There used to be, too, a difference between the things people said — remarks intended to vanish on the air — and the things they wrote and published, which were generally more considered: physically laborious to produce, and passed through selected gatekeepers in order to reach a mass audience.

And then came Twitter, the most powerful modern illustration of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message. Here, the flow of news is continuous, unregulated and fierily interactive. The instant, throwaway nature of conversation has been imported into a published, preservable medium. Spats that arise on Twitter now regularly flow back into the “old media” of print; and then — with the ease of retweets and replies — it has technically enabled the rapid amplification of praise or abuse, the latter resulting in the “pile-on”.

As with the emotional contagion that sweeps through a physical mob, the particular structure of Twitter encourages users to behave in ways which would have been contrary to their “public self” five or ten years earlier — although it may, sometimes worryingly, have unleashed the private self to speak more freely. Those who join in often sport the blue ticks denoting a verified account, and it’s clear that they don’t think of themselves as bullies, but as the righteous enforcers of a fluid but tangible moral order.

One recent episode involved Darren Grimes, a young, gay, pro-Brexit conservative commentator who has over 150,000 Twitter followers. In the aftermath of the Euro 2020 final, when emotions were running high, Grimes posted a tweet in which he tagged in the young England footballer Marcus Rashford — who had missed a penalty — and said “penalties not politics from now on, aye?”

It was a snide tweet, partly designed to set the Twitter hive-mind buzzing in irritation. It was unfair, too: plenty of hard-training players miss penalties — and since the press and public spent years berating footballers for their boozed-up, skirt-chasing antics, it seemed weird to deride one young player for dignified campaigning on free school meals. Many people disagreed with Grimes’ tweet, and said so. But the blue-ticked rugby pundit Brian Moore went one better, tweeting of Grimes that “this little done-nothing twat deserves a good kicking.”

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The kicking was duly delivered elsewhere, in electronic form. A different tweeter, from the now-defunct account @hepcatsector, came up with the dubious story that his cousin had gone to school with Grimes, and that in year 9 he had a nickname associated with masturbation under a desk. This tweeter also posted a series of messages between himself and Grimes, which later turned out to be fake. The allegation was designed to be both sexual and shaming. Twitter adored it, naturally, and sent it viral — endlessly hashtagging the alleged nickname, expanding on it, illustrating it with obscene memes and videos.

Grimes replied that he didn’t have that nickname at school, but that he was certainly called “poofter,” “fag” and beaten for being “gay”.

The Twitter rumour wasn’t directly homophobic, although certainly nasty. But anyone who recalls homophobic taunting from their schooldays will remember how frequently it caricatured gay adolescents as inappropriately sexual, prone to getting “turned on” in situations and ways that allegedly repelled their tormentors. In effect, the baseless rumour that Twitter spread about Grimes as a schoolchild is precisely the kind of rumour that school bullies spread about gay teenagers. Those revelling in it would mostly count themselves on the “progressive” side of politics, and would no doubt officially deplore homophobia. Yet somehow that line of attack arose – and they all joined in.

The spat had barely cooled when Giles Coren, a columnist on The Times, posted a tweet about Dawn Foster, a Left-wing fellow journalist who recently died suddenly aged just 34. Foster, who could be a combative Twitter presence herself, had made acerbic comments about Coren some years earlier. These had rankled, and upon her untimely death — to sum up his tweet, which was later deleted — he wondered aloud about a response which began in faux-commiseration and ended in gleeful laughter.

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His tweet itself suggested someone playing a high-stakes game of risk, not only with the boundaries of taste in the aftermath of a death, but with a huge and volatile audience: a kind of Russian roulette with a “post a tweet” button, testing if this might be the one that triggers disaster. And Twitter did indeed respond, sometimes with pained disbelief, and sometimes with foul insults and escalating threats of real-life reprisals over many days.

British speech was once heavily associated with understatement, which itself was tied to civic virtue. The most inconceivable pressures and agonising wartime losses, for example, were often described in stoically minimal terms such as “a spot of bother” or “a bit sticky”. Quite the opposite mode of speech, however, has spread throughout social media: the language of wild overstatement. It frequently employs adjectives once applicable to the extreme depths of human behaviour – “vile” “disgusting” “horrific” – to perceived minor transgressions of some fast-moving social code. This fury is often triggered by nuance, while leaving major, real-world offences untouched.

