed and publicity of social-media announcements creating a sense of uncontained, perhaps uncontainable, chaos.

Johnson was correct when, delivering his resignation speech from outside No. 10, he bitterly noted that “at Westminster, the herd instinct is powerful and when the herd moves, it moves”. What he didn’t mention is that such speculative runs would be near impossible to achieve without the coordination mechanism now provided by modern media. Under previous regimes, politicians found room for maneuver amid the comparatively slow speed of information. Just consider the astonishingly quaint recollection Ken Clarke gives of Black Wednesday, when Britain crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. Having “pottered around” at the Home Office a bit, Clarke joined Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd who were “cooped up” in Admiralty House, “drinking tea [and] hoping against hope that a second-interest rate rise would work” to avert a sterling crisis. Only some hours into the afternoon did it occur to any of them that, in their splendid isolation from the flow of information, they “were probably less well informed than perhaps anybody else in the United Kingdom about exactly what was going on”. “We began to search for a transistor radio.”

However counterintuitive, in political crises too much information can be as destabilizing as too little. The reasons Britain has recently surpassed Italian levels of prime-ministerial replacement are probably overdetermined. But one important accelerant to the many underlying problems is the dysfunctional epistemic environment, one which offers a surfeit of opportunities to overreact to new information. Recently, Daniel Kodsi and I have argued that there is a distinctive kind of intellectual pathology associated with the temptation towards “presentism”, and more generally the temptation to attach outsize significance to incoming data simply because it is novel or striking. Of course, “presentism” might as well be the in-house motto of rolling news: with its stunted attention span and breathless inability to differentiate between what is significant and what is merely novel.

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Of course, the harried reporters of rolling news and locked-in situation-monitors of social media might with some justification claim that their business is a short-term market in novel information. But it is telling that when the hive mind of the modern press is thrown into overdrive, even the criterion of novelty is relaxed: the more basic objective being a manic exercise in pattern recognition for whatever will stoke controversy, and keep the perpetual motion-machine of the news cycle humming at full speed. For that purpose, old news repurposed as revelation will do just as well — aided and abetted by the kind of collective amnesia that comes naturally to a mind that lives in a permanent present. The news that Peter Mandelson had “failed to pass” security vetting in the run up to being posted to Washington as ambassador had been prominently reported in the Independent months before being resurrected as chaos-inducing scoop when its political valence changed. Likewise, clearly not recognizing the moralistic potential of what they had unearthed, the Mail on Sunday reported in gossipy style on early events in the scandal that would become “Partygate” a year before the press adopted the cause with monomaniacal fervor. As was so clear with Partygate, the media’s characteristic priority — to prosecute every fresh detail of a rolling saga under the crudest moral lens to hand — can often actively inhibit the effort to collectively confront harder questions, about, say, the justification and efficacy of lockdowns themselves.

Now it is Starmer’s turn to be the subject of the modern media environment’s special ability to speculate a crisis into being. Pathologically dull and terminally unimaginative, Starmer hasn’t changed a bit since being elected. That the local elections would result in catastrophic Labour losses was not only eminently predictable, but widely predicted, not least by journalists who lusted for months over the political instability that might result. The deeper, underlying difficulty — that Labour’s existing policy program is unequal to alleviating any of the country’s long-term structural or cultural ills — should not come as a surprise to anyone so close to Starmer as to actually be one of his sitting MPs. Why panic now, then, when the evidence of political malaise has been so clear for so long? In an environment dominated by noise, perhaps they can no longer pick out a long-run signal.

More to the point, why think for even a moment that any successor to Starmer would be able to resist the modern media’s predation? The hankering after instability and hunger for panic that moves the news cycle is constitutive to its operation, and not so much — as commentators used to speculate about successive Conservative leaders — something that results from an individual leader’s ability to project “vision” or competence. Britain, as many of the media’s commentators like to observe, seems to have become “ungovernable”: a verdict that should be delivered as much in a spirit of self-congratulation as impartial observation.

My Saturday evening began just over the road from the White House, waiting to see if Clavicular had sufficiently recovered from his overdose to make a much-heralded appearance at the Substack party along with the one Democrat whose phenotype is Chad enough to have gained the looksmaxxer-in-chief’s prospective electoral endorsement, Governor Newsom. In the end, the secret service arrived before either men-of-the-moment, sealing off the street and sending security swarming up the main stairway of the Renwick Smithsonian Gallery to place the entire party under lockdown. No leaving! we were told. No, not even to go to the Time Magazine party at the Swiss Embassy. At least for an hour or two. Commanded at gunpoint to return to the open bar — a degree of compulsion that I sensed was quite unnecessary — we did our duty and obeyed.

Before that night’s armed assault, however, the main battle of the week lay in gaining access to one party in particular: the inaugural Grindr WHCD Party in the prime-time Friday night slot. According to breathless reporting in Vanity Fair — who, one notes, have a party of their own to plug — Grindr’s was among the “most sought-after invitations of the weekend”: “the talk of the town”. A spread of “top power gays” were forecast to be in attendance. How exactly, I wondered, would this serve to differentiate it from the scores of other parties held throughout the year in the district of Columbia? There was only one way, I was repeatedly told, to find out.

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Arriving just before 10pm, thinking it best to make Grindr the last pit-stop of an overworked evening, the sight that first met the eye was a little discouraging. The venue was an unsellably large Georgetown townhouse, now re-purposed as an “event space”. Leading up to the colonnaded entrance was a club-style line of some hundred or more restless male homosexuals, and the occasional ally, showing no visible sign of forward movement. The ominous phrase “one in one out” was being thrown around. Worse still, it transpired, this was the line for people who had been invited. Mainly “circuit gays”, a chaperone who I had acquired on the way observed, deploying expert local knowledge. All the same, poor form from Grindr, I thought, to insist you can host only to leave your men begging entry from the curb.

At the business end of the line, and somewhat to the detriment of any “one in one out” principle, a more interesting sociological spectacle played out. Every 30 seconds or so a monstrous black SUV would pull up to the entrance, the doorway closely guarded by half a dozen blonde women wearing Britney-mic headsets. An entourage would emerge — “power gays”, I inferred – and either cruise straight through the doorway unopposed, or thrust an iPhone mid-call towards the chief headset-wearer, putting her in touch with a mystery speaker – identity unknown – who seemed to have the power to compel admittance faster than words could be spoken. Occasionally, there was a negotiation. “I have two of Karoline Leavitt’s boys coming from across town, I want to make sure they get let in”, one arrival barked at a headset blonde, holding her eye with an intensity seldom seen outside of an ophthalmological examination room. Unable to take the press secretary’s name in vain myself, it was clear I was going to have to rely on my ability to project a certain amount of soft power. A minute or so later, I was received indoors.

Commentators who insist the current mood of American party politics is antipathetic to gay interests might have had trouble explaining the scene inside. A Where’s-Wally panorama of half-familiar state department faces, mixed in with the younger, prettier congressional and senate staffers. Behind them all stretched a long garden, concealing many bars and hiding places. CNN’s Don Lemon was apparently somewhere on the dance floor; Scott Bessent, half-jokingly spoken of as likely to make an appearance, was apparently not. Instagram male models bussed in from New York squeezed in between the guests with buckets of oysters harnessed to their waists.

A great deal of mutual studying was taking place: is this, I wonder, what women are getting at when they refer obscurely to the “male gaze”? Every interaction was a function of two parameters: attractiveness and power. Some had both, but it seemed likely you needed at least one to get anybody’s attention. Once or twice, I was warned of an approaching young man that “she” is dangerous. But for the most part, the crowd was notably professional, conservatively dressed; there was little in the way of the modern LGBT-movement’s characteristically garish paraphernalia or costume. Intergenerational, too: the young men confident in their natural appeal, the older guests for the most part gristly bodies in over-tight suits, their faces unnaturally unlined and with an odd chemical shine. Nobody was fat. When I try to order a beer, I am practically thrown out under suspicion of being heterosexual. A harder drink is placed in my hand.  

“Donald loves the gays,” a White House staffer reassures me. “They’re good workers. He lost a lot of good people in the Eighties”. Of a foreign journalist we both know, there is an exasperated flourish of the wrist: “another blonde woman”.

Why, one wonders — both in DC and in Westminster, too — do gay men seem to be so over-represented in elite politics, at least behind the scenes? While drinking with a Tory staffer on the terrace of the Stranger’s Bar in Parliament, he had only to open the Grindr app on his phone for it to start vibrating uncontrollably, overheating as the deluge of solicitations mounted up. In DC, a political monoculture on the scale of a capital city, the effect seems even more pronounced. In recent years, Grindr has crashed through overuse at Republican National Conventions. And as recounted in James Kirchick’s recent, exhaustive history of the subject, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, the paranoid notion that the gays may have fully taken control of national politics proves oddly recurrent. In 1969, J Edgar Hoover began investigating the Nixon White House, suspecting it of having been infiltrated by a “ring of homosexualists” operating at the “highest levels of the White House”. Later rings – always rings – were suspected to be in control of subsequent candidates. From the Fifties onward, a list of the 4,000 or so homosexual men estimated to be living in and around Washington DC was supposedly compiled on the grounds that these characters constituted an obvious Soviet blackmail liability. Whatever the fate of that defunct list, clearly Grindr has compiled a similar database of its own. 

Observing the partygoers on Friday, it was difficult to know whether Grindr was attempting to court the historical stereotype or dispel it. Is the aim to project an insistent normality or something more illicit? Did the event belong or stand apart from the rest? One senses the popularity of the party owed something to a confused mixture of the two. At the garden’s center a large, illuminated ice-sculpture of the Grindr mask melted gradually over the course of the evening. The bathroom – somewhat disconcertingly – was set up in a re-purposed sauna complex at the end of the garden. But few other clues would have helped distinguish it from the many other parties of the week. 

As the soirée ended, the crowd was forced out onto the street and into the fleets of circling cars that waited to power the gays away. At least, until the next evening. Perhaps there had been too many women present for things to get seriously out of hand. Or perhaps the real action was happening just off-stage, in a room yet more inaccessible: a very DC-coded fear to have. 

Though extraordinary, Trivers was also extraordinarily difficult. He was impulsive, often rude, drug-abusing, and temperamentally allergic to the kind of niceties that structure today’s academic environment. While his early work as a graduate student at Harvard saw an unprecedented burst of creativity, subsequent years were occasionally derailed by bouts of “serious drinking” and “much more THC than was strictly consistent with forward progress on any subject”. He had a remarkable capacity to be drawn into confrontation, both the productive scholarly combat increasingly discouraged in some departments and the more hand-to-hand, life-threatening kind. He was constantly getting held up at knife- and gunpoint in brothels, or else thrown into jail overnight. His 2015 memoir, Wild Life, is somewhat cursory about the evolutionary research programs he helped found, and more concerned with recounting vignettes from his reprobate lifestyle. “I have ‘enjoyed’, as he puts it, “an unusual number of near-death experiences — due in part to my tendency towards intense interpersonal disagreements late at night”.

Wild Life is full of the kind of useful know-how all too rarely imparted in the sheltered environment of higher education. How should you deal with a thick-set male who has forced you into defending a woman’s honor? Trivers’s answer is four or five “very rapid left jabs, the key punch in keeping a beast at bay. You can finish your attacker off later, if you are lucky, with a right cross, but in the meantime it’s jab, jab, jab, jab, right in his face”. How should one fend off a wild dog when armed with a gun? Don’t try to take it out at a distance, Trivers warns: hold your nerve till it’s close enough to wrap its jaws around your leg, then put a bullet through its head.

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Trivers’s memoir is full of the sort of throwaway lines and disorienting opening gambits one seldom encounters in the autobiography of a tenured academic. “For this account, I have simply gone through my arrests in the order in which they occurred”; “Having just laid on my back and chug-a-lugged Jim Beam bourbon in front of everyone…’ ; “I was arrested for driving under the influence in California, and they were dead right”; and so on.

Later in Trivers’s career, one of his graduate students recalls inquiring about a recent wound on his hand. Trivers explained blandly that he had recently survived an armed home invasion at his house in Jamaica; word of his receipt of the Crafoord Prize — the equivalent of the Nobel in biological sciences, worth half a million dollars — had got round town, he suspected. Arriving home one evening, Trivers noticed two shadowy figures emerging from the darkness. “Had I forgotten an appointment, as I often do? No — since when was I meeting with two butt-ugly young men in my bedroom at ten-thirty at night”. That terrifying set-up develops into a quintessentially Trivers-style tale of disorderly derring-do. Having escaped his attackers by leaping from a second-floor window, Trivers stabbed one of his assailants with a six-inch blade he kept on his person for just such occasions: “I cut the shorter one across his throat as he leaned over to attack me – alas not deeply enough to kill him”. At the time, he was 67.

The way Trivers’s ungovernable temperament interacted with the rarefied status of a distinguished academic was more than a passing note of comic incongruity in his life. His theoretical contributions, too, were outputs of the very same unflinchingly direct and bloody-minded disposition that continually got him into scrapes. Trivers had no patience for the mawkish instinct to regard mankind as elevated or special, somehow an exception to the Darwinian framework. Such thinking was mistaken twice over: naively dismissive of non-human animals, and complacently self-important about the human animal. He used the word “organism” of others as a term of endearment, and continually saw his own impulses reflected back at him in the animal life he studied.

His unsentimental eye enabled him to see the theoretical fruit in applying a gene-centered view of natural selection to human social life. Thoroughly repelled by the amorphous “group selectionist” theories still in vogue in the Seventies (according to which, by some obscure mechanism, individual organisms sometimes “sacrificed” themselves for the good of the species), Trivers’s first revolutionary paper attempted to spell out the genetic basis for altruistic behavior. There, Trivers developed the foundation laid by W.D. Hamilton, showing that altruistic traits could be selected for — so long as the costs of helping another remained comparatively low and the chance of future reciprocity remained high enough. On Trivers’s model, moral emotions, like gratitude, an instinct for fairness, and an urge for revenge, were predictable upshots too: dispositions necessary to police the subversive behavior of those who attempt to free-ride on the good deeds of others. Colleagues joked that the tit-for-tat, “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”, logic (shortly to be popularized in The Selfish Gene) came naturally to Trivers, being not too far off the way he instinctively perceived human social interaction. (“If you say something insulting”, he reflected, “I want to strike right back”).

Trivers had a bracing ability to detect the bestial side of human life and the human-like intricacies of animal life. He saw, for instance, how the diverging genetic interests of siblings and parents necessarily led to a standing conflict of interest in which offspring are always disposed to extract more than an equal share of communal resources and parents always disposed to try to stop them. Cuteness, tantrums, post-partum depression, rebelliousness, and sibling rivalry for parental attention are conjectured to be some of the many weapons in that battle between parent and child in which each attempts to impose its will on the other.

Another groundbreaking paper came about when Trivers made a study of pigeons jockeying for position among their female partners just outside his apartment window at Harvard. He recognized what was already familiar to him: the undisguised evidence of male sexual jealousy. (“It became clear that pigeons suffered from the same kinds of psycho-sexual behaviors and feelings we did”). While the male pigeons would possessively guard their females from the romantic attention of competitors, males themselves would take every opportunity to cuckold a rival, often while their partner looked tolerantly askance.

What explains the dramatic divergence between the physiological and psychological make-up of the sexes? Trivers’s hypothesis was that sex differences could be traced to the differential parental investment made by each sex in producing offspring. Take the human case: while a man’s contribution to reproduction is often over in a depressingly short time, the woman is left for nine months to bring a three-kilogram baby to term. That fact sends the sexes down diverging physiological and psychological pathways. Roughly: the female becomes pickier, while the male becomes more prone to infidelity, jealousy and sustained competition for sexual opportunities. In showing that a sound, elegant, evolutionary logic underpinned the dynamics of the human sexual marketplace, Trivers bequeathed the respectable intellectual backdrop onto which the pseudoscience of the contemporary manosphere is projected. Trivers would presumably have held in contempt the twisted misogyny and glaring self-deception of those male influencers who appropriate a Darwinian idiom. Still, it is difficult to avoid concluding that his own stereotypically blunt and psychologically self-knowing method enabled Trivers more easily to reach the insights he did. How many researchers would so readily see their own psychology reflected in the sexual jealousy of a pigeon?

The unvoiced question that hangs over Wild Life is whether a man of Trivers’s combination of ability and rebarbative personality would be enabled to flourish in the academic world of today. One telling data-point is provided by the dismaying cul-de-sacs Trivers’s own career occasionally turned into. Even after his discipline-shaping work, much of it done as a graduate student with little formal training in biology, Harvard demurred and delayed over his tenure application; Trivers’s response was to impulsively up sticks to California, something he came to regard as a “once-in-a-lifetime” mistake. At the end of his career in 2015, notwithstanding his intellectual renown, he was suspended and eventually quit Rutgers University, having kicked up a fuss about being made to teach an introductory course on the nature of human aggression, something which he claimed not to be sufficiently expert in (hardly plausible when you consider his personal track record).

Jeffrey Epstein then gave Trivers $40,000 to continue his research into the connection between human knee symmetry and sprinting ability. Entirely predictably, Trivers then became one of the coterie of elite academics, alongside the likes of Larry Summers and Noam Chomsky, to be smeared for their association with Epstein. Even here, Trivers, who remained convivial with Epstein into the mid-2010s, distinguished himself by his sheer incapacity to play along with the media’s moralistic ritual of extracting a performance of contrition from their prey (“he gives me consistent, warm support without me having to write endless applications for grants”, he said matter-of-factly, while provocatively wondering aloud whether Epstein’s crimes were really so “heinous”).

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Would a Trivers-like figure just starting out survive in an academic climate that places an ever higher premium on conformity over individual brilliance? Men of Trivers’s cast of mind are often shunned for their morbid style of thought. In his twenties, Trivers, who suffered from episodes of serious mental ill-health, confided in his mentor William Drury that during his most recent breakdown he had resolved to kill himself if he ever felt another coming on; but now, he added, he had refined his plan: he had a list of 10 people he would take down first before dying “in the counter-attack”. Drury’s charming response was to pause a moment and then ask whether he could add three or so additional names to Trivers’s list. Would such a macabre exchange fly now? More likely, it would set in train a complex disciplinary process and expedited referral to Prevent. Yet more disqualifying, of course, would be Trivers’s uncrushable dislike of authority and native intolerance for the kid-glove discursive norms that are now treated as non-negotiable in many universities.

Implicit in much thinking within the academy, in its present “woke” phase, is the assumption that research should be an emollient process of mutual cooperation rather than a productive, potentially offense-giving, clash of competing outlooks. But as Trivers saw all too keenly, social relations that seem on their face harmonious — those between man and woman, parent and child, friend and neighbor — invariably conceal a suppressed dynamic of conflict. In the university’s case, the passive-aggression with which progressive ideals are enforced conceals the exclusionary pressure that can be directed at troublesome outsiders like Robert Trivers. All too often, such figures must either concede defeat and become domesticated by the system — or else be expelled, whatever intellectual gifts they have to give. In effect, these individuals are dubiously sacrificed for the good of the species, the mechanism by which this is supposed to do any good only ever opaquely spelled out. That, as Trivers knew, is a bad idea.

Emerald Fennell seems to have approached Wuthering Heights in a similarly improving spirit. I must say I haven’t read Emily Brontë’s novel myself — though I was assured that wouldn’t be a problem when it came to following the film, and may even confer an advantage when it came to enjoying it — but I’m guessing the stable-room bondage scene, depictions of public masturbation, and corpses with erections were all Fennell’s tasteful additions.

In fact, a little research suggests that whole epochs within the novel hit the cutting-room floor in the journey from bookstore to screen, with characters ruthlessly conflated or excised altogether, so as to accommodate all the steamy sex scenes that Brontë thoughtlessly forgot to arrange for her protagonists.

On the promotional circuit, Fennell has repeatedly emphasized the deep impression the novel made on her as a teenager, and her film contains touches overwrought enough to bear that out. As has been noticed, the film unfolds more like a fan-fictionalization of its source than an adaptation: the surrounding structural architecture of plot and character developed only to the degree that they can be taken for granted as a stable context for erotic wish-fulfillment. Even the title, which comes wrapped in coy little scare quotes — “Wuthering Heights” — seems an attempt early on to manage expectations. Though, of course, it’s not as if simply pleading guilty at pre-trial is a way of absolving yourself of a crime.

There is a peculiar cultural assumption that plumbing the detail of one’s sexual fantasies inevitably yields stark or revealing information about the self. To “explore” — like Sally Rooney and swathes of prestige TV — the dark allure of BDSM, and the supposedly psychologically complex interplay between affection and violence, is taken as a surefire way of advertising one’s artistic sophistication.

If Wuthering Heights achieves nothing else, it should be to put that particular misconception to bed, as it were. The inclusion of a BDSM scene seems a gratuitous, and slightly feeble, provocation. And if conceived as a quick-fix way of infusing Cathy and Heathcliff’s melodramatic love story with a sense of psychological depth — well, it fails.

