Eventually I got around to carrying it upstairs. I prised open the plastic-cupped end, pulled out the rolled-up sheet of heavy-weight cartridge paper inside, laid it flat on the dining table and discovered that it was a Banksy. Not a print, an original — spray-painted by the man himself. It was accompanied by an explanatory hand-written and signed letter. It was, I gradually realised, probably quite valuable. Today, it is almost certainly the most valuable thing I own, although nowhere near as valuable as “Game Changer”, which this week sold for a record £14.4million at auction, with the artist donating the money to health charities.

Banksy had sent me this gift as a gesture of thanks, for having unwittingly nicked a joke of mine for his first little book, Existencillism. “It is rather ironic,” the joke goes, “that the favourite drink of the homeless, should be a beer called Tennent’s”. The joke works better on stage, phonetically, than on the page. But it was a nice counterpoint to the image opposite, one of his most famous, a fallen winged angel, originally painted on a grimy brick recess in a wall in Old Street. The joke had been told to him by a mate, it turned out, who had no doubt forgotten where he heard it.

My wife gave me the book as a stocking filler, and when I found the joke I contacted him via the email address at the back. This was still relatively easy back then. He emailed back and apologised and later we spoke briefly on the phone and arranged to meet, in a café bar opposite Herne Hill station, but like the shy woodland creature he is, something must have startled him and he changed his mind. We never met, and I’m really quite relieved about that. He works better for me, as for everyone else, as a slightly magical figure, like something from a Russian fairy tale, a phantom that might steal your best horse and ride it into a sweat at night before returning it to your stable.

I mention all this because Banksy has emerged as a kind of hate figure for those afflicted by Cultural Cringe. The conviction that we are an irredeemably philistine people is largely a Remainer syndrome — how can you just walk away from croissants by the Seine? — but by no means exclusively. So, before I come, not to defend Banksy per se but perhaps to urge a sense of proportion to those convulsed with shame, I want you to understand why I might think that whatever else he is, Banksy is a Good Bloke. Because it really is extraordinary how many people seem to think he’s such a wanker.

His latest outrage was to win a very dubious popularity contest, when he really should know better. A company called Art Supplies had commissioned a survey of the “most popular” artists in all the countries in the world, as determined by Google searches. And to our eternal shame, it appears, number one in the UK was the Bristolian wall-botherer himself. Not just in the UK, to be fair, but in France (what? But… but… croissants! By the Seine!) and in Japan and Russia.

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The most obvious thing to say about the poll is that, like every other poll, it doesn’t tell us what it purports to. UnHerd’s Tom Chivers published a handy guide this month on How to Read Numbers, about those slippery, shape-shifting, whispering half-truths we call statistics, and he could have based half the book on crap like this. For a start, there are any number of reasons why people might Google “Banksy” that have no bearing on whether he was their favourite artist — ranging from “Do we know who he is yet so I can send him some hate mail?” to “Who is this ‘Banksy’ that my husband seems so annoyed by?”

But even if he is being searched primarily by fans, it’s pretty obvious why he’s being searched more than Rembrandt, Titian or Vermeer, isn’t it? It’s because he’s alive. He might do something. Or, more likely, just has. And that interest is not just understandable, it is healthy.

When the NME was still capable of leaving oily grime on your fingers, it used to run a poll every few years on the Greatest Album of All Time. The actual greatest albums of all time — Astral Weeks, Pet Sounds, Revolver, Exile on Main Street — would always be eclipsed by whatever had briefly excited the kids that year into thinking that they too were living through a golden age.

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By James Bloodworth

I remember one year when Pulp, Oasis and Blur all had two albums each above Sgt Pepper. This did not signify the end of civilisation. It meant that young people were engaging with the world they lived in, rather than bitterly recreating matchstick models of the neo-gothic achievements of a previous iteration of god-fearing humanity.