The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw, for example, recently described Scarlett Johansson’s “sensuous cough-syrup purr” in a review. The actress is known in Hollywood for her seductive voice: in my days as a film critic I wrote about it myself. Yet this mild expression of admiration drew the ire of an LA features editor called Alisha Grauso, who tweeted her anger at a “middle-aged male film critic” being “so GD f*ing creepy when writing about female characters.” Thanks to outrage inflation, a key element in the Twitter economy, a large band of Grauso’s 27,000 followers were soon rocking away in performative horror like the young maidens of Salem: cue vomiting GIFs, fierce accusations of “fucking gross”, and the now-formulaic imitation of stunned disbelief: “…I just…what…”

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What is this? Anger looking for a place to earth, I suppose. Restless anger coming out, sometimes skimpily dressed as satire, and attracting more and greater waves of anger to it, as a kind of confirmation of its existence. Boundaries of what it’s acceptable to say are being dissolved. And, increasingly in modern Britain, physical boundaries are being crossed too. Twitter’s mechanics are reshaping national codes of behaviour.

Last June a crowd demonstrated outside Dominic Cummings’ family home, erecting a giant screen. A different crowd recently sought out the place where it thought the chief medical officer Chris Whitty lives. Whitty himself was mauled, jostled and filmed in a park by two young men, who had just been to an anti-lockdown rally and had its speeches ringing in their ears. The wall outside Coren’s house was daubed with Foster’s name, and dog excrement left on the pathway.

In every case, the people crossing the boundaries believed that outrage and circumstance had given them the moral authority to behave outside normal codes, and to take the argument directly to their opponent’s door, sometimes to family homes in which partners and young children also live. What people do when they think they’re allowed, of course, is what part of them wanted to do when they weren’t. Regardless of what one thinks of each individual trigger, this is cause for concern.

I grew up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a conflict in which physical boundaries were frequently crossed in the most horrific ways. People were shot as they answered the door or blown apart when starting up their car. It didn’t begin with that, of course. It began with the gradual heating-up of rhetoric, the stentorian sectarian speeches of the young Ian Paisley, the impassioned orations at IRA commemorations, all fanning the existing fears and resentments of their listeners into uncontrollable action.

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For conflicts more explicitly activated by the media itself, one need only look to the central role that the Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines played in the Rwandan genocide. Its hate-filled patter inciting murderous violence against Tutsi “cockroaches” was woven in with jokes and songs, pop music and phone-ins. Conscious of the part the station was playing in directing genocide, human rights groups including the US Committee for Refugees asked that US military resources be used to jam their broadcasts. The US government refused: for reasons outside Rwanda, it had a strong commitment to broadcast freedom, and was culpably slow to see the urgency of the argument in this case.

We’re a long way from these horrors in the West, but a strange inversion has already taken hold in the thinking of many — especially those who are most vocal on university campuses. It’s said that ideological difference, even when thoughtfully and politely expressed, is “literal violence” and deserves a commensurate response. But actual, direct threats of stabbing, raping, killing or bombing are meant to be interpreted as metaphorical.

The area where this pattern of thought is most apparent is in the current highly charged argument over trans issues. It was evident in a recent article in Jezebel magazine, in which the writer, Ashley Reese, berated JK Rowling for making public a tweet wishing her “a very nice pipe-bomb in the mailbox”. Discussing the tweet, Reese mocked the idea that anyone would feel directly threatened by a Twitter user who in this case describes themselves as “a genderfluid lesbian and a cybermarxist” and uses an anime avatar.

Yet the article demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of who issues violent threats, and of what such threats — even if not enacted — are intended to do. Is there really a “type” from whom we should take threats seriously, and another we should comfortably ignore? History suggests that would be foolish. The Price sisters, Marian and Dolours, for example, were intelligent, highly attractive young women who had attended teacher training college. In 1973, aged 19 and 22 respectively — fired by a belief in the purity of their cause — they participated in the IRA Old Bailey bombing which left 200 people injured and one dead. The journalist Neal Ascherson remembered Ulrike Meinhof as a “tender and vulnerable” 30-year-old journalist, the mother of young twins. That was before she “took up the gun” as a leader of a gang responsible for a wave of bombings, shootings and assassinations across Germany.