Long stretches of the film consist of exactly the sort of breathless, derivative, fleeting encounters you might expect it to on the assumption that you were not watching Wuthering Heights, but something operating at a somewhat hazier degree of removal: an attempt to depict the erotic shadow cast by the book in the mind of a half-remembered adolescent reader.

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We watch while, as if on an endless reel, Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie chase each other pointlessly across windswept moors. There they grapple with each other. Kiss. Lick each other’s faces. Breathe meaningfully. Look searchingly into one another’s eyes. The weather being what it is, they are forever getting caught in the most torrential downpours, and neither of them ever thinks to bring an umbrella or to wear clothes that don’t quickly go transparent.

They cry and mewl and pout at each other, break for a costume change, and then do it all again, striking postures of indignance and hurt as they growl about their feelings and heave their respective bosoms. They stand stoically by Cathy’s father’s grave, the wind tearing camply at her black veil, then, practically within sight of the funeral party, reunite with animal intensity. Occasionally in fits of love-stricken anger Robbie will beat her girly fists on Elordi’s manly chest. When all other ways of communicating their profound bond have been exhausted, they stick their fingers in each other’s mouths.

Throughout, there is virtually no suggestion of the existence of a wider social world, the whole film instead an unrooted universe of total mutual self-absorption. The effect is a flattening realization of the montage of imaginative sexual fantasy. Sitting there, watching it, was like re-enacting the closing scene of Cinema Paradiso, except that instead of the touching variety of rescued black-and-white embraces, it’s just Elordi and Robbie sniffing and licking each other’s faces again and again.

Fennell’s attempt to not merely adapt a book for the screen, but somehow conjure up the imaginative impact it had on a teenage reader, faces considerable challenges. Polemicists of a cultural-declinist bent may be tempted to say this is because of the greater imaginative richness of the reading experience. But actually, some of the obstacles are to do with its comparative impoverishment.

There is something deceptively shallow about the contents of imaginative simulation: the kind of activity one gives might give way to in reading a novel or idly embellishing the romance of its protagonists. The internal spotlight of wandering imaginative attention makes fantasy feel rich from the inside, but it is a richness that relies on an illusion: a mistaken impression that one’s mind’s eye “sees” in more detail than it really does.

Many people are surprised to learn that vision itself relies on a similar cognitive trick: while the brain generates the illusion that the entire visual field is in focus, in reality the fovea, the central one or two degrees of the visual field, is tiny, equivalent in area to a thumbnail held out at arm’s length, the rest of the visual field implicitly filled in by a process akin to a simplifying inference.

Whether because of their inherent shallowness or otherwise, many of us come to realize it is a naive mistake to expect others to be as attached to our fantasies as we are. It is notoriously boring to hear others describe their dreams. In the same way, attempting to depict an object of fantasy can destroy its deceptive, impressionistic power. Most people are familiar with the dissatisfied feeling that a character played on screen is not at all how they imagined them — even if it is not always easy to put your finger on just how they depart from the under-specified but perfectly cast original.

Imaginative fantasy, then, has a propensity to crash-land when realized in the flesh. That propensity may only be greater when it comes to the kind of romantic escapism Fennell has tried to make flesh in Wuthering Heights. Writhing with Heathcliff on the moors, licking and gasping and striking a pose: from the inside of the teenage mind, these may grip one as the very heights of erotic profundity. Flattened onto the screen, they can seem like withering lows.

Of course, it’s not as if film, the standout expressive art form of the 20th century,  is too limited a medium to evoke romantic fantasy in a viewer. But to do such material justice probably requires something other than Fennell’s trademark style of campy overstatement, of which the lavish aesthetic and anachronistic latex costumes are only the most obvious manifestations of a general inability to exercise creative restraint.

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Some films can be almost novelistic in their tendency to invite an imaginative contribution from the viewer. Writing in 1972, the screenwriter Paul Schrader coined the term “transcendental style” for the peculiar effectiveness — the near-meditative quality — that was sometimes achieved in films of Ozu, Bresson and others, many only then being screened in LA for the first time. Schrader’s theory was that these filmmakers had learned to direct in such a way as to trigger introspection. The characteristic technique was to withhold — something akin to the intelligent use of empty time and space.

Into that space the engaged viewer is forced to contribute something of his own. Made to “add their own egg”. Of course, Fennell might argue she was trying to make a very different kind of film to those Schrader was watching; nevertheless, her Wuthering Heights stifles imaginative engagement in the very act of attempting to control it. Hers is a film in which all of the eggs are added on the viewer’s behalf — not least when Cathy is made to crack half a dozen of them into Heathcliff’s bed as an early provocation, and Elordi kneels there, plunging his fingers gormlessly into the gooey mess. (As ever no prizes are on offer for guessing subtext; there wouldn’t be enough to go round!).

The idea that information might be strategically withheld to creative effect is not a distinctively cinematic insight, of course. At the sentence level, Hemingway’s theory of prose seems to have been that there was imaginative danger in over-specificity — that it is in general an illusion that, as one modifier is piled on after another, resolution increases. Better to take advantage of an intelligent reader’s tendency to make an imaginative contribution of his own. Emerald Fennell, on the other hand, prefers to make films where all the adjectives are left in — italicized, underlined and in scare quotes too.

No doubt, in the contemporary attention economy, the natural tendency is to favor Fennell’s lurid approach over more hands-off alternatives. As Matt Damon and Ben Affleck recently recounted in a widely publicized interview, it is now de rigueur for Netflix to helpfully suggest that a film’s characters verbally reiterate the plot at least three of four times, and that large set-piece action scenes should be used to “grab” the viewer’s attention in the first few minutes.

Perhaps naturally suited to the cultural moment, Fennell has never shown any temptation to act on the maxim that less is sometimes more. “I will not stand for this grotesque performance a moment longer”, shouts Nelly at a bed-ridden Margot Robbie towards the end of the film, and it is difficult for the audience not to share the sentiment. The risk, in the end, in simply “grabbing” your viewer’s attention, and training it on the banal contents of an adolescent fantasy, is that you unwittingly reveal how shaky and under-developed those materials can be.

The causal power attributed to porn has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. Of course, that isn’t to say that there aren’t lots of good and familiar reasons to dislike pornography. A lot of porn is disgusting, tacky and misogynistic; it certainly harms the people who make it; to be aroused by its more depraved varieties is, in a completely straightforward way, a manifestation of bad taste. Perhaps the young, or those of limited inspiration, even pick up hackneyed or harmful sexual “scripts” from what they watch. Sex-positive progressives who try to suppress this knowledge for ideological reasons are usually guilty of embarrassing levels of self-deceit.

Not content to rely on those considerations, however, the present wave of anti-porn journalists usually also make extravagant empirical claims about the potential population-level effects of porn use. For instance, Louise Perry and others have suggested that the rise in pornography consumption has seen rates of erectile dysfunction “skyrocket”, from single to double digits, in recent years. Such claims may have the ring of truth. But is there any hard evidence behind them? Not really. There is a dearth of gold-standard longitudinal data. Much of what does exist fails to find statistically significant correlations between ordinary levels of pornography consumption and erectile dysfunction. The catastrophizing results have to be cherry-picked: in this case, as the science writer Stuart Ritchie discovered, from unrepresentative self-reported survey data collected from Swiss military conscripts.

Even when pathological, rather than ordinary, use of pornography is brought into focus, journalists steadfastly neglect obvious confounding factors. Extreme pornography use is not independent of other kinds of sexual dysfunction. Men who are predisposed to erectile dysfunction for other reasons may also spend more time seeking solace in porn. Men who are intrinsically bad at relationships will both experience relationship failure and end up as lonely masturbators for want of anything better to do. Innately violent men will both mistreat women and be drawn to depictions of mistreatment in pornography. There is nothing ad hoc about invoking such causes: we have independent reason for believing they are operative. Nobody sensible — and, in particular, no sensible anti-porn feminists — believe on reflection that dysfunctional, violent or aberrant men only came into existence with the advent of high-speed internet. They have always existed. An economical explanatory starting point, then, is that porn does not do all that much to fundamentally reshape men’s sexual dispositions. For the most part it reflects, rather than molds, their natures, ministering to impulses they have already, however depressing that may seem. The contrary view — that porn corrupts healthy minds — is a completely blank-slatist piece of speculative psychological theorizing.

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If anti-porn journalists find it hard to accept that starting point as even a live option, it may be because many of them seem, however unreflectively, to be operating with an unreconstructed “behaviorist” background picture of a kind that few working scientists have accepted for about 70 years. This particular anti-porn school of thought conceives of human (or at least male) sexual psychology as a blank slate written upon by the environment, in particular by the internet. Sexual dispositions are thought of as resulting from a process of stimulus and response under conditions of reinforcement learning. The implicit view is something like this: men watch porn and are psychologically rewarded by the pleasure they feel; the association between porn and reward is reinforced by repetition; the effect is that in their sex lives they seek similar rewards, or never seek sex to begin with, or can’t get an erection, or pursue ever more intense versions of the original reward in the form of more extreme porn, or whatever. In its heyday, behaviorist style associationism was an attractively general account of how all learning might take place, but it was widely abandoned in the mid-20th century in favor of paradigms that posited far more innate mental structure, with all behavioral traits shown to depend significantly on genetic factors. Human beings are not blank slates, either in their lives generally or their sexual lives specifically.

None of this is to downplay the evidence, most notably in the form of recent anecdote and survey data, that men can pick up harmful or sadistic ideas, like strangulation, from porn. People engage in cultural learning and imitation of this kind all the time, to both good effect and ill. Acknowledging it requires nothing like a revisionary psychological account of how internet porn “rewires” the mind. In fact, it is the anti-porn behaviorist journalists who would struggle most to account for such unwelcome cultural developments in an accurate way. For many women, as they accurately insist, are repelled by the gross practices that are now ubiquitous in pornographic culture (women’s brains, somehow, resist being “rewired” by the stimulus). Men on the other hand are helplessly “reprogrammed” by all they watch. The motto seems to be: anti-behaviorist psychological nativism for women, rampant behaviorism for men. But that is just silly: a grab-bag of ill-assorted theories invoked as convenience dictates.

Are our journalists and public commentators really so naïve? Anyone worried that the opposition is presently being straw-manned should read Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel’s recent, well-received, book, Pornocracy. In among some well-taken points about the iniquities of the porn industry is an utterly bonkers theory of human psychology hastily dressed up in the reassuring language of neuro-jargon. Porn, we learn, is so “addictive as to cause brain damage”. The visual spectacle of humans having sex is, we are rather implausibly told, a “superstimulus we’ve not evolved to process”. Consequently, it does not “serve our sexual tastes; it shapes them”. Porn “rewires the brain to be aroused by what the user sees and only by that”. “The more orgasms you have with porn,” we are warned, “the more sexually and emotionally attached to it you’ll become.” (So far, so behaviorist. But if the pleasure of masturbation really had such a radical conditioning effect, one might wonder why homo sapiens didn’t millennia ago become a short-lived species of emotionally-self-attached solitary tossers.) No allowance is made for the possibility that different men might be innately predisposed to respond differently to the same environmental stimulus. Porn has turned men into “wanking automata”. If only it were true that mere repeat exposure to the same stimulus did in fact “reprogramme” the mind, Bartosh and Jessell could stop repeating themselves so much and consider the reader successfully re-wired.

Duly alarmed by their own findings, the authors wonder gravely whether we may be witnessing the “de-evolution of humanity into an ape whose every thought and action is influenced… by the adult industry and its values – Homo Pornographicus”. Nor are they cautious about offering advice on the basis of this measured and careful analysis. Given the risk that you will wake up one morning next to a “de-evolved” porn-addicted ape, it may “make better sense for women to swear off men than to put up with a partner who uses pornography”.

Now, such bold counsel surely calls for overwhelmingly robust empirical backing. What are Bartosh and Jessel’s grounds for their startling claim that porn “has the power to enslave its users”? Helpfully, the entire second chapter, “How porn changed our brains”, takes up the question, gesturing at an “Everest of evidence” to draw on. “When people use pornography,” we read, “they create new ‘sex rewards’ pathways in their brain.” Every time they masturbate, “men experience a ‘spritz of dopamine’ that further consolidate[s] the connection between pornography and pleasure” — “reinforcing the new ‘pornsex’ brain network at the expense of the ‘real sex’ neural pathways”. The result is “irreparable damage to the brain’s dopamine system”.

Those who feel a twinge of doubt as to whether contemporary neuroscience has indeed uncovered dedicated “porn sex” and “real sex” neural pathways in the architecture of the human brain may turn to the chapter’s references. There they won’t find much. Bartosh and Jessel are unable to cite a single probative randomized controlled trial or longitudinal study to back up any of their alarmist claims about the effects of porn. Instead, they repeatedly cite from an anecdote-driven pop science book by Norman Doidge, a Canadian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst best known for promoting non-standard remedies for congenital and neurodegenerative diseases that make use of the “brain’s healing energies”. Later on, a promising reference to “dozens of studies [that] have identified the addictive capability of pornography” leads to the non-peer-reviewed work of an anti-masturbation campaigner called Gary Wilson. He is best-known for giving a TED talk on porn addiction that accumulated 17.5 million views, and which is now prefaced by a disclaimer notifying viewers that the presentation contains “assertions that are not supported by academically respected studies in medicine and psychology”.

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Polemical overreach often harms a theory more than it helps it. Bartosh and Jessel sidestep obvious responses to their arguments. They misleadingly suggest more evidence is on their side than it is. They ignore evidence that compulsive behaviors have nothing like the pharmacological profile of addictive substances. They risk trivializing the category of addiction by reconceiving all actions positively reinforced by a “spritz of dopamine” as incipient dependencies. And they have their model of porn addiction rely on a strained and somewhat impressionistic analogy between the “extremity” of visual content and stimulant concentration, allowing them to insinuate that men’s initially vanilla erotic tastes escalate insatiably until they all become pornographically-reprogrammed rape fantasists (again, not a phenomenon there is much high-quality evidence to support).

The view that human beings are easily corrupted by imagery is a remarkably seductive cultural trope. Socrates proposed banishing the poets from the ideal city because of their destructive capacity to excite the soul with their fictions. Recent cultural history testifies to our tendency to overestimate the psychological damage done by media of all kinds. The panics of the Nineties and 2000s, over whether video games and R-rated movies disposed their viewers to violence, were remarkably like the porn panic of today. Then too, hysteria far outstripped the arrival of anything close to confirmatory evidence for the theory advanced by panicked columnists and cultural commentators, and such evidence has failed to come to light in the years since. Still, people seem unable to resist the idea that morally depraved media must itself be a kind of poison taken in through the eyes and ears, harming the viewer, despite the striking example provided by the long history of analogous panics whose specific fears now look like relics of parochial concern.

It does no service to the cause of anti-porn commentators that they so often make their arguments depend on shaky psychological presupposition and tendentious empirical conjecturing. But one shouldn’t expect them to stop any time soon. Behaviorist scare tactics provide too versatile a template for cultural critique. And anyway, like the targets of their favorite argument, if there’s one feeling a columnist knows better than most it’s the temptation to set shame and caution aside, slump down in front of the computer, and desperately bash out another one.

Stoppard, though, was multiply disqualified from the Nobel. First, there were the scores of plays, film treatments and bon mots, all too obviously designed for the enjoyment of others. Popular without being populist, Stoppard’s career consisted in exercising an astonishing capacity for giving pleasure to millions of people. His plays were precision-made exhibitions of his own striking capacity for a kind of high-intellectual screwball: hard to devise, but not hard — not really, despite what people say — to appreciate.

That that is not a glib trick, but an unusual gift, is suggested by how few writers show much inclination to follow his literary or commercial example. Part of Stoppard’s trademark effect was to flatter his audience in the presumption that they were in on the joke, however esoteric. That alone — Stoppard’s talent to amuse — would have registered as a big no-no to the Swedish Academy.

It can’t have helped, either, when it came to judging his literary accomplishment, that Stoppard was so obviously at ease with his own talent and success, seeming to find it neither a burden nor a distraction. He was a global star, would commute if need be by Concorde, and each summer hosted legendary fête champêtres to which he would invite Harrison Ford, Alfred Brendel, Mick Jagger, the Duchess of Devonshire, and no more than 500 or so other close friends. “There is a god,” Stoppard once reflected, “and he looks after English playwrights.”

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Perhaps the Swedish Academy, party to a widespread but pretentious prejudice, felt that true artists are not supposed to be so glamorous and palpably well-adjusted, nor so candidly attuned to the possibility of commercial reward. When asked by the press to explain what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, his first major theatrical hit, was “about”, Stoppard is said to have replied: “It’s about to make me very rich.” At the height of his fame he became the well-rewarded script “doctor” of Hollywood producers — not just for Shakespeare in Love, for which he asked, and received, a $1 million repair-job fee — but also blockbusters such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

That the last in that franchise is arguably the best is in no small part due to Stoppard’s expert doctoring. Not every job had so much room for remedy. While he was working on Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, he was less a script doctor than a battlefield surgeon. But even here, his trademark humor remained. Teased about whether Shakespeare would have written screenplays, Stoppard replied unembarrassedly. “No, he’d have rewritten them.”

And then, to pile discredit upon discredit in the eyes of the Swedes, there was Stoppard’s first career as a journalist, and worse still the damaging fact that he seems to have enjoyed it. According to an early interview, young Stoppard conceived of himself, in the late Sixties, as having “no higher ambition than to make a gaudy mark in Fleet Street”. Reporting on a regional paper, he felt delighted by the decidedly parochial glamour of “flashing his press card at flower shows”.

He was, briefly, the only motoring correspondent in the land unable to drive (“I used to review the upholstery”). And even then, too, there were early symptoms of the incipient dilettantish condition that critics would later claim to detect in his plays. Applying for a job at the Evening Standard, Stoppard found himself put on the spot by then-editor Charles Wintour who, perhaps doubtful of the true extent of Stoppard’s declared interest in current affairs, asked him to name the sitting Home Secretary. “Look,” came the prototypically Stoppardian parry, “I said I was interested in politics, not obsessed by them.”

Yet for the Swedish Academy, there remains something worse, much worse, than all these faults — the easy fame, the non-neuroticism, the indiscriminately wielded and brilliant talent. That was Stoppard’s resolutely anti-political aesthetic self-conception. Art, according to him, was not politics by another means. In contemporary theater, it is difficult to think of another writer who proved so clearly their ability to take art seriously without moralizing on its importance.

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The ability to articulate a robust aesthetic theory is not a precondition of artistic virtue. But Stoppard’s was remarkably accurate in broad outline, and one he established early in his career. He was suspicious of the facile subjectivism about values that had been popularized in Britain by A.J. Ayer’s account of logical positivism, and which Stoppard ridiculed in his play Jumpers. In later life, he explicitly identified himself as a value “realist” in the philosopher’s sense of the term. He loathed communism, not least for its gratuitous imposition of extraneous social objectives onto the autonomous domain of intellectual creativity, and was repulsed by the homegrown anti-Western demonstrations of 1968. By the Eighties, Stoppard had committed the ultimate act of bien pensant sacrilege: he had expressed a sneaking admiration for Margaret Thatcher.

Stoppard was essentially a bourgeois artist, proudly owning the implications of the label, progressive literary cliches be damned. His discomfort with smuggling social commentary as literary creativity was an intrinsic, rather than incidental, feature of his outlook. Stoppard’s signature love of verbal play and “brittle” dialogue — his effort to make already erudite characters speak a notch or two more quickly and intelligently than anyone would in real life — was a natural development of his dislike of “the political”. At the same time, his rejection of naturalism was controlled enough to prevent his work degenerating into what he referred to, with apparently equal disdain, as “that child’s garden of easy victories known as the avant-garde”.

In a remarkable New Yorker profile of Stoppard, written by Kenneth Tynan in 1977, the playwright’s self-image as defiantly antithetical to political art seems to continually prickle his interviewer. It is “deeply embarrassing”, Stoppard insists, when a piece of work fallaciously assumes that it must be important simply because it gestures at some urgent social or political issue. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he adds of the heyday of kitchen-sink realism, “because when I started to write you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that.” “[My plays] must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness,” he adds with Wildean flair. “I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.”

By contrast with Wilde, too often seduced by the allure of paradox to articulate his background ethic in a clear way, Stoppard could easily switch into admirable frankness: in the end, he announced, he stood for “Western liberal democracy, favoring an intellectual elite and a progressive middle class and based on a moral order derived from Christian absolutes”. Many literary elites have attempted, both in Stoppard’s day and sense, to tell themselves a more extravagant story; Stoppard may have had too much intelligence, and easy access to his own mind, to sustain that kind of self-deception. “It’s a sheer perversion of speech,” he insisted, “to describe the society I live in as one that inflicts violence on the underprivileged. What worries me is not the bourgeois exception but the totalitarian norm.”