Furthermore, I suspect many of the world’s “favourite” artists have been searched for reasons other than artistic fundamentals. In second place worldwide was Frida Kahlo, most popular in the United States and Brazil. Kahlo is a decent artist. But more importantly today she is an icon for a full stack of currently in vogue causes — feminism, socialism, anti-Americanism and, according to Wikipedia, the LGBTQ+ alliance, though which letter accords with “falling in love at 21 with a fat moustachio’d muralist twice your age” I am not clear. These are all perfectly valid reasons to be interested in an artist. But googling “Frida Kahlo” might easily be about something other than her art.

As for those who worry that great art is being lost under a tide of activism, they should note that da Vinci was still well in the lead across the globe, with more than twice as many nations searching him than second-place Kahlo. But it is noticeable that most of his triumphs were in the developing world. There might be something of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs here. Only once the basics are met — food, drink, shelter, Renaissance masterpieces — can one indulge in the luxury of searching for self – actualisation in oils.

Meanwhile, the fourth most widely searched artist worldwide — including in China — was one Artemisia Gentileschi, of whom I am going to take a deep breath and admit I had never heard.

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If there were some way to arrange artists along a sort of spectrum, we might be able to identify the median artist rather than the mode, and the results might be more reassuring. But really, this is just a plea not to blame Banksy, or the kids — and dads — who like him. He never asked for this. If he has dedicated his life to anything other than decorating urban squalor and lifting neighbourhood spirits, it has been to challenging the art world’s fixation on monetising genius, their cynical determination to commodify creativity wherever they find it.

Some years ago, David Bowie observed that New York graffiti artists infuriated the art establishment because it was a movement they couldn’t leverage — so they cunningly identified a handful of artists like Basquiat and Keith Haring as “geniuses” and started arranging auctions for them at turbo-charged prices, ignoring the fact that they were best understood as part of a community rather than a auction house. So it goes.

My suspicion, even though he no longer returns my calls, is that Banksy finds this sort of thing as hilarious and absurd as any of you. The difference is that he is not afflicted by the cringe. He will just see it as further, if long redundant, proof of what a racket it all is — and perhaps what a great surface Russia is for an aspiring troublemaker with an aerosol can.

But for me, there was one great televised competition still in play. And if in the end, inevitably, the final was not quite the match of the series, nor the defining clash of two great individual goal scorers everyone was hoping for, so what? That has never stopped the FA Cup from commanding the nation’s affection. And at least University Challenge has never had to have a rematch at Old Trafford on a rainy Tuesday night.

The greatest TV quiz show of all time is, like me, over 50 years old now. Unlike me, it has never looked fitter.

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It has been compared not only to football’s most famous knockout competition but to everything from Wimbledon to Championship Darts. On this occasion, Imperial College London vs Corpus Christi, Cambridge was more of an intellectual Sumo match. Imperial got that first crucial cerebral shove in early, slicing Paxman’s opening question off at the ankles, then holding possession in the scrum to establish first base with a solid two out of three on the supplementaries, 20-nil up all before the second roll of the dice. It was as good as over by the first time out.

In Monday night’s final, the competitors displayed nerves of steel

After Brandon spotted the presence of Iran in the name of the Nobel laureate in less time than it took for the question itself to reach my ears, Corpus Christi began to panic. They lunged at the next question inadequately equipped with a viable answer and were briefly in negative equity. Imperial now eased into a comfortable, commanding posture and were never troubled for the remainder of the match.

To be fair, when Corpus Christi did get a toe hold, Wang’s urgency on the five pointers was electric, desperately driving pitons into the increasingly sheer rock face confronting his team — only to be shouldered aside, often as not by Imperial’s captain, who was hitting his marks in this match like Jocky Wilson on EPO. All it was missing was some fans on the pitch, who thought it was all over.

Sadly, it is now.

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By Gareth Roberts

All spectator sports are about watching grace and competence under pressure, and the character that reveals. University Challenge does this better than any other format, indoors or out, which is why it doesn’t need to dangle financial carrots in front of the contestants to keep them and the viewers onside.

It’s the only show I even try to watch as scheduled, and since entering lockdown has been my temporal anchor, the Pole Star by which I correct my course as we continue to oscillate around what is still quaintly known as “the week”.

I’m not alone. The show pulls in regular viewing figures in excess of three million. Not as great as its heyday in the mid-Sixties, when it delivered four times that. But in an era notorious not only for the splintered mirror, the fractured media of choice, but also for a viewing public believed to regard conspicuous displays of intelligence as vaguely offensive, three million is quite something.