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Soon after the tweet that Rowling highlighted — one among many threats she has received — another piece of writing came to light, this time from a paper written by an LSE Gender Studies student, Matt Thompson. In it, the author makes an explicit threat to “TERFs” or gender-critical women. “Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness in your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.” It’s the type of statement frequently found on Twitter, now immortalised in an academic paper. Thompson self-defines as “an autistic genderfuck” and also someone “who loves cats, running, books and plants.” By Reese’s logic, who could possibly be afraid of a student who loves cats?

And yet it seemed Thompson very much wanted certain women to feel afraid. There’s a negative, insidious power to open threats of harm, which is exactly why people and paramilitary groups make them. They deliberately invoke fear to shut people up. They take root in the victim’s psyche, stealing their peace of mind, making them feel that violence might be just around the corner. And sometimes death threats do come true.

We cannot put the genie of social media back in its bottle. But we can certainly stop persistently lying to ourselves — as individuals and as a society — about what it is permissible to say to those we dislike or disagree with, and how we say it. The truth is that, most of the time, the state’s not going to stop you from bullying, smearing or even directly threatening someone online: there’s simply too much material for it to handle. But brick by brick, word by word, we’re either building or tolerating a world that we will all then have to live in. And most people in the UK are simply not prepared for what that could entail.

Warhammer is a game of dice. You make little armies of plastic figurines, paint them up, and then take it in turns to move and shoot, rolling the dice to see how well your little chaps do it. I used to play it as a child; then, 25 years later, blessed with more disposable income and burdened with less social shame, I took it up again. 

Since then, to my slight surprise, a little group of my friends has taken it up as well, dads in their late thirties and early forties, some of whom played in their youth, some of whom did not but who have obviously been closet nerds for decades. We play Kill Team, a smaller, faster version of the game, with only a dozen or so models on each side; the real Warhammer 40K could have 50 or more and might take four hours for a game, and we have jobs and families.

The idea is simple enough – your Necron Warrior’s Gauss blaster might shoot 24” and hit on a three, so you measure the distance, crouch down to see if it can see its target, and then roll. Then, if you hit, you roll the other dice to see if it does any damage. Or for your fang-toothed, green-skinned, cleaver-wielding Ork Boyz, you might roll to see if they successfully charge into combat, and then roll again to see how many times they hit their opponents.

The game is all about dice-rolling. It is explicitly random – dice are the archetypal random-number generator. The game is about understanding and managing randomness, about surfing uncertainty; the skill is in navigating the luck. Your big, tough Terminator has good armour; you can probably expect him to shrug off most shots from normal guns. But if you get shot enough times, you’ll probably roll a few ones. Do you dare put him out in the open where everyone can see him, but where he can quickly close with the enemy and do the most damage? Or do you try to sneak him around behind cover, which takes more time but is safer?

We struggle, sometimes, with randomness and uncertainty. We struggle with it in the sense that we don’t enjoy it – we don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen. We struggle with it in the sense that we are bad judges of how likely or unlikely things are, of thinking in more complex shades than “will happen, won’t happen, might happen”.

But we also struggle with it in the sense that we don’t recognise it: after the fact, contingent facts seem inevitable; randomness dissolves into fate. We judge decisions not by whether they were made using the best information available at the time, but by what actually happened – a mistake known as “outcome bias”. Say I charge my Terminator out into the open and he gets 15 lasgun shots in the face, with three of them sneaking past his armour, killing him: did I make the wrong decision? Maybe – but maybe I made the right decision and rolled a few bad dice. 

Years ago, I used to play poker, very occasionally and very badly: I tended to get drunk and go all-in on bad hands. Once, I played at a casino against a pro for a feature for the Telegraph. As usual, I played my signature move, betting very heavily on useless cards after a few pints; but for once, I drew exactly what I needed on the river, and won. Very obviously, I had made bad decisions, but got lucky. But from the inside, it felt as though I had played brilliantly. 

I spoke to a financial trader for that poker piece, who uses poker to teach decision-making; he said that in games of uncertainty, like poker (or like Warhammer, he did not in fact say but could have), you can only detect the role of skill over a long time. Even after a new player has played 100 hours of poker, he said, still, “we don’t feel that we have a good handle on truth;” there’s so much noise, so much luck, that the (very real) skill can be drowned out except over the very long term. “If you win a single hand,”, I wrote at the time, “it’s meaningless to attribute it to skill. If you’re in profit after 100,000 hands, you can say with reasonable confidence that you’re a skilled player.”