Already pronounced in Stoppard’s day, the collective cultural obsession of filtering aesthetic appreciation through a narrow range of social and psychological preoccupations has become one of the basic tenets of progressive art. It is tempting to think that many of these assumptions are now so widespread as to be scarcely noticeable, all while silently guiding judgments of comparative prestige, worthy subject-matter and literary seriousness. Stoppard’s shimmering, abstract verbal play could be all too easy to dismiss as symptomatic of a limitation, somehow meretricious or shallowly cerebral: making his plays, as one reviewer put it, into wonderful “Fabergé Easter eggs”. Though never Nobel-prized, the degree to which Stoppard was generally prized by the public suggests they didn’t poo-poo that dazzling gift.

Today, one distinctive kind of bullshit is generated when a leading literary luminary (usually a novelist) is commissioned by a high-minded magazine (usually American) to pontificate at length on a political issue, or worse, cultural “moment”. The genre showcases the novelistic treatment of contemporary politics. And though the sentences are usually syntactically clear, and the articles, at first sight, apparently thesis-driven, the reader quickly remembers that appearances can be deceptive. The characteristic sleight-of-hand of this brand of bullshit is, under the pretense of heading toward a sophisticated conclusion, to assert virtually nothing at all. If there is artistry involved, it is the kind of artistry that consists in presenting completely banal conclusions as if they were hard-won insights, usually by burying them under a heap of diversionary material.

Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection, Dead and Alive, exemplifies the genre to a tee. It is a well-packed flower press of literary bull pats. Though better known as the award-winning writer of novels including White Teeth and On Beauty, Smith has found a new groove — or rut, depending on your point of view — in churning out think pieces for high-minded longform publications, on everything from the Middle East, to the 2024 presidential election, the immigration crisis, Stormzy, Tár, and the wayward political influence of Silicon Valley. Reading them is enough to make me wonder whether English students should not be educated in the style of firearms officers: provided with the basic skills of the trade only under the heavy proviso that they will hopefully never have to make use of them outside the classroom.

Dead and Alive? Even the title is faintly annoying. But Smith’s passing over the more naturally disjunctive “dead or alive” in preference for a title that needlessly flirts with inconsistency is wholly in keeping with the spirit of her essays. These, she admits, “tend to employ a lengthy and sometimes oblique way of thinking”. Smith is by her own admission suspicious of the kind of “clear, legible, ultimately deadening sentences” she associates dismissively with social media, certain styles of politics and journalism, and academic writing. She admires prose that is “serpentine, hard to parse”.

Of course to the uninitiated reader the effort to valorize unclarity and circumlocution might look like just that: the attempt to present as a stylistic virtue what is in fact a literary defect. And it’s an approach that’s got Smith into trouble before, most notoriously in March last year, when a New Yorker essay of hers, “Shibboleths” (re-collected here), seemed to many to draw several shaky moral equivalences between the norms appropriate to warfare and those appropriate to campus politics.

But that essay is a much more confused object than that parsing of it suggests, and quite representative of the collection in that respect. To her, Columbia University’s anti-Israeli protestors were both “heroic” and in the grip of motivations that were “cynical and unworthy”. In one critical posture, Smith finds the arguments of both sides vapid and politically impotent: “All of that was just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless.” Then, taking up another diametrically opposed stance within the space of a few paragraphs, she grandiosely reminds her reader that, in this political arena, “language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction”. What, then, the reader is left thinking, does Smith think words are? “Unreal” and “meaningless”, or WMDs? They can’t be both, surely? Most likely, they are neither.

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Smith is in fact a talented draftsman of tendentious moral equivalences and assorted analogical relations of doubtful standing. Aren’t the “parallels between twenty-first-century climate denialism and nineteenth-century rationalizations of plantation slavery” vivid? Isn’t Elon Musk’s twitter algorithm a bit like Nazi propaganda, only more effective? Participating in the celebrations of England fans at the World Cup, Smith is reminded of “Nazi delirium” yet again. Uncontrolled immigration may seem to be a political problem, but aren’t “all human social arrangements… inherently problematic”? Almost always, these wild inter-connections serve to obstruct, rather than clear the way for, a developing line of thought. In fact, Smith is disarmingly upfront about her lack of argumentative ambition in Dead and Alive. “All I want to do is demonstrate what a certain kind of thinking looks like”: that kind presumably being vaguely paranoid, flighty, and easily morally distracted.

Sometimes, the intellectual morasses Smith traps herself in concern her own specialism — language itself. Possessed of the writer’s occupational hazard, she overestimates how many political and social problems are fundamentally linguistic in nature. On cultural appropriation, she writes: “What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not ‘cultural appropriation’ but rather ‘interpersonal voyeurism’ or ‘profound other-fascination’ or even ‘cross-epidermal reanimation’? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even furious – but I’m certain they would not be the same.” To give Smith credit where it’s due, a world in which a phrase like “cross-epidermal reanimation” had successfully entered the popular lexicon would indeed be a very different one, perhaps unrecognizable.

When prompted, perhaps by an editor, or her own residual nagging sense that something recognizable as a conclusion is owed to the readers of her meandering think pieces, Smith’s response can be a superior kind of outrage that she should be called upon to affirm anything as vulgar as a settled position. She huffily concludes her Gaza piece: “Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward.” With the possible exception of “useful”, the risk is that the reader will take Smith up on her thoughtful invitation, and apply all of these, not exactly mutually exclusive, labels to her in light of her painful, self-regarding style of equivocation.

Smith isn’t even very consistent on the question of whether everything is complicated. You see, some things, according to her, are shockingly simple. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong things. Addressing a crowd of Extinction Rebellion protestors gathered on Tufton Street, London’s home of free-market think tanks, Smith denounces “common sense fiscal conservatives” (to her mind, apparently, anyone who thinks environmental factors should be balanced against economic interests in determining climate change policy) as unequivocally “evil”. Moreover, those “tech” bros who believe climate change should be met with technological innovations are “purely sociopathic and ideological”. The various protestors committing criminal offenses under the aegis of Extinction Rebellion, on the other hand, are bravely taking on a “level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us”.

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Unimaginable, that is, including to Smith. She is quite adept at pulling off selective failures of imagination when the moment calls for them. When invited to commit “an arrestable offense” by her fellow protestors, Smith has, hilariously, to decline. Risking arrest or conviction, you see, would make flying to New York so much trickier, perhaps even “impossible”. In fact, despite declaring that she is “trying to fly less”, scattered clues in Dead and Alive suggest that Smith spends a lot of time in the air, suspended midway across the Atlantic. London, New York, Germany — then off to Austria to collect a literary prize and make some more remarks about the alarming “rightward turn” of politics. The metaphorical richness of this repeated image — the celebrity novelist, entirely ungrounded, resolutely detached from reality — seems not to register with her.

Those cascading frequent flyer points are not the only respect in which Smith fails to live up to her own evaluative ideals, nor in the end the most damning either. As she indicates in an early essay, the simple heuristic by which she is disposed to assess artistic work is the simple question, “Is it interesting?”. Yet, time and again, Smith falls hopelessly short of that standard. Should the reader go to the sometimes considerable effort of extracting her background political positions from the thicket of evasion and complication, virtually nothing beyond the boilerplate, politically preening and utterly unserious is to be discovered. Her incidental political remarks are sub-Guardian-esque.

The Tories “want us to return to a medieval feudal state” and are only interested in “making millionaires billionaires”. Stormzy is what a real “leader looks like”. Smith is bemused to see shoplifters on British high streets: “people seizing their reparations from global capitalism and walking straight out the door.” She lambasts Boris Johnson for “partying” while people’s “relatives died of Covid”. She uses the phrase “differently abled”, apparently without irony. Once or twice, she accurately senses that she is “irrationally attached to a nostalgic politics more suited to the past than the present”. She longs for the “glory days” of the NHS in the late Nineties. She is a sentimental pessimist about AI. She shuns social media — the glow of the iPhone screen is to her a “deathly Palo-Alto-late-capitalist-consciousness-colonizing-sickly-blueish-light”. Perhaps she is also vaguely aware that in the straight-shooting discursive world of online commentary, the wilfully “oblique” takes of literary luminaries might be more easily unmasked as the often irrelevant contributions they are.

As the reader may have come to anticipate, Smith can’t make her mind up on the question of whether artists and writers ought, actually, to be interesting. (One “myth” she suddenly seeks to puncture is that “the great writer is somehow inherently more interesting than other people. He has a unique consciousness, a special way of seeing. We reward him with a book contract. I don’t buy any of that.”) Unfortunately, simply releasing oneself, however contradictorily, from the obligation of being interesting is not a way of becoming so. In fact, it is a way of being quite dull. You can see why magazine editors might see it as an inspired commission to have a prized writer weigh in on current events: the promise that the drab materials of workaday journalism will be elevated under the novelist’s unpredictable, imaginative gaze. Of course, a danger is that the process leaves you with the vices of both genres, and the virtues of neither.

The show put six young men in competition for a $10,000 prize, which would be awarded to whoever won the affections of a 21-year-old Mexican model, Miriam Rivera. It was only at the end of the series that Miriam revealed to the unsuspecting contestants, and the one “lucky” winner, that “she” was in fact, in the modern idiom, a transwoman. The shell-shocked lover was then invited to either reject Miriam or collect his prize money: the latter of which, to twist the knife, required the happy couple to embark on what one assumes would have been an unusually frosty romantic Mediterranean boat trip together.

After weighing up his options, our lucky winner creatively chose secret option C: joining his fellow contestants in a multi-party lawsuit against the creators of the show, whom they accused of conspiracy to commit sexual assault, defamation, breach of contract and personal injury in the form of psychological and emotional damage. Which seems about right.

Of course, some will be quick to identify There’s Something about Miriam as a disturbing cultural artifact of the morally benighted age sometimes referred to as the recent past. The most aging thing about it, though, to my eye — admittedly only after watching the final “reveal” on YouTube a couple of times — is not that it is morally bankrupt trash. (That doesn’t really distinguish it from modern TV, after all.) Instead, it is how utterly pre-woke the sensibility underlying the show is. You cannot begin to properly grasp the central manipulation of the format, or how captivatingly unethical it is, without taking sex-realist assumptions for granted. Miriam was born a man; he, and the makers of the show, are pretending he is a woman; the hapless contestants are having their heterosexual dispositions systematically deceived by a series of deliberate tricks. The reaction of the young contestants when they find out is artlessly relatable, and equally unfamiliar to the current age: a mixture of undisguised astonishment, horror, and sniggering mutual-mockery as they attempt to collectivize the dawning embarrassment.

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Still, there is rather less than progressives might like to think to distinguish There’s Something about Miriam from I Kissed a Boy, the BBC’s present-day, Love-Island style (at least nominally) gay dating show, which has been criticized recently for including a trans man among its gay male contestants. Whereas Miriam involved the calculated deception of its unwitting contestants by the program makers, I Kissed a Boy is able instead to rely in 2025 on socially-engineered self-deception: both on the part of its contestants and one assumes some large portion of the viewing public, all of whom are prepared to engage the pretense that there is nothing odd about the fact that one of the “gay men” taking part isn’t actually a man.

To do the makers of I Kissed a Boy justice in criticizing their unwise choices, it is important to hold fixed just how bad the show would be anyway, without the odd intrusion of a trans contestant. Though it is possible that the sexual majority of mankind likewise feels demeaned by what unfolds on heterosexual dating shows, somehow in the gay case, the veiled insult feels more personal. All that the show’s contestants are depicted as knowing how to do is shriek, dress up, speculate inanely about their various sexual predilections, and shout things like “slay” whenever they spot the show’s host, Dannii Minogue, herself something of a loud counterexample to the theory that no sound travels through a vacuum.

Annoyingly, because of the creators’ earnest sense of the program’s social progressiveness, the show doesn’t fully cooperate with the viewer’s desire to dislike any of the contestants (a bit of a breach from the norm when it comes to reality TV, as I understand the genre). Instead, as if to insist that we find them sympathetic, we are offered a series of one-on-one, sometimes teary-eyed, teachable moments about the struggles of the contestants in their pursuit of true love, after which the camera carelessly cuts back to whatever lurid discussion of butt plugs or threesomes is taking place around the pool.

As one might expect, it is in the heavy-handed didactic mode that the trans-identified woman, Lars, is deployed to greatest effect. In one bizarre moment, she attempts to correct the alleged misconception that women are physiologically unable to “top” (i.e. genitally penetrate their partner). None of the fellow contestants presses her for details. Instead, they simply shout and cheer affirmingly, before moving on to more important things.

As everyone knows, the contrivances of the genre make the “reality” bit of reality TV something of a misnomer. If the fantasy of cross-sex identification can be sustained anywhere in life, you might have thought, it could surely be sustained here. Yet, in a way quite contrary to its presumably inclusion-driven agenda, I Kissed a Boy unwittingly presents viewers with a vivid demonstration of the shallow confusions of its own theory of sexual reality. Most noticeable of all is the superficial quality of the other contestants’ subscription to trans-inclusive political dogma. Though they mindlessly affirm the claim that Lars is a man, none of them seems disposed to act on that expressed belief: for the most part, Lars is not perceived as an object of attraction or even a potential source of intrasexual competition by the men. They pay lip service to the mantra, but little lip service of other kinds to the person. Two episodes in, the man Lars has been forcibly paired up with nervously exits the relationship, making impressively dubious use of “it’s not you, it’s me” style reasoning. Economists often talk of “revealed preferences” as a more reliable indicator of an agent’s state than self-reported desires; in this case, the contestants’ sexual choices subvert their collective claim to take their female co-contestant to be a man.

The capricious dynamic of the show parallels the broader reception trans-affirming politics has received among homosexual men, where the response has often been an unstable mixture of apathy and dogmatism. A good number of gay men seem to have mistakenly judged that what is principally on the line in the terf-wars is a general right to sexual libertinism and various permissive norms of sexual self-expression, the critique of trans rights being merely the thin end of a threatening political wedge. Many have been willing to join the debate with gusto on the basis of that inadequate understanding. That they themselves wouldn’t dream of actually having sex with a female, trans or otherwise, registers with them not as a possible source of tension in their beliefs, but a mere good use of the very general right to untrammeled sexual autonomy that they see as under contestation in the first place. It often doesn’t occur to these self-described allies of the trans movement that the view (implicit in much of what they say) that gay rights can only be bought at the price of a complete sexual free-for-all is a very pessimistic view of the justificatory standing of homosexual rights.

Of course many other people, including gay men, have noticed how regressive I Kissed a Boy is. Though it may be an excessively polemical gloss on the show, there is an uncomfortable degree of truth in the provocative claim here that the show places its contestants in a situation akin to that of conversion therapy: an environment in which they are invited to feel sexual attraction towards someone who is female. Though they wouldn’t put it in these terms, the makers of the show are in a very literal sense committed to the old bromide that some of its gay male contestants may just not have met the right woman yet. In response to such claims, the programme’s defenders have pointed out that all of I Kissed a Boy’s contestants appear to have consented to the set-up, woman and all — ignoring, in doing so, the awkward truth that those seeking conversion therapy often consent to the process too, a fact in spite of which many still see clear reason to proscribe it.

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What leads well-meaning BBC executives to insert a trans contestant into a gay male dating show, all the while presumably thinking they are doing something laudable? Perhaps they operate with a faulty, but oddly widespread, heuristic to the effect that gay men, in virtue of their androphilia, must in some obscure way be non-standard women. Another subliminal temptation on the part of self described progressives is often to simply chunk all non-standard sexual identities into a category that could be labelled “sexual miscellaneous”: no doubt because they view any internal differences among these people as less important than their shared deviation from the norm.

But whatever the more eccentric features of the programme makers’ mistakes, the more damning underlying error is their failure to understand one of their show’s central concerns: the romantic and sexual dispositions of the gay men on it. These sexual dispositions track biological features, not social ones. Sex, not gender identity.

Though there remain interesting evolutionary questions about the origins of homosexual desire in humans, there is little evidence to think it less stable or fundamentally different in kind to the standing sexual dispositions of, for example, heterosexuals. There is no reason to think a gay man might be successfully “turned” by a woman, whether she thinks of herself as a man or not. Despite what the creators of I Kissed a Boy seem to think, a gay man’s sexual disposition is a robust psychological fact about him.

Why is that simple and informative account of sexual orientation, arguably the default view, so widely rejected? One obstacle to its acceptance is that it can often appear to clash with people’s introspective reports about their own inner sexual lives, a subject about which they are often tacitly assumed to be infallible informants.

But that incautious way of handling the evidence of psychological testimony is a serious error. Unlike sexual orientation itself, one thing that is often not robust (as many cognitive scientists and philosophers working today recognize) is an individual’s access to their own fleeting mental states, about which they can often be mistaken. However counter-intuitive it may seem, that includes reflective access to their own sexual desires and beliefs. Indeed, that people can often be painfully or comically confused about what they want, who they are attracted to, or what they really think of other people, is one of the basic leitmotifs of reality TV.

In spite of the obvious truth that people are capable of gross failures of self-understanding, what might be termed the “Cartesian myth” that each individual enjoys transparent access to his or her own mental life remains ubiquitous and seductive. It has certainly been of great rhetorical help to trans activists in recent debates over the nature of sex and gender, where it has invested individuals’ claims to self-knowledge of their innately sexed identities with an unearned epistemic authority. Because those reports are often so muddled, the Cartesian paradigm also has the further downstream effect of making the underlying nature of sex seem messy, “fluid”, and complicated. People’s psychological self-assessments are often a highly faulty source of data.

Less often noticed is that once the robust, simple account of sex has been obscured by so much Cartesian graffiti, the same quickly happens to sexuality. Because sexuality must ultimately be understood in terms of sex, it too must be fluid, complicated and messy. One terminally frustrating feature of the way this dialectic plays out is that many boomerish heterosexuals, perhaps flattered by the unfamiliar attribution of sexual adventurism, often collude in the confused thought that sexual dispositions are inherently unprincipled and mysterious. The rich, tumultuous and sometimes surprising character of one’s sexual experiences can help to lend credibility to that picture. But psychologically, the “messy” theory of sexuality gets things completely backwards: modeling shaky access to a relatively robust phenomenon as robust access to a relatively shaky one. It is the conclusions we draw about our own sexual natures that can be confused or inconsistent, not the underlying natures themselves.

Were a gay man to kid himself that he fancied a woman, the default explanations should be that it is just that: a flight of fancy. Even if the show’s contestants, bullied by the format of the show and strongly internalized social expectations, are able to work themselves into that regressive frame of mind, it would establish nothing of importance. For a TV show to nudge a bunch of men into misperceiving their own sexual desires is no great political accomplishment, nor a particularly clever psychological trick either, as There’s Something about Miriam testified to many years ago.

Though the creators of I Kissed a Boy think of themselves as moved by considerations of political kindness, kind motivations, a bit like sexual desires, are the sort of thing one can be mistaken about possessing. If There’s Something about Miriam now looks eccentric to modern eyes, I Kissed a Boy may to future eyes look significantly weirder: a remnant of an age in which large swathes of society engaged the complicated pretense that they had forgotten the differences between men and women. It is silly enough to claim that the differences between men and women are of no social, legal or political importance; to insist, further, that they are of no sexual importance is barely coherent.

In papers and newsrooms, with their psychologically unhealthy receptiveness to barely detectable swings in the public mood, there was of course an immediate, erotic thrill in the air the morning after Trump’s victory. Finance, and other parts of the private sector too, were apparently eager to toast important political victories such as their newly regained freedom to use words like “retard” and “pussy” with impunity.

The ivory tower of higher education, on the other hand, absorbs tremors such as the vibe shift in the manner of a studiously tremor-proofed Japanese skyscraper, the people on the top floor barely sensitive to the shuddering ground outside. Publishing, too, one might have thought. But a few weeks ago came the news that the first male-only publishing house, Conduit Books, is to be launched in an effort to undo one of the most remarked-upon literary trends of the “woke” age: the death of male novelist.

Until fairly recently, even mentioning that the male novelist had died was the kind of conversational gambit liable to provoke wilfully confused or overdrawn reactions on the part of whichever literary types you were talking to. To go so far as to suggest an industry-wide initiative to save the male novelist would have sounded akin to a recruitment appeal on behalf of spinster librarians or homosexual choreographers: a basically pointless intervention. Even now, mention his death in a certain kind of bien pensant company, and you should expect your interlocutor to oscillate in a characteristically inconsistent way between denying that he really has died and insisting that it is a good thing that he has.

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That he has, in fact, expired, seems to me a question no longer much worth debating. The evidence is in. A recent cultural autopsy report in the American magazine Compact laid out the statistics with arresting clarity. Over the course of about a decade, the once-dominant figure of the white American male novelist has simply vanished from longlists and shortlists, from the ranks of prestigious literary fellowships, and from the end-of-year fiction round-ups of magazines, even those outwardly geared to male readers. Most astonishingly, not a single white male born after 1984 has ever had a piece of long fiction published in the New Yorker. A similar story could no doubt be told about the UK. By my count, the number of male millennials to have ever been shortlisted for the Booker Prize comes in at a grand total of three. Though any one of these facts could be brushed off as an anomaly, collectively they are much harder to dismiss.