And if anything University Challenge questions have got harder. Or at least, the science ones have got harder. The ones about ska and The Clash seem to have got easier. I guess it balances out.

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I should admit at this point that I have contrived to appear on not one but two of the show’s seasonal, novelty variations. Both University Challenge – The Professionals and a Christmas series that was as close to ‘Celebrity University Challenge’ as Paxman’s perma-curled upper lip would have permitted him to utter.

On the first occasion, after getting off to a good start, the Comedians team were soundly beaten by the Ministry of Justice. They went on to be series winners so we couldn’t complain, and we all said we’d had a lovely day out: but I was quietly furious. On the second occasion, I was on representing Southampton University. We edged a win, against York, but then had to wait several days while they recorded further heats to see if we had won by enough to go through to the semi-finals.

We hadn’t. It still hurts. Every time I hear the word “woke”, the Nutcracker Suite or the poetry of W. B. Yeats, I am back there in a flash, and this time, I buzz.

There are of course other TV quizzes. Mastermind is usually the one mentioned in the same breath, and I have been lucky enough to appear on its ‘celebrity’ isotope, too. Believe me, no one is more aware of the degree to which that term has been stretched beyond its natural elasticity in order to accommodate contestants like me.

But despite the Gestapo machismo of the famous Black Chair, University Challenge is the greater test, because it’s a test of steel, of resolve, as well as of knowledge.

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Sit in the black chair and either you can remember the answer or you can’t. You have to decide how long to wait while your brain shuffles frantically through its Rolodex before turning to you with an apologetic shrug — but by and large the viewer is watching a display of information retrieval.

Only in University Challenge do you have to brave your team mates’ wrath when you decide to open fire, not knowing if you have got the right scent. To lunge ahead of your own cohort — who might well be poised to answer correctly — and risk not merely getting the answer wrong but losing ground already hard won… this is the sadistic genius of the format.

This is why the show commands loyalty even when half the questions concern aspects of quantum mechanics so involved, most viewers wouldn’t even be able to give an answer that was meaningfully wrong.

There is a danger when things get too intellectualised that you could lose touch with the mainstream crowd. Philip Larkin wrote of modern jazz that it was too damn clever for its own good, that solos now only made sense to other musicians, and that consequently the tension had been broken between the performer and the crowd. In that context, he very likely has a point.

But not University Challenge. We are watching intellects beyond our ken, for sure, but we love to watch them swoop and soar. Where some quizzes — Hello, Bradley! What ho, Xander! — are like watching Sunday League football — shouting “Shoot! Shoot, you plonker!” at our muddy avatars on the pitch — University Challenge is like watching eight Rogers Federer, returning balls we can’t even believe they reached.

At least, it was. The series finished on Monday night. It is now Wednesday. And lockdown suddenly got real.

After the burial-parties leave
And the baffled kites have fled;
The wise hyænas come out at eve
To take account of our dead.

How he died and why he died
Troubles them not a whit.
They snout the bushes and stones aside
And dig till they come to it.

They are only resolute they shall eat
That they and their mates may thrive,
And they know that the dead are safer meat
Than the weakest thing alive…              Rudyard Kipling. The Hyaenas

Jordan Peterson is not quite yet a cadaver to be clawed at by the Hyaenas of social media. Rumours of his death have, in Twain’s now sadly rather weary phrase, been much exaggerated. But he has had a tough 12 months.

His travails include, but are not limited to:

1. News that his wife has terminal cancer;
2. Addiction to, and a “paradoxical reaction” to, Benzodiazepines, initially prescribed to calm anxiety and depression but subsequently making the symptoms much worse;
3. A long period spent in Russia to avail himself of medical treatment that for some reason appears to have been unavailable in, say, Toronto, during which time he was put into a coma for his own safety;
4. The discovery that this has all led to “significant neurological damage” and that while Peterson is said to be recovering, he is not yet out of the woods.

And as reports of his brush with death emerged, the Hyaenas came a sniffing anyway.