In Warhammer, too, it feels as though the outcome of the decision is what determines whether a decision was the right one. But these are games of chance – explicitly random. That is, I think, why games of chance are important. Because you know they’re random, it’s easier to detach the outcome from the process. In other areas of life, without the training that games of chance give you, it’s not so easy.

A stock trader might become a billionaire off a few lucky trades. Are they good? We don’t know: millions of traders make trades every day; some of them will be lucky. A company runs a huge profit for a couple of years: is that because it’s well-run? We don’t know; it could just be survivorship bias. Warren Buffet clearly is genuinely skilled: we have years of data to show that. But if someone has one good year, that might just be fluke.

We have an inbuilt need to explain success and failure. And sometimes that’s important. But in some situations, huge outcomes hinge on tiny moments; a dice-roll, in essence, but a hidden dice-roll. The recent Batley & Spen by-election, for instance: Labour won it by 323 votes. In an electorate of 80,000, that’s essentially coming down to a coin-toss. If Labour had lost by 323 votes, it would have been a huge blow to Keir Starmer’s leadership; he might have faced a challenge. But in reality it would have told us nothing different about his success or otherwise.

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Or football. As I write this, the memory of England going out on penalties is still fresh and painful; Gareth Southgate is being criticised for bringing Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho on in the last minute of extra time to take penalties, and for asking Bukayo Saka, a teenager, to take the last one. They all missed.

But before the shootout, Jermaine Jenas, the BBC co-commentator, was saying that Sancho was probably being brought on because he had the fearlessness of youth. The outcome was negative, but was the process wrong? As this guy says, in 1996 people got angry with Terry Venables for leaving penalty-takers like Robbie Fowler on the bench; in 2021 we get angry with Southgate for doing the opposite. And it works both ways: at 1-0 up against Germany, Thomas Müller ran clean through after a misplaced pass from Raheem Sterling; he should have scored but put his shot just wide of the post. He would probably make that shot five times out of six; he rolled a one. Sometimes you do.

People then make narratives about it. If the Tories had won Batley & Spen, we’d have been told it was because the Hancock affair wasn’t cutting through, or because “woke” issues were alienating the Labour base. Labour won, so the ground game was strong, or Kim Leadbetter was an engaging candidate. 

Likewise: if Müller scores, our defence isn’t good enough; if Rashford does (and his penalty sent the keeper the wrong way and was only a couple of inches wide), then Southgate’s plan worked. But if you’re trained by games of chance, then you can think: OK, sometimes you roll a one; sometimes the coinflip comes up heads. 

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There’s an obvious counter-argument: dice actually are random, whereas football and politics are not. But that’s wrong. Technically, dice are not random: when you throw them, you impart a certain amount of spin, you give them a particular velocity, they will bounce a certain way. The face they show when they land is not randomly determined: it is determined by how you threw them, by the surface they land on, by how sharp or rounded their corners are, by their density and elasticity. A Laplace’s demon, an all-knowing God, could in theory predict how they bounce, limited only by the apparently true randomness at the quantum heart of the universe. But in reality, as chaos theory tells us, tiny changes in the input make it fundamentally unpredictable.

Similarly, tiny, unnoticeable differences in reality can have major impacts on your outcome. David Foster Wallace, writing about tennis in 2006, talks about the minuscule details a tennis player has to pay attention to: the tiniest difference in the angle of the racquet’s face; hitting a ball a millisecond earlier or later. Tennis players repetitively, obsessively hit the same shots thousands and thousands of times in training, so that it is second nature, so they can hit it 999 times out of 1,000. But still, a minor irregularity in the court’s surface can change a bounce; a momentary slip can make a shot fail. The difference between a bad player and a good one is that the good one is more able to control randomness, to put the ball into the area they want to more often. But the randomness is still there. If, in Batley & Spen, a few Labour activists had had to self-isolate for Covid, or if the weather had been different, that might have changed the result. 

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If you want to draw conclusions from these things — to say that England should have done X or Labour should have done Y — there are hard limits on how much you can say, from a single data point like a by-election or a cup final. Too much of sports and politics journalism, I think, is finding narratives after the fact, “analysing” events by looking at the results. As in poker, you need more data than a single hand can provide. 