Less obvious than whether the young male novelist is actually dead, is the matter of whether he was hunted to extinction, or died out as a result of ecological changes in the wider cultural environment — to which he couldn’t adapt quickly enough. Perhaps instead of being actively discriminated against, young ambitious men are simply self-selecting out of the literary scene. Faced with the appearance of collapsing industry-wide sales, and a remaining readership of literary fiction largely composed of women, that would certainly be a rational market response.

Explanations like those might settle the question, were it not that writing has always been a comparatively unpromising path. What remains particularly striking about the present day is the total absence of even a single outlier case: an instance of the competitive, prototypically-masculine male novelist for whom the culture was spoiled for choice only a few decades ago. More pressingly, what has happened to the kind of helplessly inventive, self-driven artist who can do nothing but pursue his calling, whatever the costs or barriers? His disappearance suggests there may be something more insidious at work in the structures of contemporary publishing.

The theory that there are more subtle ways of creating an unfavorable environment for specific kinds of people or behavior is one that has been richly developed by progressives in other contexts; but they apply its lessons in unprincipled ways, forgetting it entirely in cases that risk producing politically unwelcome conclusions. Though the feminization of publishing — today, 68% of those employed in it are female — and the accompanying feminization of the tastes that rule it, are one possible explanation, there is another more obviously culpable development.

That trend, which mirrors a wider one in all artistic enterprises, could be glossed as the replacement of merit by perspective as the governing priority of cultural life. Any book reviewer who has glanced through the promo material for a debut novel in recent years will be familiar with the mandatory references to the author’s backstory, whether eccentric or mundane; their lived experience; their “unique” “authority” to “tell” this particular “story” from whatever marginalized perspective they feel best placed to make a claim on.

Such desperate self-siloing is a marketing technique that is the natural counterpart of the invidious identitarian prohibition on writing from any politically-salient perspective other than one’s own, a transgression that one senses is fittingly regarded by some as a kind of creative theft. What, on the other hand, is virtually never front and center of the publishers’ sales pitch is any suggestion that the book might be “good” or the author “talented”. All fiction, within this framework, is a mode of biography, its value that of an elevated kind of social commentary.

The assumptions of this cultural turn have become so widespread that it can be difficult to recall how tedious and dysfunctional they are. They amount to the gradual corruption of artistic activity by outside concerns. At the limit, the view that art’s value consists in shedding light on extraneous social issues or political identity is one that denies art any kind of distinctive value at all, since other things achieve those tasks too — and often more effectively.

Philistines have always held the view that art’s value is at best derivative; that this view should have become the reigning ideology within cultural life itself, however, is perverse. Yet skim, for instance, this year’s Observer magazine splash celebrating the best up-and-coming novelists of 2025 and you will find the inclusion of virtually every entry justified on the purely instrumental ground that it addresses some extraneous social theme or other. Pieces like this read like a greatest hits reel of all the most eye-rollingly worthy subjects you can think of: “coercive control”, “queer romance”, “the opioid crisis”, “toxic masculinity”, “the northern black experience”, “empire, populism and global warming”, “male violence”, “taboos around the body”.

As many of the more generic social themes get done to death, it clearly pays with publishers to get a little more specific. One listed novelist claims to be channeling the disarmingly specific “feeling of growing up after 9/11 in an Iraqi-Pakistani household in Manchester”, another the experience of turning “16 the year that section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988” was passed. (I conjecture that someone who can directly feel the passage of local government legislation needs a doctor, not a book agent). Then, with the usual comic twist, one of the novelists announces their book is interesting because they are “dyslexic” and the list mercifully comes to an end.

What is to be done? Conduit Books and the new publishers for men to the rescue? Hardly. A quick glance at its self-characterization, and recent comments by its founder Jude Cook, reveal it to be yet another symptom of the disease it claims to fix.

Speaking to The Guardian, and with appropriate anguish, Cook dutifully acknowledges the “toxic male dominated” scene of the Eighties and Nineties. This, he tells us with a strange combination of vagueness and inaccuracy, was the tail-end of “3,000 years of patriarchal domination”. But in recent years, as the reading public will have noticed, an epoch-defining event has taken place in which literally thousands of years of artistic injustice have been set in reverse by the arrival of “Sally Rooney et al” as a “timely corrective”. (If three thousand years late now counts as “timely”, I feel considerable reassurance about my own filing habits).

Still, Cook can’t help but notice that the anti-male correction may have been an over-correction. There’s something wrong with today’s crop of up-and-coming novelists. The men all write like women, and the women all write like Irish women. And where’s the — buzzword coming — diversity there?

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Men, Cook imaginatively suggests, are the new font of “overlooked narratives”, their voices in need of amplification and platforming as they describe their very own lived-experience of “fatherhood, masculinity, working class male experience… and negotiating the 21st century as a man”. And just in case that doesn’t sound dull enough, Cook adds the oddly neutering constraint that it “cannot be over-stressed” that his new press will not “seek an adversarial stance”. Indeed so keen is he to trip himself up in pursuit of his stated goal, that Conduit is actively soliciting the work of “queer, non-binary and neurodivergent” authors in its attempt to court the lost male market.

There is a lesson here: both in Conduit’s wonky diagnosis of what has gone wrong in literary life, and its ill-conceived attempt at a cure. Thinking about the problem in perhaps the only way he knows how, Cook has attempted to conceive of young men, the only demographic that still robustly resists such treatment in the social imagination, as constituting yet another dimension of potential political marginalization. As his framing dictates, male artists’ only possible artistic interest could be to act as a filter for the kinds of social experience typical of their group. Though it parades as a solution, this is an expression of exactly the same diseased thinking that got us into this mess to start with.

It is not that young white men need to be added in, like an almost-forgotten ingredient, to the stew of social morality tales from which the literary world may draw. It is that no such extraneous social priorities should ever have been imposed on literary activity to begin with. They are the kind of thing bound to artificially constrain creative work in ways more likely to generate failure. It is hard enough, for writers of either sex, to produce intelligent art to begin with — without further forcing it to pass irrelevant tests as demographic survey or social commentary. But perhaps there is no way to force the publishing industry to internalize this simple lesson, short of some up-and-coming writer authoring a debut novel about the oppressive social experience of having to deal with an industry whose first response to identifying the consequences of its own errors is to implement its mistaken theory with more determination than ever.

White’s prolific sexual career took place during the “golden age” of homosexual metropolitan promiscuity. This was a time for “tribal love”, a time for exchanging the shackles of “grim American “morality”” for shackles of more specialist kinds, a time — as White reports in one of the antique strings of camp verbal play he has hoarded from the era — for “falling heels over head in love”. Or, more prosaically: a time when one wouldn’t think twice of “taking a break from writing at two in the morning to saunter down to the piers and have sex with twenty men in a truck”.

Like most gay men of his generation, White is an unreconstructed sex-positivist, at least avant la lettre. Needless to say, in today’s ideological climate, sex positivity — the view, roughly, that the only significant evaluative constraint on sex is the consent of the parties involved — comes in for a hard time. The publicity stunts of OnlyFans camgirls such as Lilly Phillips, for example, who managed to sleep with 100 strangers in one day, rightly strike most people as grotesque for reasons that have little to do with the willing agreement of everyone taking part.

Of course, next to the body counts of Edmund White, and indeed many gay men, Lily Phillips and her colleagues are banking amateur numbers. But because it is invariably developed under a female lens, the critique of sex positivity is often implicitly treated as though it does not generalize to the gay male case. If it is not being politely ignored altogether, the gay sexual market is treated as a sui generis and lawless domain where strongly sex positive norms enjoy a kind of local legitimacy, if only because no alternative seems possible. Yet between Lily Phillips and Edmund White, it seems the more interesting question, at least psychologically, is why someone like White — an intelligent, cultivated, reflective person with a rich inner world and the apparent capacity for self-control — would live as he did.

White is, in the truest sense of an over-used term, a survivor. An anomalous immune response prevented him from developing AIDS, despite an HIV diagnosis in 1984. In consequence, he lived long enough to write dozens of novels, memoirs and plays, a gay sex manual, a literary biography of Jean Genet, and win the Pulitzer Prize. His atypical longevity has also given him free reign, in his memoirs, to preach what he so enthusiastically practiced in the original all-you-can-eat gay heyday. The result, in this case, is a memoir so sexually graphic as to be at points booby-trapped against direct quotation by reviewers in the mainstream press.

It is impossible to turn more than a few pages without being confronted by yet another “dick as big as a child’s arm”, or “as large as something that would have saved the lives of three Titanic passengers”, darting out from within another pair of “piss-stained denim jeans”. We hear of the male prostitutes White has employed all his life to meet his surplus sexual needs. This, he admits, is an “expensive hobby”, but worth it if you have a “gout exclusif” for “Nordic blonds” or “young but legal”, or, more innocently, if you happen to find yourself in New York, famously the bottom capital of the world, and quite reasonably want to hire someone who will at least agree “to impersonate a top from the outset”. The best in the business, White notes, will even “crush my head between Transformer biceps” and “obligingly ridicule my tiny penis”. Throughout the Eighties, White particularly liked holidaying at a favorite beach resort in Crete, because there “everyone was available for a price, even the mayor”.

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White’s style of self-revelation shares something of the sexual exhibitionist’s fascination with provoking his audience. That, and at the age of 85, perhaps the occasional touch of the rapt self-involvement characteristic of senile disinhibition. White and his partners, we hear, drank one another’s urine: “like seals begging for fish”. Other anecdotes are so gruesome as to make the above adventurism look quaint by comparison. One surreal story unfolds at a fisting colony in Normandy. There, an acquaintance of White’s, Robert, “pushed an entire football up a Frenchman’s rear; the man had to visit a local surgeon”. The real kicker, however, as we are informed with glee, is that the next day “a whole queue of ass-hungry men were lined up before Robert’s door at the colony. They, too, wanted to be worthy of a serious operation… greedy glutes!” Such goings on stretch, among other things, credulity.

In fact, his blasé presentation of the consequences of embracing minimalistic sex-positive norms often seem like an open invitation to call that theory’s bluff. Despite what sex positivists insist, there is more to the evaluative appraisal of sex than a thin, rigoristic condition of consent. The uncritical live-and-let-live view that sex, alone among valuable things, cannot be seriously degraded if pursued in a self-destructive way is hard to sustain, when given a moment’s thought.

Of course, one shouldn’t downplay the substantial differences of male psychology, and the physical and emotional parity of male-on-male sexual relations, that reduce the attendant dangers of allowing sex positivity to reign in the gay sexual market. Men prize sexual novelty more. They are less physically vulnerable to one another. There is more common knowledge, making the exploration of extreme practices safer. It is, at least to my mind, considerably easier to think of a woman like Lilly Phillips as straight-forwardly self-deceived than it would be her hypothetical gay male counterpart. Still, there remain serious risks, as Loves of my Life inadvertently reveals, in organizing one’s life around the satiation of a single impulse, one’s sex drive, while driving other reactions to the margins.

Sex positivists have a hard time accounting for the value of sex because they are committed to thinking that all it takes for sex to count as good is for it to be authentically willed. According to this view, one’s sexual practices are presented as at once central to one’s life and self-identity, but oddly resistant to any satisfying evaluative appraisal. White is a case in point. He writes that what has “mattered most” to him in his long life are his many thousands of often anonymous, fleeting and ungentle sexual encounters. And, yet, “in the cold polar heart of old age”, he comes to see his sexual adventures as “comical and pointless, repetitious and dishonorable”.

Though an aesthete in his artistic and intellectual life — a self-described “epicure with high standards” — White makes a marked exception when it comes to sex, where he becomes defiantly undiscriminating: a “clumsy slut” with a “pair of warm holes”. He claims to have felt “intimate and tender” love for his thousands of partners and fallen “in love ten times a day”. But it is difficult to think of this as anything other than kitsch exaggeration when elsewhere he describes his sexual life as “sequential and hyper-horny”: “one-sided, aspirational and impossible, never domestic and mutual”. This is not just a matter of catching White out; such inconsistencies reveal a deep tension in his view.

To give him credit, White clearly has enough self-knowledge to pre-empt the bleaker revelations that threaten to undercut his book’s official tone of sexual triumphalism. He invites the reader to witness his later sexual misadventures, but only on the condition that he is able to cast himself in a knowing or comic enough role: one able to absorb some of the instability that comes with having to share his self-conception as liberated, while at the same time recognizing him as helplessly degraded.

In his old age, pursuing younger men with fetishes for sadism, White feels a vivid indignity: crawling obesely across the floor, “as big and awkward as Mr Snuffleupagus in Sesame Street, a muppet so large and unwieldy that it takes two people to operate him”. Does White’s very detachment from sexual reality itself take on an erotic thrill? And with the arrival of Aids, his continuing pursuit of casual sex comes to seem to him like “Russian roulette”. Nor does old age stop him from “feeling like a starving dog at the door of a meat locker”. By this point, he attracts complaints that he is “somehow too experienced, too slutty, too quick and adept in assuming the position”.

Though it bears pointing out that many of those who lead less adventurous sex lives than Edmund White might be disappointed and unfulfilled, attempting to double-down on the opposite sexual strategy is no guarantee of securing what’s of value in life either. Helplessly caving to impulse might seem to provide a handy model for liberation. But it is an obviously fallible one. Appeasement, so often a bad strategy for avoiding conflict, works no better when deployed to keep one’s own desires at bay. Deceiving oneself about the profundity of casual sex is not a means to happiness; it is means to being overblown.

So Shakespeare, with his practically clairvoyant ability to sympathetically channel vying perspectives, is a fox; Dante or Nietzsche, high-ranking hedgehogs. Plato, Dostoevsky and Proust are all, to varying degrees, hedgehogs, says Berlin; Erasmus, Montaigne and Aristotle, foxes.

It is a classic piece of high-table repartee from Berlin — often damned with faint-praise as the champion “talker” of his era at Oxford — which also owes something to the “ordinary language philosophy” of his day, which invested great importance in identifying subtle variations in meaning between apparent- or near-synonyms (if your dentist is readying his “instruments” you may rest easily, though somehow less so if he tells you he is fetching his “tools”).

The game of Berlinian binaries still has life in it. Tom Stoppard is a fox, Alan Bennett a hedgehog. Tarantino is a hedgehog, much as he might resist the label, Kubrick a fox. Part of the fun consists in casting people in ways that run counter to their own self-image.

Of course, Berlin’s game only works well if applied to people who are in some sense accountable for their own philosophic or aesthetic vision. Party politics calls for different instruments (or should that be tools?). At the Tory party conference I toyed with sorting the delegates into swivel-eyed loons, fruitcakes and closet racists, but ran into teething problems. The binary format turns out to be quite important: “closet racists” collapse too easily into “swivel-eyed loons”, leaving “fruitcakes” to pick out a more heterogenous residue than it really should. The tripartite structure was good for the cadence the Cameron became lumbered with allegedly making, but bad for heuristic purposes.

But how should we group the four remaining leadership contenders, who are to be whittled away to two this week? The great tribal binary of recent years, Brexiteer or Remainer, took on quasi-Berlinian contours after a few years of attrition in the public imagination: more dependent, in the end, on impressionistic assessment than how an individual actually campaigned or voted. Notoriously, Liz Truss, a remainer, came to be outlandishly Brexit-coded, while Rishi Sunak, who swung behind Leave much earlier than it made career-sense for him to do so, lost that credential. Today, the tired and too-contested binary does little to distinguish the four remaining aspirant leaders of the opposition.

Instead, it is tempting to frame the decision the Tories face as one between an everyman and an ideologue: pitting Badenoch and Jenrick, comfortably in the latter camp, against Cleverly and Tugendhat in the former. To give a quick lay of the land: in their different styles, Cameron, Johnson and Major were everymen; Gove, Osborne and Rory Stewart ideologues.

The ideologue is marked by his possession of a theory, the everyman by his possession of a disposition. At the conference last week, candidates were clearly marking their territory. James Cleverly used his big set piece speech to chastise his party for its lack of “normality”. Meanwhile, a series of increasingly incautious remarks by both Badenoch and Jenrick, far from being ordinary gaffes, seemed more likely part of a brinkmanship playoff in which the pair revealed the more daring consequences of their ideological priors.

The Tory party conference, though, is most probably an ecosystem in which the ideologue enjoys an inbuilt advantage. Within the safety of the conference centre, conventional standards of political sanity can be temporarily forgotten. The Conference is a place where Mark Francois is stopped for selfies with unironic enthusiasm by young men and women. It is a place where delegates queue up to have novelty tattoos of their preferred candidates’ faces inked onto their own. It is a place where Peter Bone is able to show his face (though, in the presence of so many Tory staffers, perhaps we should just be grateful he didn’t show more). In defeat, the Tories seem to have entered a decadent phase — excitable, speculative, drawn away from the sobering responsibilities of power toward less worldly styles of ideological reflection. One popular Centre for Policy Studies event was titled simply, “What would Maggie do?”.

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The ideologue’s challenges begin on the national stage, though, where their dogmatic allegiance to theory construction can alienate public feeling and be a liability in office. Truss was the ne plus ultra of the ideologue in living political memory. Of the current four, Kemi Badenoch seems most susceptible to being tripped up by her own ideological luggage. At the Conference, she pressed into my hands an inscribed copy of her 22,000 word pamphlet (“based on a forthcoming book”), Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class. It has four A4 pages of endnotes, and a runic pair of diagrams on page 16 involving triangular figures, with the words “right” and “left” written in them and bisected by lines at various angles. Such outward symptoms of crankishness are a gift to one’s political opponents. Ideologue-bashing is one of the shameful past-times of lazier elements of the media class. The flat-out dismissal that there might be any unifying diagnosis to be made of Britain’s long-term structural shortcomings is obvious and complacent anti-intellectualism. You can only discover the first-order merits, if any, of such diagnoses by actually looking.

The ideologue’s standing problem, then, is that he or she forgets that political success depends on appealing to people far less interested in ideas than they are. A more subtle obstacle is that sweeping political ideologies are not the sort of thing that should be perfected in advance, but instead evolve in tandem with the actual exercise of power. Many of the enduring tenets of Thatcherism were not established features of her political repertoire till her second term.

The everyman faces different challenges. He is famously discriminated against by the Conservative Party membership, who, like all party memberships, place a high premium on ideological purity. The more pressing danger this time round is that content-light normality can seem like an underpowered reaction to the scale of the electoral defeat the Conservatives suffered in July. These are activities better suited to the ideologue, but the everyman must engage the pretence as best he can.

The Tories are conflicted: torn between their interest in the diagnosis and their desperation for the cure. It has become a truism that electoral defeats are occasions for “soul searching” and radical course correction — as opposed to, say, brute manifestations of predictable cycles in electoral politics. While the ideologue wilfully indulges the urge for diagnosis, the everyman must artfully quell it by example. That is a hard role to play. Projecting a powerful sense of normality is not a normal thing to be able to do. It is a rare political gift; none of the remaining four possesses it. If the coming years are the Tories’ years in the ideological wilderness, it will be because the best way to avoid electing a weird ideologue is to elect someone weirder.

By the media’s assessment, many this year will have been cloaked in political hypocrisy, the past week having only provided more data for the robust rule of thumb that with the Tories the problem is always sex, and with Labour always money.

It is hard to escape the feeling, though, that “freebie-gate” has so far been sustained by the motley quantity, rather than the quality, of the evidence it relies on. The long-standing generosity of Lord Alli has combined loosely in the public imagination with the outputs of an undignified briefing war within No 10 to create the feeling that Labour ministers aren’t holding themselves to the standards of sober probity they so righteously affirmed in opposition.

While any one accusation could be litigated, perhaps successfully, on its merits, the slow accretion of new stories, in the manner of a pointillist image, creates a hazy, hard to dispel, impression of malaise. Not noticing this, or perhaps not knowing what to do about it, a number of ministers pursued oddly unpromising lines of personalised defence while under pressure in Liverpool’s media zone.

Among the most grimly plausible of the responses, Bridget Phillipson suggested that her 40th birthday party (funded by part of a £14,000 donation) had actually seemed to her to be very much celebrated in a “work context”; then, in an impressively cut-throat piece of buck-passing she blamed her own child for her accepting free tickets to a Taylor Swift concert. Not to be outdone on brazen front, Angela Rayner suggested that her declared reliance on Lord Alli’s largesse while visiting New York was in fact evidence of “over transparent” behaviour.

Whatever schadenfreude this might afford to those watching such contorted responses delivered half-heartedly to camera, it is probably worth recognising how overblown the litany of accusations has become. Perhaps Keir Starmer does have questions to answer about the historical, and possibly undeclared, use he made of Lord Alli’s London address. But the following is much more doubtful: that it is in principle scandalous that the prime minister wears clothes he hasn’t picked and paid for himself, that security requires he use a director’s box at football stadiums, and that his school-aged children escape the pre-election media buzz around their family home while taking exams.