Of course, not all of the curs openly point and laugh. Commentary — and the internet was awash with it — was in places couched more in sorrow than in scorn; in the familiar, “while I take no pleasure in the suffering and travails of [another human being] it has to be said that [said human being] arguably brought this on himself by [angering the gods of chaos with his stern warnings about dissolute behaviour] and thus [one must admit the natural symmetry and poetic justice of it all…]”

A brusque and brutal “Ha-Ha!” of the Nelson Muntz variety, which was the subtext, would at least have the virtue of brevity.

Anyway, if you had been waiting for a chance to sink a blade into Peterson —  as all the two-bit would-be Leftist Matadors were — the rumours of his helpless thrashings in the briars of pharmaceutical addiction was an opportunity just too delicious to decline.

“I’m sorry, you mean, the man who issued such stern warnings against the siren call of recreational drug abuse, of seeking refuge in their perfidious sanctuary, has himself become so weakened by recourse to prescription tranquilisers that he nearly forfeited his life? Oh, too, too sweet!” Who wouldn’t slaver at such news?

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The video message about this from his daughter — whose own notorious prescription that one should eat only beef in order to overcome various auto-immune issues — only enhanced the piquancy of the moment. This was as close to the old “Motel phone bill of the tele-evangelist reveals a fondness for rent boys” story of yore as we were likely to get, from one following as painfully self-enforced a moral code as Peterson’s.

Why, you might ask, is he so hated, that people so actively and nakedly revel in his distress?

Peterson’s core proposition, as laid out in his 1999 work Maps of Meaning, was that there are two kinds of knowledge of the world —  what it is and what we should do about it. His contention was that while science has proved an incomparable tool for expanding our understanding of the former, it was not equipped to satisfy our questions about the latter. These he suggested were perhaps better served by acquaintance with the world’s great mythical, religious and spiritual traditions. Some of these suggested answers were, inevitably, somewhat conservative in their remedies. This has been enough, in effect, to make him the Supreme Demon in the Pandemonium of Progress.

And, to be fair, anyone who has insisted on the value of ancient myth in understanding our superficially modern, hi-tech existence should not be surprised to find himself discussed in these terms, and the subsequent irony relished. Peterson had — to return to Kipling — set himself up as the Priest of the Gods of the Copybook Headings. That they should turn on him was high drama. And almost absurdly neat.

Peterson’s journey into Russia for medical treatment is further food for the mythically minded. Russia is for Peterson the cradle of Bolshevism, origin of the greatest tyranny to be visited upon Mankind in living memory. Plunging into this monster’s lair to seek his own redemption is pure Beowulf.

And surely Peterson rising from his induced coma is a little like the death and resurrection of the Hero, as described in Joseph Campbell’s mythological synthesis? Every hero, according to Campbell (a view endorsed by Peterson) has to die and be reborn before his quest is accomplished, his foe truly vanquished. The movies offer a thousand examples, from Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter, though my favourite has always been Baloo, briefly swiped into mortality by Shere Khan’s massive paw.

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By Patricia Marcoccia

Jordan’s story arc has thus far been inescapably Christ-like, even if the Peterson Pieta is diminished by his body being metaphorically cradled in his daughter’s somewhat compromised arms, rather than those of his Mother, Beverley Ann.

Or, alternatively, he is just a bloke who got rich telling young men to tidy their rooms, yet couldn’t even keep his own House in order, or indeed his mental integrity, in the teeth of an imminent spousal bereavement, an adverse reaction to benzodiazepine and grotesque levels of public scrutiny. Ha ha!

So, while it is a little disappointing that so many for whom compassion is, if not to be cultivated, at least to be signalled, found it just too tempting to get stuck in — it’s not a surprise. A degree of rancour is inevitable in the battle of ideas, and Peterson’s insistence in the right of the Right to be right stirred more than most. But the publication this month of a new feminist history does I think offer a way to reconsider and even reconcile a little.