Media has a responsibility to hold political figures to standards of transparency. But it is difficult to see how the current lines of questioning do anything but make Britain seem a parochial backwater whose media class is wilfully out of touch with the exigencies of political office. An American politician of Keir Starmer’s rank, for example, who refused the trappings of stylists and security would not be viewed as an honest broker but, at best, an eccentric.

Outrage over the perks of political power plays into a perennial theme — one especially indulged during conference season — that politicians should be just like ordinary people. Politicians themselves are guiltier than anyone for encouraging belief in this strained fiction: Keir Starmer’s awkward reminiscences about his tool-making father and Rachel Reeves’s foghorn reminders that she went to comprehensive school being just two claims to trenchant normality this government has been trying to condition the public into never forgetting. It’s a depressingly anti-elitist line which creates the expectation that front-line politicians should enjoy no special status or resources, even when representing their country in the eyes of the world.

Though some will find it controversial to say so, it is tempting to think that public practices of accountability lead most people to seriously overestimate the moral significance of hypocritical behaviour in public life. As a matter of ethical theory, the second-order question of whether one has flouted one’s own principles is arguably much less important than the primary question of whether one has transgressed any further principle of importance in doing so.

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At the institutional level, however, hypocrisy is a feature, rather than a bug, of our parliamentary system, with the Opposition operating under a standing incentive to hold the Government to a standard of behaviour higher than that it might instinctively apply to itself. Of course, once in office, the gulf between stated aspiration and the necessities of political reality grow starker still. A front-line politician who resolutely refused the option of hypocrisy under such circumstances would have a short career.

As Keir Starmer and his colleagues are currently finding out, accusations of hypocrisy are particularly popular with the media not because they are overwhelmingly important, but because they are so easy to prosecute. All it takes is a saunter down the archives to find an incriminating phrase or action. A simple contradiction is enough. Basically, they’re looking for a contradiction. This is far easier to land than arguing from first principles that a position they occupy, while not strictly inconsistent, is nonetheless mistaken.

Easily lost in all this is the idea that a certain measure of public hypocrisy is likely a constitutive feature of political life in the kind of well-functioning, open democracies one should wish to live in. Somewhat inevitably, these also tend to be countries in which there is inbuilt pressure on leading media figures to whip themselves up into a fervour over moralised criticisms that on reflection they would find hard to take at all seriously. After all, as we all know, if anyone loves a freebie more than a politician, it’s a journalist.

Evidently, the image of Didion that has entered popular consciousness — the Didion who modelled for Céline, had a Netflix hagiography made about her, and smokes languidly in black and white photographs on the bonnet of her white Corvette — is an easy object for (as the young themselves might put it) an exclusively vibes-based admiration. At a recent house auction of Didion’s personal effects, which took place shortly after her death in 2021, lot 122, a bundle of 13 notebooks, sold for $11,000. That the notebooks were entirely blank seems a fitting testament to the vapid high regard bestowed on her by modish fans who value her more for her aura than for the things she wrote down.

Very few writers, of course, deserve to be judged on the basis of the fans and acolytes they inspire. That this is so in Didion’s case is rather heavily underlined by a recently published memoir by the American writer Cory Leadbeater. The Uptown Local: Joy, death and Joan Didion is his account of the nine years he worked as Didion’s personal assistant, living rent-free in her magnificent apartment on the Upper East Side. While still an undistinguished creative writing student at Columbia, Leadbeater informs us, he dined with the great and the good of New York, his life taking on the character of a “ludicrous fantasy”. In fact, it would be easy to resent Leadbeater for his good fortune alone were it not that his book provides a wealth of other, more compelling, reasons.

Cory Leadbeater has achieved something frankly remarkable. He saw Joan Didion more or less every day for nine years, yet he has not a single interesting or original thing to say about her. Indeed, a few chapters into the book, she more or less vanishes. Instead, we learn a great deal about Leadbeater’s unhappy, though not deprived, childhood in New Jersey; his tortured inability to write a novel; and his hatred for his difficult father, who hit him as a child, and was later jailed for real-estate fraud. Nor is Leadbeater’s side-lining of Didion evidence of tact towards his late employer. “I confess,” he writes, “that there’s no one and nothing I wouldn’t put into this book if it meant I could make something beautiful and lasting… has it worked?”

Well, no. It hasn’t. The Uptown Local is a staggeringly tedious book. Nauseatingly self-involved, it inflicts an enormous punishment on the reader lured in on the understanding they were going to find something out about Joan Didion. It must be conceded, though, that in its way the book is oddly representative of the maddeningly over-produced genre of highly literary first-personal non-fiction, which publishers seem never to tire of inflicting on what remains of the contemporary reading public.

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It is no small irony, of course, that the alienated, inward-looking style Leadbeater adopts is one Didion did so much to popularise. In the wrong hands, as Leadbeater proves, it is a truly dangerous inspiration. Consider the scene after Didion’s death on 23 December: “I took down her Christmas tree through tears. The tears were because the metaphor was so obvious that it was just the kind of thing we would have laughed about.” Note, this is a man who cries not about people, but about the obviousness of metaphors. In fact, none of life’s revelations are equal to disarming Leadbeater’s unerring instinct for pretension. In another scene, his wife tells him she is pregnant; “I made her stand in front of the giant Auden portrait in my office and hold the test up, and I took a photo.” 

Leadbeater seems at times simply unable to describe things in a way that isn’t cloying and affected. He is full of enigmatic bon mots and non-sequiturs. “I was someone who wanted nothing, who required nothing and so I could be anything”; “Death is not an illusion but the meaning we invent for it most certainly is”. Quirky detail accumulates to no purpose other than to create the illusion of depth. Did you know, for instance, that Didion “ate vanilla ice cream with a fork”? His fussy, but confused, instincts sometimes get him into terrible tangles. “I was hit by my father,” he tells us: actually, “‘beaten, not hit’, I can hear my adult self-correct me”. (What distinction does he think he is marking here?) “Do you know how improbable that is… or unlikely, I should say.” (Ditto.) “Leadbeater”, “with an L”, he insists when introducing himself. (Eh?)

Though Leadbeater must be well into his thirties, he possesses a largely adolescent ego. “There is nothing I cannot do,” he announces, weirdly. “I am in possession of the world’s most powerful imagination. It burns through ideas faster than forest fires, it explodes with meaning where meaning only begins to exist.” Of course, Leadbeater might plead insincerity when he says things like this, but then that too would be part of the problem.

Once installed in Didion’s home at the recommendation of a friend, Leadbeater dines “with Oscar winners, California governors, and Supreme Court justices”, though we are not allowed to hear much about those, potentially interesting, people. He is aware that Didion’s “rarefied” friends don’t like him, and he is constantly fearful of displaying “a too-conventional enthusiasm”. In place of interesting material, there’s much grandiloquent description of his various failed book projects.

He spends hours alone watching CCTV footage of school shootings on his laptop. Surely, “there was a poetry of Inclusion that could cure all this”? By writing about it, perhaps “I could cure myself of having lived through such a violent era”. The fruit of these heroic labours is an “epic” book-length poem aiming to “synthesise the violent events of our time — the Oklahoma City Bombing, Columbine, 9/11 — into an idea about what was rotten at the core of the American Psyche”. (Thanks are presumably owed to the New York publishing industry for quarantining this early effort.) “Day after day rejections poured in.”

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Leadbeater often thinks about killing himself. “For long stretches I was untying my shoelaces and crossing 72nd street against traffic, hoping I would trip and fall beneath a delivery truck’s wheels.” Less slapstick forms of suicide are considered too — but all such malaise is chalked up as evidence of his personal depth: “Folks who find reality inadequate are apt to go looking for better or different things elsewhere.” Despite this suicidal ideation, his predictable reaction to the arrival of Covid is to acquit himself like a preposterous drama queen. “I wore a cloth mask over a hospital mask, I wore black latex gloves, and I sometimes wore sunglasses.” When his father sets foot outside “without a mask”, he loses it: “You’re going to get us fucking killed.”

The kind of literary environment that encourages books like The Uptown Local to be written cannot be an entirely healthy one. In fact, it is the kind of book that could confirm one’s worst instincts about contemporary publishing: that it is an industry overpopulated by wet English graduates who are readily won over by superficial displays of erudition and who, as a professional cohort, are nowhere near as afraid as they should be of being called out as phonies.

The disappearance of the reading public has likely played a role in this collapse in standards by removing any mechanisms of critical accountability. Unburdened by any awkward commercial imperative to sell books, it must be all too easy for today’s writers to navel-gaze as if no one is reading, because all too often nobody is. In Leadbeater’s preening assessment, Joan Didion’s greatness — her “real gift” he says — is that “she gave me permission to be myself in toto”. You do not have to admire Joan Didion as much as I do, or Leadbeater as little, to find this a simply bizarre assessment of what made Joan Didion great.

Wearing their constitutional knowledge commendably lightly, Youth Demand’s Twitter/X account explained to its followers that the state opening of Parliament is “an outdated, farcical parade” in which the “King will ride in a (literal) golden carriage” and “welcome in” Keir Starmer “as the new head of a blood-stained Parliament”. Only by disrupting the event in a way that will prove “impossible to ignore” does the group think it can achieve its aim: an “end to genocide”, starting with an Israeli arms embargo, and — a little incongruously, but they might as well read the whole shopping list while they’ve got your attention — a prohibition on new licences for oil and gas exploration in the UK.

Parliament is an appropriate target for rebuke because, as the group emphasises, whether “Tories or Labour, it all means genocide”. “Young people are not stupid,” they insist, perhaps pre-empting a charge sometimes levelled at this stage of the sales pitch. Rather, they “see through the bullshit” obscuring the fact that UK’s is a “rigged political system”.

As should be clear, in idiom and action Youth Demand is a fitting addition to the paramilitary wing of the student-led activist movement. As of April this year, it already claimed a 10,000-strong mailing list, with representatives at 17 British universities. Among its recent political achievements, it has spray-painted Labour Party headquarters and the Ministry of Defence, and staged a creepy protest involving children’s shoes outside the Starmer family home in Kentish Town, leading to three of its members being convicted of public order offences. (Apostates being worse than infidels, it is the Labour Party that seems to come in for the worst of Youth Demand’s ire, despite the group’s offhand acknowledgement of the Conservative Party’s responsibility for “14 years” of unspecified “atrocity”.)

It is tempting to think that the rapid turnover of political fashion over the past decade has had a curious effect on protest-oriented youth. More than at any point in recent history, today’s student protestor must be a generalist rather than a specialist. In a style characteristic of a conspiracy theorist, their background theory of the operant forces in society encourages them to see every injustice as standing in close explanatory connection to every other: and a failure to see these sometimes quite obscure links can be a worrying symptom of bad faith, privilege-induced blindness, or something even more culpably malign.

Under such pressures it is easy to acquire the monistic belief that there is really only one political problem — though one that perhaps has different manifestations — as people have started calling it, the “omnicause”. In the mouths of today’s protestors, what often seem like quite different political objects of disapproval — global capitalism, the patriarchy, white supremacy, Gaza, environmental terrorism, settler colonialism — are slurred over in a way that makes them seem fungible. They are all vantage points on the same monolithic oppressor. Something like that deflationary urge might always have been with us. But unlike their ancestors, who would have urged each other perfunctorily to “stick it to the man”, today’s activists feel shamelessly compelled to spell out the weird consequences of their background theory. Hence, the unabashed existence of vividly maladaptive movements such as Queers for Palestine.

The resulting political movements are characterised by an unhealthy mix of political disengagement and global fixation. The ordinary mechanisms of electoral politics are judged too feeble to be of any service to the extravagance, urgency and scale of their cause — which is, at the limit, the whole world and its unjust past and endangered future — and are promptly bypassed.

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It is of course easy to find activists led astray by such a totalising theory a comical spectacle (or an obvious anti-social menace, depending on how nearby they happen to be). They are in a straightforward way politically short-sighted: the immediate, local, and graspable problems of political life seeming to them blurry and unimportant, only expansive, universal, and unobtainable objectives snapping into focus.

Such moralism arguably involves a practical mistake. Its proponents misidentify the sorts of problems universities, book festivals, private firms, political parties, or even national parliaments are suited to solving. As a means of effecting political change, such mistakes are a recipe for making oneself irrelevant and one’s cause disliked; though one could litigate the exceptions, indiscriminately-targeted direct action has a comparatively poor track record of securing lasting political progress. This shouldn’t be surprising: its aims are often ill-defined, and its methods deliberately calculated to avoid engaging the socially established channels of political action.

At a theoretical level, however, comical though it undoubtedly still is, such moralistic overreach is at least an intelligible form of error. The fact is that moral and political progress in the past often has been achieved by gradually expanding the sphere of ethical concern both outward in space and forward in time. The extension of moral concern provides one easily-grasped paradigm of moral progress. Most psychologically normal people, however, find it clear that uncontrolled reliance on this heuristic quickly yields silly results. In fact, part of the comedy of Just Stop Oil, Youth Demand, and their fellow travellers, is that despite their grandiose dogmatism the meagreness of their actions reveals that they, too, find it difficult to take their theory at anything close to face value. (If the fate of the earth really were at stake, action more drastic than the spray-painting of Taylor Swift’s Jet or boycotting book festivals would be morally required.)

More curious than the way young activists misunderstand the collective interest is the way they routinely fail to understand even their own self-interest. Though charitable interpreters will be inclined to think that youthful idealism, even in overreaching, serves as a socially useful corrective to a jaded and politically unimaginative status quo, from another point of view it represents a gross diversion of political resources.

Despite the widespread trope that they are excessively self-centred, one of the most striking facts about people in their teens and twenties is their near total neglect of their distinctive interests as a political class. Young people form an increasingly natural constituency for political solidarity, yet time and again age is overridden by dividing lines of more doubtful importance. In fact, to learn of the agenda of a misleadingly-named group like Youth Demand would lead you to think that the young had no political causes of their own worth pursuing and so had generously moved on to solving the world’s problems.

The complete absence of a sense of intra-generational solidarity among the young is, in a way, baffling. The dysfunctional political decision-making of the recent past has been utterly prejudicial to their interests. Electorally outnumbered by a politically active gerontocracy, the young now leave university with mountains of debt. They can look forward to a future cramped by an effective graduate tax on even small earnings, national infrastructure degraded by long-term under-investment, a chronically under-supplied housing market, and little hope for the life-enhancing arrival of economic growth. All of this is the political legacy of older generations who, unlike the young, vote in high numbers and ruthlessly in their own interest. According to the CPS, someone born in 1956 will extract £1.2 million in state benefits, and someone born in 1996 only half that. These are the basic ingredients of intergenerational injustice.

The totemic political betrayal of the young in recent years — the casual use of lockdown as a tool of public health policy — involved a catastrophic transfer of wealth and opportunities away from children and young adults, towards the elderly. The ongoing and expensive Covid inquiry will presumably reach no holistic judgment as to whether this was a justified action. Recent university cohorts had their A-levels cancelled, were placed under effective house arrest in their university accommodation at their own expense, and then had the delivery of their final university grades delayed by university strikes. That all of this was accepted in a spirit of compliant resignation makes it hard not to want to blame the young for their want of vitality.

Such political quietism is the natural accompaniment of a style of activism which is pathologically moralistic and holds the actual practice of politics in contempt, as today’s frontline student activists do. Is it too much to expect that, at least as a default, student activism should be about students’ interests?

All this is enough to make one nostalgic for the anti-tuition-fee riots of 2010: perhaps the last time an impressive number of students mobilised in their own interest. Then, as even The Daily Telegraph recorded, “perhaps because their cause was justified… [the protesting students] had none of the swaggering, self-righteous manner of the student protestors of legend”. City traffic ground to a standstill; students occupied the Millbank tower; Conservative Party headquarters were graffitied over with a crude drawing of an ejaculating penis accompanied, ironically or perhaps not, with the message “don’t kill the arts”. Nick Clegg took to the airwaves to explain cravenly that he should have been “more careful” in making his ill-fated manifesto pledges; days later, as Clegg was delivering the Guardian’s Hugo Young lecture at Kings Place in London, students outside the building brought out a Clegg-like effigy which they sentenced to death and promptly executed while chanting “Nick Clegg, shame on you, shame on you for turning blue.” All very invigorating stuff.

It is hard not to warm to these protestors in a way not possible with the student activists of today: grounded self-interest is so much more sympathetic than unworldly moralism. They had a just grievance — they had been misled, perhaps even lied to, at the ballot box. They owned their own cause. They had a realistic grasp of the party political structures they were attempting to influence. Best of all they had a lively sense of their own material interest. That is a precondition for getting a political hearing though by no means a guarantee of one.

Today’s student activists could do with being a little less self-involved and little more self-interested.

In its oblique gesture towards a besieged and perhaps vanishing greatness, Robert’s question brought into play the usual unreflectively naïve assumptions about the uniquely inferior quality of today’s crop of politicians. This is simply a form of political exceptionalism about the present. It is an uncritical habit of thought that calls to mind a notional past in which politicians were upstanding, deft, civil, conservatively-dressed, models of probity. Consider that by some obviously relevant standards — intelligence, moral fitness, command of policy — they are the best pair of candidates we’ve been presented with for several electoral cycles: nothing special, perhaps, but then, it follows, nothing especially bad either. It bears pointing out that the last time the public was invited to vote, the choice was between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.

It must of course be admitted that for a workplace of some 650 people, the House of Commons does seem to give rise to more than its fair share of workplace indiscretions. Publicising pictures of your genitals and distributing your colleagues’ phone numbers to potential blackmailers; dipping into political donations to pay-off “bad people” and ending up chained to a radiator; browsing pornography on your phone inside the chamber House of Commons; offering to lobby parliament while being secretly filmed by undercover journalists. At times, the scandals operated according to a kind of nominative determinism for ease of recall: Pincher was the bottom grabber, Parish the profane one, and Bone  — upsettingly — the flasher.

As for Rishi Sunak, it is, of course, a bitter irony that his roll of the electoral dice has been skewed by the scandal of politicians making dodgy wagers against manifestly unfavourable odds. As it stands, five Conservative political figures, including two now-unendorsed parliamentary candidates, have come under investigation by the gambling watchdog for placing potentially illicit bets on the date of the election. It’s a squalid spectacle. The characters, nonentities; the motivations, base; the sums of money involved, comparatively paltry.

But however hard it is to summon up enthusiastic moral condemnation, it is even harder still to feel anything close to surprise. That gambling is, apparently, rife at Westminster is probably in no small part because it calls on the same dispositions and skills as politics does.

If there is an underlying unity to the many and lurid transgressions of our outgoing cohort of parliamentarians, it is their near pathological inability to properly respond to risk. But, then, anyone who wins a seat in the house of commons is, more or less in virtue of that very fact, someone who fancies their chances against sometimes wildly unfavourable odds. Even for the well-qualified candidates, merely being selected by a local association is an often random, taxing and capricious process, a fact testified to by the gleeful operation of Twitter accounts such as “Has Sebastian Payne got a safe seat yet?”.

It is an important fact about MPs that each and every one is a person who decided at some point to channel vast resources of time and energy, and very often their own money, into a process that would at some point or other see them being humiliatingly rejected in a regional leisure centre at 4am. It comes to them all, eventually. And for the time that they are in post, the attraction of thinking of much political action on the model of a gamble rarely dissipates. “ACHAB”, the Tory diarist Alan Clark used to console himself when some scheme or political wheeze seemed to be heading for the rocks: “Anything Can Happen at Backgammon”. The phrase was one exported from the gambling room at Clark’s club, Brooks’s “where games can swing at a late stage on an unpredictable run of the dice”.

Nor would it be sensible to blame politicians too much for acting on the basis of instincts that might share much of the phenomenology of the often unreliable twinges of a gambler’s gut instinct. Sometimes there may be little else to go on. Such instincts, under the right circumstances, may even yield a distinctive kind of political knowledge. It is a well-attested insight of psychology that gut reactions, and fast and frugal heuristics, can provide a reliable basis for knowledge. An expert political operators may, for instance, instantly read a room, or effortlessly notice the most powerful person in it; in the subtle cues of a colleague’s facial expression they might detect weakness or the prospect of betrayal; like a master chess player taking in a board at a glance, they might instantly see a position as a “win” for one side rather than the other.

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The most effective political operators tend to be those who have a lot of such intuitive knowledge. Whether they do or not is usually the sort of thing that one can assess only on the basis of demonstrated performance. Rishi Sunak, by most people’s lights, has very little.

More challenging than the thought that our politicians might be gamblers by disposition — not all of them cut from Clark’s cloth, admittedly — is the knowledge that we actually want them to be rather good at it. Risk-taking is constitutive, rather than incidental, to political life. Political realists, going back to Machiavelli, have emphasised the intelligent management of luck as being key to effective political leadership. A level of daring that might be inappropriate in more sheltered walks of life can be indispensable to successful political action, aided by the absence of any clearly defined or properly enforceable code of professional ethics in political life — the non-existence of which so distresses Question Time audiences.

Calls to clean up politics, to drain the swamp and restore a sense of decency to public life are leitmotifs of politics of the populist Right, Left and Centre. That such partisan charges can be credibly made from all sides suggests that a general phenomenon is being misdiagnosed as something more parochial. There hasn’t been a sudden and local collapse in political standards; this critique is insensitive to characteristics of politicians that are long-lived, widespread, and less contingent to the effective operation of political life than might first appear.

Even if panic about the rapid decline of public morals is unwarranted, the widespread belief that such decline is taking place creates a problem, and ironically, an occasion for opportunism. Public trust in politicians has reached an all-time low. Ruthlessly indulging the exceptionalist view in the final leadership debate, Sir Keir Starmer declared with uncanny historical precision that “over the last 14 years politics has become too much about self-entitlement”. Instead, he suggests that Labour will restore a lost ethic of public service to political life. But the suggestion that one can remould the characters of politicians by moral fiat is one that fails to take seriously the structural features that virtually guarantee these traits are selected for. Perhaps Keir Starmer knows that. As Machiavelli would no doubt advise, making a convincing pitch for the restoration of public trust need have nothing to do with actually acknowledging the truth.

Lamé was hired in 2016 as part of Sadiq Khan’s “plan to turn London into a leading 24-hour global city”, her job being to “champion nightlife and nurture our night time economy”. Since then, some of her more ill-disposed critics have pointed out that she doesn’t seem to have done much to “nurture” London’s night-time economy — apart, that is, from presiding over an impressive salary hike for Night Czars employed by London’s Mayoral Office.

The real challenge when you’re placed in a cushy political role, with negligible power and no prospect of remedying the social ill for which your job has been designed, is sensing when to declare victory. Lamé, it turns out, can’t do this properly either. In a widely ridiculed recent op-ed defending her record, she madly proclaimed London “the best 24-hour city in the world”, one whose “world-renowned nightlife” had left “other global cities looking to [it] for inspiration”. Sitting rather uneasily alongside this vapid triumphalism was repeated acknowledgement of the “huge challenges” London’s night-time economy nonetheless faces.

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Apparently banking on the fact that no one watching had ever visited another major city, Lamé doubled down on this baffling line in a follow-up interview with the BBC. London, she insisted, was a “truly 24-hour city”. When the awkward question arose of what exactly London’s 24-hour economy consisted of, Lamé’s puzzling first suggestion was people “working for the NHS” — the implication being that, because it is still possible late at night to travel across the capital by ambulance, London is a thriving metropolis. It is difficult to know what makes this defiant style of political gaslighting seem a good idea, even when you bear in mind that Lamé had to account for herself somehow. The claim that London is “the best” 24-hour city in the world isn’t just false — it involves obvious presupposition failure. London is simply not up and running half the time.

Consider, as I often do, drinking. Has London ever been a more hostile environment for late-evening drinkers than it is now? Wander into a London pub at any point after dark, and more likely than not your offer to trade money for alcohol will be met with the familiar vitriolic shake of the barman’s head that conveys the response: “Are you mad? It’s almost 9:30 on a Thursday evening, of course we’re closed.” Over the years, I have gone to simply extraordinary lengths to prolong an evening of drinking in London. I have dashed about town on the shakiest of speculations that some-place-this-guy-knows might still be open. I have climbed into strange taxis with taxing strangers. I have posed as a guest in hotel bars. Seeing no alternative, I have allowed myself to be bullied into nightclubs so unpleasant that no amount of alcohol short of a lethal dosage could alleviate the misery of being there.

On one particularly dispiriting evening, my friends and I once completed the paperwork necessary to join a members-only casino just so that they’d let us carry on drinking their past midnight, a short while after which we were asked to leave for not gambling enough. Dragged against my will in the early hours to a club staffed by topless dancers who seemed to be under instruction to target aloof customers, I found myself explaining, as camply as seemed necessary, that, unlikely as it might sound, I was actually just there for the conversation and the £14 bottles of Heineken. “Everybody gets a dance,” came the ominous reply, as reinforcement hostesses advanced towards me like gunboats out of the half-darkness. I begged; I pleaded incoherently to just be allowed to sit and drink; and somewhere out in the night I could hear the sound of Amy Lamé cashing another enormous cheque.

What kind of society imposes such frightening costs on law-abiding citizens? Dr Johnson conjectured that a man tired of London must be tired of life. But he didn’t know about Sadiq Khan’s “24-hour London Vision”. Today, it is only those who against all the odds haven’t quite given up on living whom London is still able to routinely terrorise and disappoint. Time a midweek visit correctly — either quite early or quite late — and swathes of central London take on a practically post-apocalyptic atmosphere: the streets deserted, the lifeless city resembling a monumental abandoned film-set which you can stamp around like Philip Seymour Hoffman in the closing scenes of Synecdoche New York, wondering whether anyone else has noticed how unhinged things have become.

To make the situation more maddening, the underlying causes of London’s nightlife problem aren’t hard to grasp. The scarcely credible fact that London does not have a network-wide 24-hour underground system discourages businesses from operating, and people from socialising, late in the evening. You can read the deadweight loss off the empty streets. The few places that make a point of staying open late have a captive, self-selected, audience and can be as nasty and expensive as they like.

Civilised nightlife dies under these constraints. In the last three years, 1,100 bars and clubs have closed in London. Added to this, the kind of bars, clubs and pubs that you’d want to stay open are terrorised by local authorities, which allow a small number of hostile actors to behave like veto players over late-night activity: withholding licences, bullying businesses with excess regulation, and ministering to Nimbyist instincts about noise and activity even in the densest and most central parts of London.

It is important not to forget what a manifestly unnatural constraint this is to impose on city life. If there aren’t going to be late-opening bars and restaurants in, say, Soho, then these things aren’t going to be anywhere. And if this is the case, it is not at all obvious what the distinctive function of a city is supposed to be. On that framing, it is no longer true that part of the implicit bargain of city-dwelling is that one sacrifices private space and income in the expectation that one is compensated by a hospitable and vibrant public realm.

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All of this raises the question of why anyone would put up with the dysfunctional, life-denying norms that have degraded London’s nightlife. It is tempting to think that the only psychologically sustainable response towards such constraints is complacent acceptance. Perhaps we have become accustomed to thinking of it as a brute inevitability that, mid-conversation and at some point around 10pm, the bells sound out across London, the dentist-chair lighting snaps on, and everyone is instructed to leave — initiating the hard-transition to somewhere grosser, more expensive and further away. It doesn’t help, of course, that the horrors and privations of London’s nightlife are felt mainly by the young, a group which in recent years has revealed itself to have only the feeblest grip on its collective interest as a political class.

One predictable reaction to this dismal picture of youth culture is the sort of self-congratulatory bullet-biting that comes so naturally to the proponents of contemporary public-health moralism. Drinking, carousing, casual sex: these things are bad for you, unhealthy, inherently risky. Better, in the image of Amy Lamé’s London, to have a night-time economy staffed principally by health workers keeping alive a population with increasingly little to live for. On the moralist’s view, what might feel like personal deprivation, and the frustration of natural instincts, is in fact all in the service of the theoretic collective good.

During lockdown, many young people self-consciously welcomed the disappearance of Fomo — complacently satisfied by the knowledge that everyone was having as bad a time as they were. Even at the time, it was clear that this reaction expressed a mistakenly parochial view of what counts as missing out. Whole groups and cities, as well as individuals, can miss out if they try hard enough.

Oxford has always offered sanctuary to the socially maladjusted and chronically ill-at-ease. At first glance, Emerald Fennell’s new film, Saltburn, might be an attempt to dramatise the resulting long-lived demographic tension of undergraduate life: the modus vivendi that must be established between those who effortlessly belong and those who find they can’t. Fennell is herself the Oxford-educated daughter of a multi-millionaire London jeweller, perhaps giving some indication of which side of the university’s social binary might have claimed her allegiance. Much like her first film, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is propelled along by an enjoyable, rather unhinged, spirit of social paranoia. It is a film that is rather evidently entertained by itself and its own excesses. In fact, the film is so enjoyable that many of the curious errors and misconceptions that underscore its depiction of Oxford undergraduate life occur to one only as afterthoughts.

The film’s elevator-pitch is simple enough: the psychodrama of The Talented Mr Ripley imposed on the charmed setting of Brideshead Revisited. Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is gormless and poor; Felix (Jacob Erlordi) is gorgeous and rich; both are first-years at Brasenose. After a few run-ins, Felix generously befriends Oliver, many rungs his social inferior, and invites him to spend the summer at Saltburn, his family’s country seat. Ripley-style, Oliver is revealed to be in the grip of an opaque desire at once to pursue, destroy, and in some sense become Felix, the object of his dark obsession.

He embeds himself in Felix’s life like a parasite, his fascination all the creepier for having a sexual dimension while lacking any straightforward sexual explanation. In one scene, having spied Felix masturbating in their shared bathroom through a crack in the door, Oliver waits for him to leave, then climbs into the tub and sucks the inseminated water out of the drain. But worse than this — much, much worse — is that Oliver is later discovered by Felix to have lied about his social background. He is not in fact working class, but a middle-class person engaging in “oppression cosplay”: a very Oxford touch. Fennell has correctly noticed that among today’s undergraduates, misleadingly playing down one’s privileged background might well be a more profitable form of social camouflage than playing it up.

That aside, the more one thinks about the fast-blossoming relationship between Oliver and Felix in the first act, the less sense it makes. Why exactly does Felix allow Oliver to penetrate his life to the degree that he does? Pity — the explanation the film seems to want the viewer to accept — is, as Oliver must know, not a very promising model for manipulation within the socially ruthless undergraduate circles in which Felix seamlessly moves. There are half-hearted attempts to suggest that the frisson of playing the role of saviour, or perhaps an acquired taste for the exoticism of poverty, might motivate Felix’s adoption of Oliver. (“I can see why Felix likes you,” his sister tells Oliver when meeting him — Yes? Please tell us! the viewer thinks — “you’re so… real”). But none of those interpretations of Felix’s motivations can be properly sustained for the reason that Felix, perhaps against the grain of our expectation, turns out to be consistently decent, sane and straightforward.

For similar reasons, it isn’t at all clear why Felix’s family seem so desperate for Oliver to stick around at Saltburn once he’s been invited up. Likely explanations as to why this berth might be made available to him — for instance, that Oliver is a sparkling conversationalist or accomplished social performer — are ruled-out by the film’s premise. Were he to have these qualities, Oliver wouldn’t have needed to trick Felix into friendship in the manner in which he turns out to have done. In general, the film suffers from a kind of uncertainty about how attractive a figure Oliver is supposed to be. He manipulates boldly but haphazardly, leaving the viewer wondering whether anyone capable of even occasionally pulling off the feats of seduction and role-playing he sometimes succeeds in would really be stuck in such a social rut to begin with.

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If the degree to which Oliver succeeds at Saltburn is under-explained, the degree to which he fails to at Oxford is more so. In his first few days as a fresher, Oliver is mocked by his tutor for having read all the books on his reading list, and at dinner is shown to be a solitary loner adrift in a sea of convivial, urbane and already intimately acquainted others. The message seems to be that he is an isolated loser. But as anyone who has been there will know, and anyone who hasn’t should be able to guess, there are in fact countless Oliver Quicks at Oxford. For the most part they are fully-integrated, albeit lame, members of the community. Oliver would fit right in!

A conscientious but neurotic loner, the prototypical Oliver is probably a PPE-ist (rather than an English student, as Fennell imagines). He types away loudly in lectures and pulls a reliable 9 to 5 at his favourite desk in the college library; he may have been liberated by student life to the degree of making some inadvisable fashion choices and has perhaps even got a daring earring, all the while holding his underwhelming personality fixed. He goes on a few forgettable nights-out a term, prizes the limited social recognition he receives on the basis of fulfilling some thankless administrative role like being JCR secretary, and spends most of his evenings cooking enormously elaborate meals with his boring girlfriend in the staircase kitchenette. I encountered Oliver dozens of times at Oxford.

Saltburn may of course not intend to draw any deeper moral about Oxford’s social scene. Few of the satiric touches in the film seem to be operating in the service of a wider background political theory. Of course, that aim — to make a film about social inequality at Oxford which is just fun — may strike some as subversive enough in its own right. All the same, any film that did aspire to be a credible satire of contemporary Oxford would have to reckon with the fact that Oliver is not now, nor likely ever was, the canonical villain of undergraduate life. At best, he is a hapless accomplice. The real baddies are a subtly different social type.

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Generations turn over quickly at Oxford, and the spirit of the age changes with them. It didn’t take me and my contemporaries long to notice that, in the latter half of the 2010s, we had contrived to come up at a time when a detectable atmosphere of lameness hung about the place. This was doubtless true of other universities too, though the combination of Oxford’s fragmented and parochial institutional structure, as well as the high concentration of intelligent weirdos, seemed to amplify its effects there. “Lameness” is admittedly a frustratingly non-specific label, but seems the right kind of impressionistic diagnosis to get some traction on the problem. It was after all often a little tricky to put one’s finger on what lay at the root of this lameness, though the dispositions and reactions associated with it were quite obviously expressions of the same underlying phenomenon.

It wasn’t, to be clear, just that there were a number of visible malcontents in the social mix — that, I had obviously been fully prepared for — but that, somehow, they seemed to be in charge, and moreover ruling by consent. Everyday college life was kept in check by their many wildly unpredictable and exquisitely-honed sensitivities; a casuistry of safetyism provided the method by which almost all communal decisions were taken. The mood was censorious, retributive, and moralistic. The de rigueur attitude was a kind of performative insecurity, though lapsing into this mode was often nothing more than an implicit double-bluff: a way of announcing one belonged by insisting that one didn’t.

An extraordinary coup had clearly taken place at some point, comparably diabolical to the one which Oliver pulls off. Many of those in power behaved with a kind of wounded officiousness that suggested they had been bullied too much at school, or perhaps not enough. Now, as if taking their cue from certain progressive political causes, they seemed to be attempting to “reclaim” their lameness as something to be celebrated, or at least uncompromisingly imposed on other people.

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Perhaps the most violent outlet for these strange urges was JCR politics, which some of its leading practitioners seemed to conceive of primarily as a mode of social revenge — using it to terrorise their fellow students and police their activities, though invariably under the guise of promoting kindness, the collective mental wellbeing, or some equally sinister objective. In the manner of modern day Lord Chamberlains they would turn up to the university theatres and hammer lists of trigger warnings to the doors; satirical college magazines were shut down; each term brought with it a cause of outrange more unimportant than the last. The rule seemed to be that no gripe could be too manifestly unserious to fail to count as a veto on any collective enterprise. It was often difficult to know how far to be amused and how far disturbed by the strange ascendant mood.

A shrewd choice to simply side-step these unwieldy contemporary developments may be why Saltburn is set in 2006: long enough ago that recent history’s political and technological trends hadn’t had a chance to warp the character of campus politics, though still recent enough to pass for the present in certain crucial respects. Still, the effect is to trap the film with a somewhat ersatz image of Oxford — the dreamy crane shots over the Rad Cam, the oddly managed homoeroticism, the remote aristocratic estates. The view from the dreaming spires manages to not quite bring into focus certain notable developments on the ground.

As a result, and whatever its other successes, Saltburn fails to skewer what is distinctively worth skewering in undergraduate life today. It’s a shame, as that would be well worth doing. Undergraduate life is funny, even though it takes itself seriously. Some properly trained derision would reveal its excess self-seriousness to be compensating for a gross lack of seriousness; its overweening moralism disguising an untoward parochialism; the pretence of imposter syndrome concealing the existence of the real imposters.

Part of the show’s appeal, I take it, lies in the near-hallucinogenic spectacle of watching minute variations on a theme playing out within a largely unchanging structure. But failure to change even a winning formula draws criticism. In 2021, when asked whether the programme’s producers would ever consider including non-heterosexual contestants, ITV commissioner Amanda Stavri said — presumably while panicking a little — that although “it goes without saying that we want to encourage greater inclusivity and diversity”, including gay or lesbian islanders might create “logistical difficulties”.

That such a change would lead to “logistical difficulties” is an obviously sound consideration, and so predictably enough was immediately identified by critics as evidence of rigidly enforced bigotry on the part of ITV and the television industry at large. It was a strange diagnosis; television executives don’t seem the kind to make a stand on a point of principle, even a deeply cherished bigoted principle, if abandoning it could earn them costless approval.

Presumably, the logistical difficulties Stavri had in mind concerned the underlying selection mechanisms on which the drama of Love Island largely depends. Among reality-TV subgenres, Love Island operates firmly within the “state-of-nature” model. Contestants are removed from society, deprived of almost anything that makes life worthwhile — notably intelligent conversation and alcohol — and made to interact. Under these lawless conditions, the threat of forced “recoupling” and manipulative tests of loyalty artificially speeds up the cycles of relationship and break-up, as islanders are forced to divide and unite under close observation, like material in a petri dish.

The ceaseless pressure to find a mate results in a market of romantic goods and, as the intrusive night-vision footage occasionally implies, services. That one sex is interested exclusively in buying what the other is selling, and vice versa, is crucial to the extended dynamic. For example, when a new male “bombshell” hits the island, the calculated effect is that the bargaining power of all the men suddenly decreases. To introduce men who sometimes prefer men to women, or women who sometimes prefer women to men, would likely frustrate some of these effects, and not necessarily in ways that would be congenial to those who were hoping for a progressive display of “inclusivity”.

For one thing, it might alter contestants’ incentives to tactically reveal or conceal information about themselves. Events could make it expedient to match against one’s actual sexual preference, or even to strategically feign or deny a settled sexual preference: not an obviously edifying spectacle. But any alternative to this — for example, a format which offered same-sex pairing options only to certain contestants — would disunify the market, undermining the sense in which all islanders face equal options.

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By Jarryd Bartle

An easy way to bypass these problems, as the producers of I Kissed A Boy, which concluded on Sunday, evidently saw, is to populate the island exclusively with gay men. Like its inspiration Love Island, I Kissed A Boy also exemplifies the state-of-nature paradigm, though it does fleetingly concede something to that other monolithic sub-genre of reality TV: the “sexual re-engineering” format. These programmes — such as Naked Attraction or Married At First Sight — humiliate their contestants under the guise of helping them, usually by violating some obviously sound norm of social life (norms such as “Don’t pick your prospective partner out of a naked human cattle-auction being run by Anna Richardson”, or “Don’t marry strangers”). Their modus operandi is to establish the vague thought that modern romantic life is somehow subtly dysfunctional, misdiagnose the problem, and propose a wilfully ill-motivated solution.

I Kissed A Boy’s twist is to have all the prospective couples, whom they match initially for compatibility, make out with each other before exchanging even a single word upon arrival at the villa. “No small talk, no swiping — it’s all about the first kiss.” It is an oddly confused premise, at least when presented under the guise of a supposed remedy. What alleged problem of gay life is it supposed to be a remedy to? It has never seemed to me that 20-something male homosexuals need any encouragement adopting the shoot first, ask questions later strategy. Unsurprisingly, almost all of the couples hook up sight-unseen without much difficulty, some so extravagantly that one almost expects a comedy crooked-cane to appear jauntily from off camera to drag them discreetly out of shot.

While the BBC-produced I Kissed A Boy neatly dodges ITV’s much-feared logistical problems, it does encounter some telling new ones. A little self-conscious about being the “UK’s first gay dating show”, the programme veers chaotically between meeting the perennial progressive challenges of celebrating difference while emphasising sameness. In the first mode, the show risks being immensely trivial, in the second, oppressively sincere. Celebrating diversity, the producers seem to think, largely involves quite a lot of mandatory dressing-up and catwalk posing in feather-bowers and chapless pants. The sincerity quotient is provided by way of the usual tearful disclosures contestants are obliged to make about trauma in their upbringing, or personal lives, or whatever, which invariably conclude with reflections on the vast importance to society of the work being done on the show.

The problem of subjecting a distinctive group — gay men — to the demeaning attention of reality TV is that it can end up distinctively demeaning them. We watch as the contestants are made to play games like “yas or pass” where they reveal their authoritative judgment on such questions as “Is Lady Gaga a better artist than Beyoncé?” or “Is it fine to send a dick-pic as the first message?”. Later, in a scene so explicit as to leave nothing left to imply, the “boys” take part in a relay race, the crucial stage of which involves each taking turns at clamping a cream-filled éclair between his thighs and thrusting it, through a glory hole, into his blindfolded partner’s open mouth, as the delighted others improvise a crude commentary (“Gareth, are you sure you’re not a bottom?”). Is this, what the final stages of social equality look like? To be fair to them, I suppose, straight people have been forced to do this kind of humiliating stuff on television for years.