In a neat twist, it’s by Helen Lewis, who has history with Jordan Peterson. She conducted a well-publicised interview with him for GQ in 2018. And she also wrote about him in the New Statesman, describing the man who had, if not destroyed, then at least carefully dismantled C4’s Cathy Newman, as a “Cargo Cult Intellectual”, ie an empty outer shell, with no working machinery

But with her new book, Difficult Women, she makes the very worthwhile point that much of the progress made over the last two hundred years in women’s rights was won by troubled, flawed, even monstrous individuals. The uncomfortable truth is, according to Lewis, that pretty much every one of those great pioneers of that long march have been women whose company it would be hard for a modern feminist even to tolerate for very long, or whose wider views they could endorse.

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By Tanya Gold

It’s an observation worth reflecting on, and not just when it comes to feminism. It can, I think, be extrapolated to describe all those who make useful waves. They are all too often deeply unreasonable people. As George Bernard Shaw said, it is only those who are so afflicted, who don’t just accept the world as it  is, and therefore change it.

And if it’s slack we accord our allies, it’s slack we must surely concede to our enemies, too.

Perhaps some of those who read Lewis’s book will conclude, reluctantly, that if you want to break the ice which is ever forming on the surface of society, you have to accept the kind of people who wield axes for what they are. Decide to wait, instead, for a man or woman without inconsistencies, without hypocrisies, without flaws, who is not human, and you will either wait for a very long time, or you endure sermons of a very thin gruel — a meal not even fit for Hyaenas.

His was a record of smooth, unequalled majesty. Until 2018, when Gyles Brandreth stepped in for a couple of episodes while the Doyen recuperated from a brief illness, he hadn’t missed a single recording. He was, at that time, 94 years of age, and still had a few months in him yet, his diaphragmatically modulated manner as suave and indulgent as ever.

The only other figure who has tracked my footprints in the sand for so long – other than our Lord and Saviour, of course – has been the Queen. It is only fair to note that Her Majesty has never had to worry that her next season might be her last, at least not on the whim of some new Controller, Focus Group or Social Media faux pas. But either way, they have both projected, above all else, ineffable calm.

I was two years old when Just a Minute first broadcast. Parsons has been asking guests to speak on a given subject within certain parameters for 60 seconds since before I could speak at all. And the voices of Derek Nimmo, Clement Freud, Peter Jones and Kenneth Williams were as much a part of my childhood kitchen memories as Bejam sacks, whistling kettles and chip pan fires.

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By Giles Fraser

So, how has a Host, a mere persona really, who was I imagine, a little outdated when he first accepted a challenge for Repetition, survived perhaps the most tumultuous decades of cultural revolution the Nation has known since the Civil War, and to bow out at the final curtain without having so much as rolled up the sleeves of his boating blazer?

The answer is of course – because of his refusal to change. Parsons saw off The Beatles, The Sex Pistols and The Prodigy, The Dot Com Boom and Crash, The Walkman, the fax machine and the digital watch, without so much as a gesture towards modernity. The World Trade Center rose and fell — as did the careers of Jimmy Young, Terry Wogan and of course J**** S*****. Sir Nicholas gave not one inch.

I wonder if some of our other much loved institutions could learn from this. The Crown has long understood the benefits of longevity, and with Her Majesty poised to glide pass Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil himself, in another five years or so – it is clearly beyond reproach on this matter. The House of Lords, meanwhile, does not appear to be in a hurry to affect more than the most superficial of mollifications. Though it is always best when a genial, familiar old curmudgeon or two are dominating the benches of the Supreme Court. And I miss Denning.

But what of the Church of England. It is forever entangled in footling debates about political concerns and personnel matters — matters that have relatively little to do with the timeless anxieties of the human soul, to which it was surely established to minister. The trendy vicar trope almost precedes Just a Minute — indeed, Derek Nimmo knew how to satirise it well — but the Church gives the impression of anxious trend chasing to this day. Meanwhile, congregations dwindle and moral authority is ceded to the John Lewis Christmas Ad.

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By Giles Fraser

Is it too much to suggest that staff turnover is part of the problem? Six archbishops have shared the title in the span allotted to Old Nick, and none of them were young men when they first stepped up. It has been perhaps less hectic than the comings and goings of Prime Ministers in that time (Wilson/Heath/Wilson/Callaghan/Thatcher/Major/Blair/
Brown/Cameron/May/Johnson) but still, compares poorly with the Papacy. Imagine how we would feel about the Church if there had been but one kindly but stern figure who had always been there admonishing us in our deviations and counselling against hesitation, throughout our little lives?