The show also struggles to accommodate a rather more interesting kind of challenge. Somewhere in his early diaries, Alan Bennett observes that when a straight couple goes out to dinner and one of them flirts with the waiter, it ruins the evening; when the same thing happens to a gay couple, it becomes part of the shared fun. Bennett’s insight, characteristically well-judged, is that gay life cannot always be relied upon to reproduce the same tensions and obstructions that exist in its heterosexual analogue.

One plausible explanation for this points to a fact more basic than sexuality: it is not that those involved are gay men, but more basically that they are simply men. When it comes to studying evolved mating preferences — factors such as appetite for casual sex, readiness to arousal, the importance attached to a partner’s status or age, susceptibility to sexual jealousy — evolutionary-psychological studies reveal substantive divergence between men and women, but suggest comparatively little between homosexual and heterosexual men. An environment such as that on I Kissed a Boy, where everyone shares characteristically male preferences — and moreover knows that everyone else does — should be predicted to differ in basic ways from the mixed-sex heterosexual alternative. In some respects it might be a much simpler environment to negotiate.

The uneventful course of I Kissed a Boy provides a fair amount of anecdotal data for this prediction. Implicitly co-operative, unpicky about their options, and pragmatically sex-oriented. There is none of the coyness of Love Island. The men realise that pooling all relevant information in a fairly collegiate way makes life easier for everyone. That is to say, they get behind each other. “I want to know who’s tops and who’s bottoms”, one demands as a sensible opening-move. “Get me some cock!” shouts another to no one in particular, first thing in the morning.

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Why do progressives watch porn?

By John Maier

Of course, the uncomplicated dynamic that follows means that equilibrium is very quickly reached, and the show’s producers must, in an occasionally haphazard way, introduce more contestants to the house in the hope of restoring novelty and “drama”. The remedy is always short-lived: the new boys are just as willing to cut to the chase as others were. A new arrival, asked to identify his “type”, replies “Can I say all of you?”. (“She’s into group — fair play” is the inevitable, gleeful response.) Another new arrival, asked to select among the men for a date that evening, cuts out the middleman entirely: “Right boys, get your willies out!” he orders, rubbing his hands together.

The uninterrupted atmosphere of bawdy, flamboyant directness is one that is simply impossible to imagine being replicated in an environment also containing women. The men freely joke about “topping” and “spit-roasting” each other, on the understanding that there is, as one puts it delicately, “a whole world of cock to explore”. One pair excitedly realise they live near each other in the UK (“how many metres on Grindr?”). Another two are certain they’ve met before: “I’ve probably sent you dick-pics at some point,” says the first, with a non-committal shrug. No, that’s not it, the other persists — “Do you ever go cruising?” he whispers, covering up his mic in a quite unprecedented show of discretion.

It is much to their credit that the cast of I Kissed a Boy largely defeat the genre’s complacent expectations — more interested in paying lip-service to one another than to the lacklustre conventions of the format. Many of the routes to “drama” and dysfunction are simply short-circuited; the moments of conflict largely anomalous or apparently manufactured; the atmosphere of intrigue that depends on mutual-incomprehension diffused by too much mutual-understanding. It is an amusing spectacle, one which the show’s producers cannot possibly have intended, as it contributes to the show not conforming very well to the Love Island model and its tropes. The “differences” the programme attempts to “celebrate” end up running deeper and in somewhat different directions from those it naively anticipates. It is a satisfying failure, one well worth celebrating.

Polly Barton’s Porn: An Oral History — a transcript of 19 meandering conversations with anonymous interlocutors on the subject of sexuality, kinks, feminism and pornography — introduces narcotic doses of nuance into a “conversation” one might have considered already unwieldy enough to begin with. The book is “a compilation of messy, ugly conversations brimming with contradiction and ambiguity”. Indeed, by the end of her 19 conversations, Barton has been exposed to so much nuance she appears to have achieved full cognitive disengagement. “I am increasingly unsure what a position or even an opinion on porn could look like for me,” she concludes with satisfaction.

This is a common enough phenomenon when it comes to thinking reflectively about sex: bully your basic reactions with nuance to the point where you can disengage from the underlying phenomenon and believe almost anything. Barton’s conversations — especially those with women — are full of reports of sincere, sound, and persuasive first-order judgments about porn that are then swiftly crushed by second-order deference to a sexual morality of nuance. Her interviewees spontaneously notice that some sexual or pornographic convention strikes them as wrong, or degrading, or disgusting, then will immediately check themselves by noting that things are of course subtler and more “complex” than that suggests.

Contemplating the diverse horrors of porn — its violence, its tendency to warp and infiltrate sexual taste, its exploitative business model and association with criminality — Barton’s interviewees are near unanimous. They feel “extremely uncomfortable”; something “between anger and disgust”; “a kind of nebulous, all-pervasive worry and discomfort”. Porn is “unhinged”; “doesn’t sit right with me”; is “super off-putting”; “terrifying in a quite non-specific way”; “I just think about how the porn actress is in pain.” Barton notes the “flashes of discomfort in [their] eyes” as they answer. “I’m scrolling down,” reports one man, “and then I get to something that will suddenly be a turn-off. Women with their mascara running, or they start being tied-up, or they’re being abused and humiliated… It’s awful… It makes you feel dirty…[but] in a way I want to say, each to their own.”

Each to their own? This familiar corrective is more than an expression of the admirable liberal view that depraved practices ought not to be outlawed simply because they are wrong; it is the view that it is a mistake to register them as depraved or wrong in the first place. One interlocutor reports being made “queasy” by porn, but then to being “troubled… because I don’t what to be a prude and I want to be sex positive”. Another person is disquieted by styles of porn in which “the woman is treated quite violently”, but smothers this thought with the “understanding of that diversity and wanting to celebrate it”. “Why am I strangling you?” one man recalls thinking with horror, while discussing the sexual choking he was invited by a partner to imitate from porn. He then urgently corrects the record: “It’s not that I’m against it. I’m not against any of it.”

He’s not against any of it? Another woman, having discovered her husband’s penchant for “eight person gang-rape” videos, feels conflicted: “I understand that is some people’s fantasy… and I’m hesitant to kink-shame.” Several of the women are understandably scared by the idea that their boyfriends may be secretly aroused by the spectacle of misogynist sexual violence: “I struggle with it… sometimes I get myself in such tangles,” one says apologetically. Of course, some people might see this mental tangle as symptomatic of enlightened political thinking. Perhaps these people are in the process of refining their baser aversions to being slapped, degraded, and ejaculated on. They are overriding their untutored judgements, tuning them politically to the sex-positive framework, making them more sophisticated. More nuanced.

One diagnosis is that these people are attempting systematically to loosen their grip on fairly reliable patterns of response that we unproblematically accept when applied to the rest of human life. They have imbibed a doctrine of sexual morality that tells them to uncritically embrace every sexual impulse, on their part and that of others, apart from the ones sending them warning signals of fear and aversion. Of course, as Barton’s interviews remind us, it is very difficult to restructure one’s basic reactions as to what is bad, dreadful, threatening, or gross. They continually reassert themselves, despite attempts on the part of the subject to crush them in vindication of some putatively more elevated sexual ethic. The upshot is a feeling of helpless conflictedness.

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A striking feature of Barton’s interviewees is that they take it to be obvious that the broad-minded, sex-positive attitude that explicitly shuns “judgement” of others is the most empathetic view, and therefore the right one to hold. It is not at all clear, however, what is involved in the exercise of empathy free from judgement. Examined under a different light, such supposedly broad-minded assessments look more like failures to fully exercise empathy, rather than the opposite. “I’m not into people getting slapped in the face, or pinned down by the neck, or kicked,” says one interviewee. “I get that maybe some people are, but to me that doesn’t seem enjoyable.” Under ordinary circumstances, the judgment that another person might like to get slapped in the face does not strike us as a successful exercise of empathy. It seems about as successful an extension of empathy as the short-tempered schoolmaster’s judgement that, contrary to everything else he knows, what his student really wants is a good beating.

It is not obvious why we should accept the wholly exceptionalist picture of sex as immune to the relatively robust norms that we happily apply to the rest of life (for example, the norm that it is wrong to slap someone in the face merely for your own gratification). The sex-positive outlook of unconstrained nuance is not of much satisfaction to those who embrace it, as becomes all too clear to anyone who reads Barton wallowing in it for over 300 pages. As she comes close to admitting: she knows that porn is largely horrific, but wants to believe that it isn’t.

Barton attempts various unsuccessful means of easing this instability. One is to venture that while porn may be an ethical free-for-all, the general dislike she has of it might be to do with its “problematic aesthetic elements”. But the attempt to wholly divorce the aesthetic and ethical deficiencies of porn is almost certainly ill-fated. The two modes of appraisal are too closely entwined. The judgment that what one has just watched is nasty, or dreadful, or simply gross, invariably draws on both dimensions of value.

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A more disconcerting reflection for the anti-exceptionalist view of sex might be that one risks denying an important truth: that the erotic has, to a certain extent, a life of its own. More, the erotic stands in some interesting relation to transgression itself. The attempt to tame sexual impulse with ethical norms immediately raises the prospect of their being flouted. It is the perennial pornographic leitmotif: the sideways glance, the final trembling protest of one’s better nature, and all the rest gives way to extravagant gratification. Erotic life takes us by surprise; takes us out of ourselves. It is ruled by murky and poorly understood impulses. Of course, even if we accept this picture wholesale, it wouldn’t follow that our account of the erotic should be similarly murky and poorly understood, as Barton seems determined to make it. More tellingly still, to attach any great significance to transgression, one must first acknowledge that there are some norms in play to be transgressed.

The fantasy of a sexual realm that can float untethered from the rest of ethical life and human judgment is just that, a fantasy: just like the view that ever more nuance is a necessary good, and conversation always remedial. As Barton’s book makes all too clear, in fact, “conversation” can serve to conceal, rather than reveal, the truth. The complaint — which she occasionally makes — that we do not yet “have a language” that is sufficiently nuanced to reconcile us to pornography and the degrading sexual practices it depicts can, under this light, take on a cynical quality. Actually, the language with which to describe violence, coercion, and the lack of self-knowledge and false consciousness required for people to uncritically approve it, is all too readily available; what we do not always have is a language of critical reinterpretation that is sufficiently opaque to disguise uncomfortable truths from us.

Meanwhile, at Merton, where Liz Truss read PPE in the Nineties, undergraduates still perform “The Time Ceremony” every autumn when the clocks go back. Between 2am British Summer Time and 2am Greenwich Mean Time, students dressed in full sub fusc (black tie and gowns) walk backwards around the Fellows’ Quad in order “to maintain the space-time continuum”. According to her biographers Harry Cole and James Heale, Liz Truss delighted in Merton’s eccentric ceremony. I wonder whether her thoughts turned to it at any point during her own liminal 44-day premiership, before it too collapsed into an extensionless point in political space-time.

The tricks being played on us by the accelerated pace of political upheaval are well in evidence in both Cole and Heale’s Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss, and Sebastian Payne’s The Fall of Boris Johnson, both of which enter a kind of warp-speed as their protagonists’ regimes spiral and crash. Great offices of state change hands like debased currency; in the last three years, we have practically doubled the stock of living ex-Chancellors. And remember when Grant Shapps was Home Secretary for six days? At times, it looked as if Andy Warhol’s prediction may become true of politics, if not elsewhere: in the future we shall all be Cabinet Ministers for 15 minutes.

What explains this unusual volatility in the political system? One widespread attitude expresses itself in the form of an exceptionalist view about the present: our politicians are peculiarly crap and ill-suited to govern. The watchword of this theory is “unprecedented”, and its characteristic mood is one of ahistorical sanctimony about contemporary political life. It is often difficult for these theories to rise above the flippant register of the sketch-writer’s caricature: Boris Johnson is a Machiavellian clown, psychologically incapable of telling the truth; Liz Truss is a Thatcherite human-GIF who loves pork markets. That is, the account struggles to actually explain the data in place of merely describing them.

Another more jaded mode of explanation is ahistorical in a different way. This outlook regards today’s problems as nothing special. Disaster and tumult are more or less eternally constitutive of political life. On the subject of Johnson and Truss’s downfalls there is little to add to Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failure. While offering a useful correction to the former account, this view is also too complacent. It is, for one thing, often a little unclear what content there is supposed to be to the claim that all political careers end in failure beyond the banal truth that all political careers simply end.

In fact, there are several, somewhat novel, destabilising political phenomena described in the work of Cole, Heale, and Payne. Foremost among them is the manner in which the 24-hour online news cycle, with its insatiable appetite for a worsening situation, encourages a form of speculation on political confidence and capital. The combined desiderata of round-the-clock media scrutiny — a demand that officials be publicly accountable, and the lightning movement of news data — is an inherently unsteadying mixture. It is, after all, well-observed that social media can help to precipitate bandwagon-effects of popular resentment under repressive regimes; it would be curious if analogous effects were not also in play under settled liberal governments. Of course, the demand for accountability and a merciless attitude toward failure in public office are good things in their way. But almost no good thing arises without loss in some other dimension.

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Don't make me Prime Minister

By John Maier

At pivotal moments of collapse in both books, events outpace the ability of political actors to effectively manage them. The lumbering anatomy of Whitehall is not built for acceleration. It is difficult to imagine how, in a previous technological era, a spectacle as engrossing, damaging and chaotic as the cascade of resignations from Boris Johnson’s government could have been similarly achieved. In the age of paper and post, it took a bit of time to resign. In one revealing anecdote of Payne’s, the spectral figure of Charles Moore sidles casually up to Treasury Minister Simon Hart who is sitting on a park bench on Twitter. “Oh Simon, what are you up to this evening?” Moore asks. Hart responds: “If you wait 15 seconds, I’m literally resigning.”

There are, thankfully, some reliable frictions left in the political process. Professional vanity, for instance, provides some residual robustness in the face of even the most vividly disintegrating political fortunes. Brandon Lewis, for instance, “breezed into” Johnson’s strategy room, at a moment of high calamity, and surveyed the reshuffle whiteboard. “Sensing the weakness of the team that was being assembled, Lewis argued he should get a grander job and was offered Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.” He left, apparently pretty pleased with himself — much in the spirit of a passenger who’s just successfully upgraded their cabin on the Titanic — before resigning a few hours later.

The relation between Johnson’s administration in its final months and the media placed him in a posture of increasingly hopeless damage-control. According to Payne: “from October 2021 onwards, [Johnson’s] administration was… entirely focused on firefighting.” At moments when instantaneous response was needed, aides found the Prime Minister “was always away”. Channels of communication stalled. The chief problem, as Payne tells it, was not so much that Johnson’s Number 10 team were mendacious and corrupt, but that they couldn’t stay ahead of the story — whether it was Paterson, Pincher or Partygate — for sufficiently long to counteract it. One unwelcome effect of the emergence of these intense, and no doubt irreversible, political pressures is to increase the appeal of a certain virtue of bloody-mindedness in public life. It might be, however counter-intuitively, that increasingly stringent demands for transparency and integrity in public life end up favouring not the squeaky-clean class of politician, but those who are able to cultivate a calculated indifference to the rules in play.

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Needless to say, politicians who possess these qualities won’t just exercise them when they’re useful; they’ll do so too when their effects are destructive or straightforwardly unhinged. Mere hours before his resignation, Johnson remained “determined to carry on through sheer effort of will”. “All my life,” he is reported to have said, “people have been telling me ‘you can’t do that’. And I’ve always proved them wrong.” The same morning, Michael Gove made his fateful visit to Downing Street, by that stage a bunker of panicked activity, and urged Johnson to stand down. The Prime Minister responded by relating a story, apparently in admiration, of an uncle of his “who had ‘failed to take his meds one day’… [and] so barricaded himself into the town hall with a shotgun. The uncle was eventually bundled out by the police. ‘That is going to be me,’ the prime minister said.” Returning to his Ministry from the meeting, Gove informed his staff that the Prime Minister had unfortunately “gone mad”.

As with Johnson, the portrait developed of Truss by Cole and Heale, is one of a political agent almost pathologically insensitive to the influence of other minds. Aides noticed how “very thick-skinned” she was, with this “delightful Terminator-like quality”. But, on closer acquaintance, her steady hand could be unnerving, even to allies. At the height of the income tax U-turn, with the pound crashing, allies “were struck by her ‘worryingly zen-like’ demeanour”. As David Laws recalled of Truss at her first department, Education: “I like Liz but she doesn’t listen very much, and when people try to make points, she just talks straight over them in a slightly irritating and rather ‘deaf’ way.” This quality of political “deafness” can of course be useful, allowing one to wilfully resist the demands of external opposition and public scrutiny that might move a less headstrong individual to self-doubt or compromise.

But as Laws’s description implies, there is a constructive ambiguity in Truss’s case as to how far her obstinately “deaf” temperament is actually under her control, or about how far it is a part of a more general strategy of calculated madness. Rory Stewart recalls his years under Truss at Defra as “traumatic”. There, watching her civil servants “you could see the panic in their eyes and them thinking ‘does she really want to do this?’” And according to Dominic Cummings, Truss is “about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in Parliament”.

To her credit, Truss occasionally reveals a degree of pragmatic awareness of the manner in which her political strengths entwine with her personal incapacities. Addressing close allies in the early stages of her leadership bid, “she was blunt and to the point, telling one visitor: ‘I think I would be a very good Prime Minister, there are just two problems: I am weird and I don’t have any friends. How can you help me fix that?’” Presented with the consequences of the mini-Budget, and the possibility of simply throwing the old steamroller into gear and ploughing on, Truss at last recorded a final and uncharacteristic twinge of self-doubt: “the problem is the last time I ignored all these people they were right.”

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The Tory Party belongs to Alan Clark

By John Maier

Some years after his own short premiership (366 days), Alec Douglas Home is said to have encountered an elderly woman at a train station who admiringly told him that she’d always thought he would have made rather a good Prime Minister. He reportedly responded, with good grace, that he actually had been, though admittedly only “for a short time”. Liz Truss can for the moment only dream of comparative levels of anonymity. As her short administration collapsed around her, though, I wonder whether her temperamental deafness proved something of a solace — as Truss addressed the nation outside Downing Street she seemed almost to be smiling. (“Don’t worry, I’m relieved it’s over,” she is reported to have told those on the inside of the black door, “at least I’ve been Prime Minister.”)

But the lessons from Johnson’s demise and Truss’s implosion, so far as I can see, are not as commiserative. Today’s political environment makes remarkable demands on the modern politician — demands of exertion, openness, imagination, resilience to criticism, and speed of response. It is sometimes difficult to see how any decent politician could be equal to meeting them, though it is increasingly clear how a bad one could be wilful enough to resist them.

It is perhaps an anecdotal measure of cultural decline that Alastair Campbell, along with fellow “political heavyweight” Baroness Warsi, is now playing the role of scowling mentor in Channel 4’s new reality show, Make Me Prime Minister. Twelve “ordinary yet opinionated Brits” compete to see if any of them “has what it takes” to “do the top job better”. They are faced with wildly under-specified tasks — week one: “totally reform primary school education”; week two: solve “the obesity epidemic” — with rather uncertain standards as to what might count as success. Presumably, next week it will be “broker a multi-lateral peace treaty in the Middle East”, or “restructure the UK’s long-term government debt”. If that kind of geopolitical cosplay doesn’t send them hurtling for the fire escape, the candidates should perhaps ask themselves if anything would.

The candidates grandstand, argue, blame and bullshit one another — ungrammatically and at length — in a tour de force of charmless self-assertion. They stumble around boardrooms in a fake Downing Street, draw randomly on whiteboards, and loosely translate the vapid, self-affirming dialect of reality-TV cliché into the terms of the mad fantasy the show insists on: “As Prime Minister, I have to stay true to myself”; “I don’t want to be like the Prime Ministers that we’ve had previously”. Warsi and Campbell — one can only hope in return for a large fee — are made to debase themselves by pretending the exercise has some halfway credible purpose. “I hope what this competition will do is find a new generation of political leaders,” says Warsi flatly, like a hostage to camera. “It would be quite extraordinary”, Campbell agrees, “if one or more of the people who go through this process actually do end up as elected politicians.” True enough.

Why insist on this deranged understanding of the show’s purpose? There is, I take it, something more to it than the usual time-filling promotional bluster.

At the heart of the show is an oddly exceptionalist view of politics as a locus of human thought and action. It is the view that politics, unlike any other intellectually-demanding discipline you care to name, admits no refinement of judgement: that there is no such thing as political wisdom or expertise. This bedrock conviction provides a firm basis for various kinds of populist sentiment. If there are no standards of political judgement, any “ordinary Brit” with enough of a can-do attitude should be able to do it. The apparent existence of subtle, structural or technically-demanding political problems turns out to be an illusion, one no doubt sustained by a political class who gain by it. Actually, the view says, there are no persistent or recalcitrant political problems, no perennial challenges of conflict or co-ordination: politics is nothing but a realm of pseudo-problems. What is needed, as one of the contestants puts it, is to “just apply some common sense to what we were told was a very complex situation”.

The show ministers to a strand of common-sense supremacism that plays a recognisable role in more and less sophisticated styles of political cynicism. Make Me Prime Minister is the kind of show you can imagine appealing to someone who reckons Hugh Grant should definitely be made Prime Minister on the basis of the terribly amusing dance he does in Love Actually, or who tweets terrifying lists of the various celebrities who would appear in their “fantasy cabinets”. It is a position that operates in a purposefully unstable rhetorical ground — at once reflexively sanctimonious and deeply unserious. The show’s embrace of this kind of thought makes for a haywire tone. One moment Campbell and Warsi talk disapprovingly about politics “being in a mess” and the urgent search for “new talent and energy”; the next, parish-council tactical-Zoom-defenestrator Jackie Weaver is introduced as one of the contestants. One minute, we’re told “parliament ought to sit up and take notice” of the fine example the contestants are setting; the next, we have to watch as they stumble around, asserting themselves mindlessly like a round-the-clock tribute act to the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Of course, to the owners of the reductive theory that politics consists in the straightforward application of common sense, the solutions to all our problems can look frustratingly close to hand. All we have to do, as various candidates suggest in their turn, is to put “any differences aside”, agree to “take a more progressive approach”, and try to be “a lot more forgiving and a lot more open”. “I believe in doing the right thing,” insists one candidate, contentiously; another informs us that in politics all “you need [is] integrity and principles”. “I try not to take an argumentative stance when I debate” reveals one, apparently without irony. “I don’t like to be confrontational”, insists another at a decisive moment of conflict. “It’s one of the things I dislike about politics.” (What exactly there is left of politics, let alone left to like about it, once conflict has been disposed of, is not explained.)

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You might think it would be quite tricky for someone who believes that all political disagreement dissolves in the universal acid of common sense to explain the manifest character of the world around them. Cynicism about the political process can be a helpful crutch here, though it can easily modulate into something with a more wide-eyed, conspiracist aspect to it. Because there cannot be any real political problems, the theory might go, anyone — in particular, any politician — pretending that there are must be somehow compromised: a liar, ill-intentioned or in someone else’s pocket.

For common-sense supremacists, being alienated from a sclerotic and corrupted political process can therefore only bolster one’s credentials. The “ordinary Brit”, with her brutal logic of common sense, wouldn’t do the “top job” just as well as the career politician; she would do it a damn sight better! She is, after all, free from all that unhelpful political baggage — you know, all that dreadful cumbersome stuff like understanding, loyalty, experience or commitment.

All the contestants on Make Me Prime Minister seem to credit some version of this account of the pure and indefeasible claim of free-floating common sense. In fact, it is perhaps this that accounts for the strangely unstable set of attitudes they seem to hold with regard to extant political life: a mixture of global contempt, wild self-belief, and shameless ignorance. At the limit — as the show’s candidates express with an unguarded clarity — even a standing interest in politics might be a possession of doubtful value. “I don’t know that I am interested in politics,” Jackie Weaver boasts; a second contestant suggests his “greatest attribute” is his lack of party-political solidarity (“I would just weigh up the policies as I see them”); another boasts of his “outsider status”; “what you need to do is think: I’m sick of these politicians, I can do this better”.

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The anti-democratic argument that rule-by-experts would be best for society and the soul is, of course, as old as political philosophy itself. At first sight, the implied political vision of Make Me Prime Minister is a terrifying inversion of its Platonic relation — it shows us a vision of society ruled, not by philosopher kings, but by an untrained council of reality TV contestants who also happen to be apolitical imbeciles. But in a way, the opposed visions have more in common than is first apparent. Both are ways not so much of advancing political life, but of disposing of it altogether. They are both expressions of the belief, or perhaps the consoling aspiration, that politics, with all its constitutive disharmony and antagonism, should cease to exist. Of course, as a solution to the perennial problem of reaching political decisions, the resolution comes, inevitably, one decision too late. And it is one of the fleeting pleasures of watching Make Me Prime Minister to see its contestants’ belief in the obliterating power of common sense and worthy intentions disintegrate as they struggle, argue and disagree in the course of making even the most elementary decisions.  

Surely this show has backfired on its creators? If I didn’t know better, I would say the whole thing was the result of a hasty backroom deal between television executives and the government designed to make members of the current administration look sane, witty, intelligent, urbane, self-effacing and capable by comparison. It is no small irony that the show falls flat in this way, much like the contestants’ attempts to “prove themselves” do: collapsing without generating intelligent reflection or insight, the hollowness of their shared and complacent vision of politics exposed. There are, needless to say, insightful and unsettling criticisms to be made of the political institutions in this country; but the claim that we would all be better off if very simple-minded people were running them is not one of them.

All the same, it is a serious question: which vices should we want our politicians to have? The normative demands of politics are significantly different from those of everyday life, and this fact rubs up uncomfortably against the misguided, but popular, expectation that our politicians should not merely represent us, but resemble us too. This places MPs, especially senior ones, in something of a predicament: they must dissimulate so as to appear less exceptional, but at the same time prove themselves the only person fit for the job. The simulation of normality is something of a high-wire act not least because, as the current Tory leadership race is illustrating in real time, the imperative to present oneself as ordinary can take on a crazed, desperate quality, a neediness which strikes the rest of us as, well, slightly weird.

If readers want to be freed from the expectation that their politicians should be remotely like them and — even more so in this direction — vice versa, they might try reading Alan Clark’s Diaries.

Perhaps no one did more to reveal the deformations inherent in the political psyche. Entering the Commons in 1974, Clark must at first have seemed an archetype of the kind of wayward backbencher the Conservatives are generally better at producing then their opponents: unruly, temperamental, little-concerned for party discipline, more interested in being admired by a selective group of colleagues than liked by the elective public. He longed, however, for government position and the first volume of his Diaries, a bestseller in 1993, records his years spent as a Minister under Margaret Thatcher, first at the desultory Department of Employment (re-christened, by Clark, the “Department of Un-employment”), and later (much more to his taste) at the Ministry of Defence.

Diaries often provide a much more direct form of psychological access to their subjects than memoirs, and Clark’s are wildly unguarded. Take this entry, from 23rd June 1983, a mere ten days after Clark had first entered government. Surveying the street below his office balcony, he writes: “Sometimes I get a wild urge to relieve my bladder over it, splattinlgy on the ant-like crowds. Would this get one the sack? Probably not. It would have to be hushed up. Trivial, but at the same time bizarre… I might do it on my last day.”

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The whimsical delight in a mad fantasy of pointless transgression is Clark to a tee; not just the offence itself, but the school-boy glee at the thought of dower-faced officials, poor squares, frantically trying to keep up political appearances. As is often the case with Clark, the puzzle is not so much that he has these thoughts, but that he thinks it a good idea to write them down and collect them between hardcovers so that other people can read them. Still more, that he could do all this and then spend the next few years wondering self-pityingly why John Major hasn’t put him in the House of Lords yet.

Not everyone in government thought it better to have Clark in-the-tent-pissing-out. We quickly see why. The voice that emerges in the Diaries is spoilt, snobbish, monstrously vain, impulsive to the point of recklessness, hypochondriacal, sentimental, over-sexed, and completely unsparing of the feelings of others. Clark was an unusual composite of dispositions: a kind of Romantic Thatcherite.

“The Lady”, as he insisted on referring to her, always took his phone calls — immediately — and sturdily overlooked the fact that he was an obvious political liability. Clark would, for instance, go on Question Time and be mocked by Sue Lawley (whom he dismisses as a “silly bitch”) for refusing to defend his own government’s policy; or, as he did on one occasion, arrive at the dispatch box drunk after a wine tasting (“all marvellous bottles”) and give full show to his contempt for the illiterate speech his ministerial officials had prepared for him (“Sometimes I turned over two pages at once, sometimes three. What did it matter? There was no shape to it”).

There is a rule of thumb about the wrecking of political careers: with Labour MPs the cause is invariably money, and with Tories, sex. Clark’s self-confessed “lecherous tendencies” provide that rule with a fat confirmatory data-point. He seems to have subscribed to a kind of vitalistic theory of machismo energy according to which his sexual and political potency rose and fell together, and was always very disheartened when he woke up without an erection. Ahead of the count for his Plymouth seat in 1983, and sensing victory, Clark contemplated his 22-year-old Labour opponent, Frances Holland: “I’m madly in love with Frances Holland. I suspect she’s not as thin and gawky as she seems. Her hair is always lovely and shiny. Perhaps I can distract her at the count on Thursday and kiss her in one of those big janitor’s cupboards.”

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The janitor’s cupboard. Not quite the electoral swing either party may have been hoping for. Clark can hardly look at a young woman without recording some version of the thought “pretty legs” or “phew-wotta-scorcher blonde with a lovely figure and lots of sparkle and confidence”. “I am interested in Clare, the au pair,” he writes. “I strolled over this evening, deliberately entered by the back door and chatted her up. She’s not pretty, but is sexual. Dairymaid.” He is randy to the point of self-parody, at funerals for colleagues murdered by the IRA (“the proximity of death always makes me sexual”), and at Christmas carol concerts (“I only can properly enjoy carol services if I am having an illicit affair with someone in the congregation. Why is this?”) Even watching Thatcher command the dispatch box he notices her “very small feet and attractive — not bony — ankles”.

In one spectacular confession of poor judgement, Clark appears to admit to an opportunistic hook-up on an outbound train from Waterloo: “[A] plump young lady came into my compartment at Waterloo. She was not wearing a bra, and her delightful globes bounced prominently… She was adorable. Am I crazy? Death wish? Above us in the Luggage rack the Red Box gleamed like a beacon.”

Old dogs can learn new tricks, however: later, as Defence Minister on a sojourn in Marrakesh, Clark turned down the tempting offer of an escort for the evening, with the jaded reflection that: “They’d be bound to take photographs, tape, video everything. For all I know, my bedroom has got a two-way mirror. So embarrassing for the dear PM — ‘I’m afraid it, er, looks as if Alan has been behaving, er, badly…’”

In fact, Sir Robert Armstrong, the head of the civil service at the time of Clark’s appointment to government, had worried openly that his libertine sexual practices made him a blackmail risk. Clark pointed out, somewhat persuasively, that blackmail is only an effective technique against those with some residual shame about the things that they do in private, and he had none. To this extent, his reputation for being accident-prone was ill-deserved. “A true gaffe is accidental,” Clark wrote. “Mine never are. I like to shock, and I do it (though not as often as I could) deliberately.”

All the same, can Clark possibly have meant to expose quite so much of himself? As is true of exhibitionists in general, he does not seem to find the right things embarrassing. It is no doubt true that the self-same qualities that made Clark a wonderful diarist also made him a rather lousy politician. But the notably cold-blooded regard he could have for others also left him with a very fine appreciative faculty, an “infallible eye for what is or is not political”.

His cursory portraits of colleagues are often particularly deadly, especially the ones that are supposed to be admiring. Jonathan Aitken is a “good friend and standby for many a dirty trick”. William Waldegrave is an “ambitious creep”, Ken Clarke, a “podgy life-insurance-risk”. “Norman Tebbit is truly formidable”, he records. “He radiates menace, but without being overtly aggressive… They arse-lick, massively, with Norman. Which he accepts, expressionlessly.” It is reassuring to hear a politician saying these things, not so much because they are intrinsically valuable insights, but because if they are not at least thinking them then they are not noticing enough.

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Clark’s “infallible eye” also gave him a very steady view of what the business of politics was. He understood that gossip, bitching, dirty tricks, hypocrisy and betrayal were not epiphenomenal to the practice — nor really dysfunctional — but actually constitutive of it. Finding that he had been artfully misled by a scheming colleague, he feels not frustration, but a kind of disinterested admiration of the kind a sportsman might feel on being outmanoeuvred by a defter opponent (“I like this. If you’re a serious player, it’s no good being ‘straight’. You just won’t last”).

He had no interest in appearing “normal”. He would, no doubt, have regarded the prospect with a kind of aesthetic distaste. His disinclination to conceal his strange feelings, to lie, curtail his dissipated life-style and toe the party line, arose not, it seems, from any conviction about the importance of honesty in political life, but from a protective attitude toward his own character, which he refused to reshape to better please the public. Clark never mastered the coded way in which politicians learn to reveal and conceal themselves, nor did he want to. As such, he remained an expert spectator, but poor player, of the game.

What should we make of politicians who actually excel at the kind of character-acting apparently required by their profession? Of course, those who speak too fluently in the Whitehall style can find that they are punished for their lifeless performances. And rightly so; at best, this is an uncreative way of disguising one’s unedifying character from the public. If Clark suffered with a form of exhibitionism, these personalities suffer with something akin to inhibitionism. A more fearful possibility is that such people really do have nothing to hide; a danger in selecting politicians who perform too slickly in the approved style is that you may end up with leaders, not with fewer vices, but simply very little self-knowledge.

As Levin warily observes in Anna Karenina the impulse to work for the public good can seem to reveal not a positive quality, but something more like an absence, a lack of some underlying conception of what one’s own life is about. Perhaps, as Denis Healey famously mooted, what a better class of politician most needs is indeed “hinterland”, but where this implies the existence not just of a reservoir of deeper commitment, but also a refined capacity to keep these potentially shadowy areas of one’s life just out of sight, off-stage, concealed in the darker regions of the political personality.

Her novels — Normal People, Conversations with Friends and last summer’s Beautiful World, Where Are You — have helped to popularise a flat, affectless, prose. Novelists operating in this disenchanted style presuppose, like Rooney, that an unshakable feeling of worldly-alienation, together with an almost pathological degree of highly absorbed self-examination, constitutes the only fitting response to the conditions of millennial life and to the dilemmas forced on their protagonists by “late capitalism”. The temperament described — and probably shared — by these writers is one that veers unsettlingly between a familiar kind of cynicism about the social world (underpowered by any deep understanding of it) and embarrassing displays of earnestness.

The TV series (first Normal People in 2020, and now Conversations with Friends) are rather less annoying than the books. Because the alienated world-view is so much bound-up with prose style, it is difficult to reproduce on the screen. Both series are, needless to say, extremely handsome and expensively-produced. Everything — the shabby-chic interiors; the cute acoustic soundtrack; the long, stilted silences; the tiny corners of well-chosen novels allowed briefly to appear from between the protagonists’ hands; the carefully-choreographed sex between hairless Grecian bodies — all of it is just dreadfully, dreadfully tasteful.

More vividly than the books, the dramatisations indulge certain aspirational fantasies the viewer may have about her own life. They are also rather forgettable. Freed from Rooney’s reductive prose-style, the stories lose much of their distinctive atmosphere. First-personal detachment is difficult to convey in film; these series opt, sensibly, to be complacently beautiful rather than meet the challenge. One result is that the highly conventional quality of Rooney’s stories becomes more vivid to us: they are sentimental teenage romances, languidly extended over ten hours.

Still, in both Normal People and Conversations With Friends there are helpful clues that we remain in the Rooney-verse. Many scenes are given over to patience-testing depictions of the mundane business of the protagonists’ lives, which seem at moments to be unfolding before us in real time. (Characters brush their teeth, do the dishes, walk around… brush their teeth again). Rooney co-scripted Normal People, and in both series dialogue is often lifted directly from the books, which — when spoken aloud —reveals a strangely remedial quality, as if it is being translated from a foreign language off-the-cuff and by someone with a slightly limited vocabulary in English.

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“I don’t think it’s a bad thing that you’re feeling bad about this”, Connell’s mother tells him, profoundly. “I feel like our friendship would be a lot easier if certain things were different”, Connell later confesses to Marianne. ‘Nice’ is a near-universal term of approbation. Al dente pasta is ‘nice’; the university therapist is ‘nice’; doggystyle is ‘nice’; Christmas with grandma is ‘nice’. At times, the anti-naturalistic dialogue seems by its presence to reveal a nervousness about the actors’ abilities to communicate any unspoken feeling whatsoever to the viewer. “I want this so much’, Marianne is made to announce while she and Connell have sex. ‘It’s really nice to hear you say that’, he replies.

An underdiscussed fact about the books and their adaptations is how remarkably without humour they are. There is no hint in the books that the world might be a remotely funny place. Of course, we are given to understand that the characters themselves sometimes say funny things, more often than not of a cruel or misjudged sort  — that they occasionally cause one another physically to laugh — though we are not very often allowed to know what the funny thing at issue was. If they weren’t at least minimally funny, I suppose, the worry is we might start to question whether the characters were quite as attractive or intelligent as we are instructed to think they are.

For doubt to set in on that question would be fatal to the ideal on offer. The neurasthenic temperament, one exquisitely tuned to social nuance and psychic discomfort, is what admirers of Rooney’s work identify with and aspire to. They want to see themselves in this disfiguring generational portrait. Why? One ready explanation is that Rooney’s novels flatter the kind of reader already likely to be attracted to her work. They do this in one straightforward way by being sentimental fantasies of requited erotic love whose characters achieve their aims despite comparably little effort and much glamorous emotional anguish. The protagonists are everymen but also intensely special and distinctive. The stories are exercises in wish-fulfilment.

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Beyond this, I think the explanation has to do with the connection Rooney makes between alienated self-awareness and moral virtue. In Rooney’s works, a state of highly-analysed self-awareness in itself has a kind of redemptive quality. Marianne and Francis exist in a state of troubled grace. A neurotic and conflicted attitude is presented as somehow appropriate to the conditions of the contemporary world, its injustices, and the impossible options it places before us as individuals. Not only is the alienated condition admirable, then, it is, given the state of the world, cognitively reliable. Rooney’s protagonists see the world more clearly than the rest of us do, and their psychic unease is a testament to this epistemic achievement.

This combination of views accounts for much that irritates in the books. It explains for instance how the protagonists’ posturing and dogmatic political beliefs are combined by Rooney in such an apparently seamless way with a strangely smug quietism about politics itself. All that is required for personal absolution is to be painfully aware of one’s own horribly compromised position.

Early on in Conversations with Friends we watch Bobbi upbraiding Nick, an actor, for playing a gay role when he is a straight man. “Well, as long as you’re self-flagellating and having an awful time!” Bobbi reassures him, archly. It is a truer expression of the work’s political outlook than can have been intentional. “May the revolution be swift and brutal”, Marianne proclaims in Normal People — a mad prescription, issued to no one in particular, with no expectation that it should take effect.

Marianne and Francis, merely in virtue of being fascinated by their deficiencies of character – the gap between their lofty ideals and their shameful desires, their acts of unthinking selfishness – are shown not only to be better than people who do not have such perceptions about themselves, but also to understand the world more truthfully. The chief alternative to being an intelligent hypocrite in Rooney’s world is not, say, to be well-balanced or temperamentally sane, but to be stupid.

Rooney – a “lifelong Marxist” – thinks of her protagonists as having achieved a double-vision of the social reality of which they are a part. They see bourgeois social norms and sexual conventions for what they are. Unable to escape the analytical habit, Rooney’s protagonists also see through other people, even the ones they profess to love, and eventually, with no object remaining to detach themselves from, they see right through themselves.

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“I feel like I’m walking around trying on a hundred different versions of myself”, Connell tells us in Normal People. Aware that their preternatural intelligence allows them to justify, by casuistical lines of argument, any particular reading of the world they care to alight on, a kind of global alienation sets in, where the feeling of detachment itself is the only remaining fixed-point in psychological space, with little sense even of what it is detachment from. The result is the strangely Cartesian quality of Rooney’s picture of the agent — an internal ghost assailed by a stream of suspicious data from a hostile world.

Like Normal People, the adaptation of Conversations with Friends is over-long and emotionally laborious. For one thing, each of the show’s four lead characters attaches enormous importance to the question of whether each one of the other characters is feeling alright, and, at higher conversational iterations, whether they would tell them if they weren’t feeling alright. Such enquiries are pursued with limitless patience, and often whole episodes pass with little else discussed. Despite their indefatigable efforts to relate to one another, the characters misunderstand each other all the same, and cry themselves into dehydration. By the time the sans-serif credits began to crawl across the ending of the twelfth episode — reminding me of the names of the men and women responsible for doing this to me — I felt as if I would never be alright again.

Why is Rooney’s work so highly regarded as generation-defining commentary? Why do people think it definitively skewering of our social age and atmosphere? Rooney herself, by explicit allusion, encourages a comparison with Jane Austen within the pages of Normal People. (Reading Emma in the university library one night, Connell is put into “a state of strange emotional agitation” and concludes that “literature moves him”, indeed that it touches him in a way that is “not completely asexual”). As with Austen, Rooney’s novels do not adapt to the screen in a way that successfully preserves their character; in Austen’s case this is to the decided detriment of the dramatisations, in Rooney’s case less obviously so.

The allusion to Austen is strangely ill-advised. The picture of the world Rooney gives the reader is one entirely mediated by the protagonists’ neuroses and hang-ups. Austen relies on precise, puncturing ironies. The comparison also runs the risk —  hardly sensible under the circumstances — of reminding the reader that instead of watching Conversations with Friends or Normal People, she could be reading Emma.