It might be a stretch to advise the Church to appoint a fashionable, smartly dressed Archbishop in his early forties and let the parish grow old with him, just because it worked for Just a Minute. And yet…

I remember making a parody of Troubleshooter for Radio Four years ago, which cross fertilised the wisdom of two different professions. So, to help advise a priest I visited a shepherd and found that one of the key learnings of that trade is the during lambing season, the fellow must get himself well and truly dowsed in the “juices” of the birthing process. The ewes and the lambs both respond to the familiar aroma he will thus have and will intuitively trust him as a result.

I’m not suggesting that a modern church man or woman literally steep themselves in their parishioners’ birth fluids to earn their trust. But the longer someone is on the throne — ideally through a few generations — the more familiar they seem to us in all our senses.

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By Douglas Murray

This theme is touched upon in the excellent Netflix drama, Two Popes, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce. It is a superbly acted and tastefully shot tale, partly fictionalised but I think well within range, of the peculiar arrangement arrived at between the two present incumbents of that, traditionally singular, role. The younger of the two makes the point that the power of the position derives in large part from the understanding that its occupant will bear their cross “unto death” – that they are in that relatively trivial regard at least, like Christ himself.

A non-Catholic, I spent much of my life regarding certain aspects of that Church as vaguely absurd, if not actually sinister. The gradual decline of the great John Paul II was a case in point – the poor chap had Parkinson’s and yet was unable to relinquish his duties and see out his days in peace. Yet now, I wonder. There was, in hindsight, something rather magnificent about this once exemplary physical specimen. He hiked, played football and even pursued weight training as a young Cardinal and was elevated, at 58, in perhaps the best condition of any new Pope in history. Yet our abiding memory is of a man being determined to exhaust every last fibre of his being on the field of battle. He too, had but one Death.

The world, it goes without saying perhaps, has changed far too much for my liking. That is pretty much a given when you are 54. The great Eastern tradition of Vipassana meditation teaches the principle of universal change — Anicca — and the necessity of accepting it if one is to have anything approaching peace on this Earth. No doubt there is wisdom in that.

But I remain enormously grateful to the familiar faces, familiar voices, familiar names that have walked beside me thus far. Even those whose views and allegiances I once detested, have to come to be — yes — familiar. Like Larkin’s Toad, I am glad to take their arm as we walk together down Cemetery Road.

The entire debate, like the rest of recorded history, is available to watch on YouTube and is instructive in all kinds of ways. Many regard it as the moment that TV became the final arbiter in politics. When, as Neil Postman puts it in Amusing Ourselves to Death, we moved from the Typographical Age to the Age of Show Business.

Looking at it today it is hard to see it in that light. It seems hesitant and apologetic, and still rather bookish. Like most Sixties’ current affairs programming, from Firing Line to Blue Peter, one is struck by the simplicity of the sets, the static camera work, and the almost offensive levels of decorum shown by the participants. One might think the two would-be POTUSES (POTI? PsOTUS?) … one might think they were joint participants in a school prize giving, for all the acrimony visible.

Kennedy makes no jibes about Nixon’s conk. Not once does Nixon, for his part, take advantage of Kennedy’s tantalising middle initial. Neither man references the size of the other’s package, hints that the other is on the nursery slopes of dementia or accuses him of harbouring prejudice against any specific ethno-religious group (there was really only one that mattered, to be fair — Christian Americans — although JFK’s Catholicism would come under scrutiny in due course).

Nevertheless, the criteria on which their respective performances were judged in these debates notoriously set the tone for the coming decades. Kennedy wowed the electorate as much with his evident vigour and hamster-cheeked good looks as his grasp of the challenges facing America. Nixon, on the other hand, was only recently out of hospital. A knee injury sustained while campaigning had become infected — Nixon was a septic Sceptic. He looked wan, and Kennedy won — one nil.

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By Mutaz Ahmed

There were four debates in all; but it remains the first that is legendary for the unfortunate Nixon, whose palour, sweatiness and even, it is said, poor choice of suit colour — it blended in with the background — all diminished him in the eyes of viewers. Remarkably, it is claimed that radio listeners, unable to see his furtive glances and glistening upper lip, believed that Nixon had won. Though that might easily reflect the demographic that chose to absorb the arguments through the more conservative medium to begin with.

Kennedy of course went on to win the race too, decisively in terms of the electoral college, which is what counts, though by a very narrow squeak in the popular vote — an interesting reverse of the divergence facing Republican and Democrat candidates today. Camelot lasted barely three years, before he was gunned down on November 22, 1963, leaving Lyndon B Johnson, who stepped up to steer the USA through its various mid-Sixties convulsions — from Civil Rights to the Vietnam War. Be careful what you wish for.

Nixon meanwhile became well aware of the power and the pitfalls of TV campaigning from then on, and swiftly mastered the art. He eventually won the election of 1968, and was re-elected in 1972, only to leave the office less than two years later under the most ignominious circumstances of any Presidential departure in History, though arguably preferable to those of Kennedy. One might say of both men, be careful what you wish for.

Ever since then, TV audiences have looked to TV to provide then with a short cut, a clue to the character of the candidate they are faced with that will enable them to confidently back or decisively reject them without having to do all that boring manifesto stuff. Like professional poker players, they know the real game is never where your gaze is being directed. They hope for a tell. A twitch, a guilty start, a darting eye. And human nature being what it is, whatever they are really hoping to see, they will.

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By Daniel Kalder

Reporting on the TV debates and interviews has focused almost entirely on what one might call the Nixonian details. Corbyn’s glasses, slightly askew on one occasion. Was Johnson more or less stammering than usual, when challenged over his lifetime record of mendacity and half-truth? Did the BBC really edit out derisive laughter from his interview? Did Channel 4 deliberately mishear Boris Johnson as saying that “immigrants of colour” were to be welcomed but only under democratic control?

I have seen perhaps two or three serious attempts by well-informed journalists to analyse and cost the manifesto promises of the parties, in language ordinary people might understand, for every hundred excited jabberings about who has got the wind in their sales, or looked exhausted, defeated, or fat.

For my money, however, the most telling interview was a BBC exclusive with a young woman who was asked what issues she would be considering before deciding how to vote. She said that she felt she had not been properly informed of the issues — passive voice — and had not been adequately educated, and that consequently she tended to just vote the way her friends did. Their collective vote was it seemed a sort of emergent phenomenon, of the kind familiar to anyone who has attended a séance.

Now, as I always emphasise when I am trying to establish a rapport with young people, perhaps to discover who left seven wet towels on the bathroom floor, the main thing I look for is openness and candour. We can make no progress without these.

And tempting though it is to roll our eyes, this woman is being admirably honest and self aware. To a greater or lesser extent this is how millions of people decide.

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By Ed West

Many develop a tribal loyalty to their first love and never re-examine the premises. They respond to peer-group consensus, however ill-informed, they think it is someone else’s fault that they are not better informed, and they wouldn’t read a manifesto in the loo while there are the backs of shampoo bottles to reach for. And it is perhaps worrying that many base these initial judgements on unexamined groupthink.

To the extent that they can be persuaded to switch tracks, they are strongly influenced by random but vivid visual stimuli of the kind that made 1960 famous. Unplanned, unscripted events that convince them they have accessed some fundamental, revealed truth about the character of the individuals they are being asked to vote for, an insight that will enable them to decide without having to grasp the implications of anyone’s fiscal or immigration policy. This is sometimes known as the availability heuristic.

Our would-be leaders are now trained to suppress all such revealing traits, of course. And while these things provide a brief flare in the darkness they rarely decide elections. The bacon sandwich may have done for Ed Miliband, but the young woman in the clip will not have found her prior beliefs challenged too hard by the past few week’s coverage. She will still trust her better informed friend, and will by now I suspect be familiar with that comfortable feeling of being able to fit anything that happens into her established world view, however second-hand and arbitrary she knows it to be.