We suck at spotting randomness. The whole enterprise of science is a careful, and only partially successful, attempt to get past our innate human need to see patterns where they often are not. But one way of training your own ability to think about processes, not outcomes, to see the hidden dice rolls behind the events that shape our world, is to play something with real dice rolls. It doesn’t have to be Warhammer; Dungeons & Dragons will do, or poker, or bridge; cards do the job just as well as dice. But I do recommend Warhammer, because you can learn about randomness while also smashing someone to pieces with a gigantic poisonous scythe. Which makes it a lot more fun. I’m going to preorder the new edition.

In a boarding school near the Kentish coast, a ruffian sneaks along the corridor, hunting for the rare stamp that will make him rich. In a Home Counties village, a tousled-haired schoolboy lies awake, putting the finishing touches to his scheme that will win the war for the Allies. Many miles to the north, a boat pulls away from Wildcat Island, bound for fortune and glory. And far across the oceans, a group of schoolboys tremble in terror, as their South Sea captors prepare to sacrifice them to their idol …

Such is the world of the classic British children’s story: the world of Billy Bunter and his Greyfriars chums, William Brown and his fellow Outlaws, Titty, Roger and the rest of the Swallows and Amazons, Jennings, Molesworth and the Secret Seven. For more than half a century, such stories dominated the imagination of millions of readers. You can still buy second-hand editions of Richmal Crompton’s Guillermo el Detective, and wonder what on earth readers in General Franco’s Spain made of them.

When I was growing up, the books of Frank Richards, Arthur Ransome and Richmal Crompton were still everywhere, just about. Our local library groaned with stories in which middle-class British children spent their weekends in the barn across the fields and their weeknights sneaking out of the dormitory for some stolen tuck. Raised on the virtues of teamwork and courage, the boys grew up to become hunters, naval commanders and Spitfire pilots. I never found out what happened to the girls. For a boy in the early Eighties, to have been caught reading Mallory Towers would have been social suicide.

I thought of these splendid and now largely forgotten books when I read that a new star is about to join the constellation of children’s writers. Marcus Rashford, footballer and saint, has written a book, or at least put his name on a book by his collaborator Carl Anka. I don’t want to be rude about it: if it encourages football-crazed children to read, so much the better.

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I’ll be as rude as you like, though, about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s forthcoming children’s book The Bench. Catchy title! According to the publishers, it aims to evoke a “deep sense of warmth, connection and compassion”. It sounds ghastly. What sane child wants to read about connection and compassion, when they could read Billy Bunter Butts In instead?

My own defiantly non-compassionate copy of Billy Bunter Butts In, first bought for my mother in 1951, is beside me right now. As far as I remember, it’s the first book that I read after lights-out, under the covers with a torch. I was risking my pocket money, but I simply couldn’t contain myself. Would the Fat Owl of the Remove be caned for failing to do his Georgic? Would Stephen Price of the Fifth manage to get his bet on for the two-thirty? And who would win the titanic showdown between plucky form captain Harry Wharton, the colonel’s son, and Herbert Vernon-Smith, cocky son of a millionaire stockbroker, the legendary “Bounder”? (Don’t worry: I won’t give the result away.)

Purveyors of Californian compassion might think this a dreadful book for a boy to be reading in the early Eighties. But I was in good company. In their heyday between 1910 and 1940, Frank Richards’s Greyfriars stories, which ran in the Magnet magazine, were the single most popular narrative in all British fiction. Then as now, some people deplored them. When V. S. Pritchett’s father discovered his son’s stash of Magnets, he burned them in the fireplace and told him to read John Ruskin instead. But Pritchett could not help himself. “One page and I was entranced,” he remembered. “I gobbled these stories as if I were eating pie or stuffing.”

Later, recalling his days teaching the sons of “shopkeepers, office employees and small business and professional men”, George Orwell reported that almost all read the Greyfriars stories and “were still taking them fairly seriously when they were fifteen or even sixteen”.

And in his book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, the historian Jonathan Rose quotes a colliery winder’s son, a Camberwell labourer’s son and the disabled son of two Yorkshire millworkers, all of whom loved the stories. On the South Wales coalfield, a butcher’s boy called Aneurin Bevan made a weekly pilgrimage to the newsagent’s for the latest Magnet. Like many other parents, Bevan’s father, a miner, banned them from the house. But the NHS’s founding father bought them anyway and hid them underneath a local bridge.

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In his famous essay “Boys’ Weeklies”, Orwell argued that these stories formed one of the great bulwarks of British conservatism:

“The year is 1910 — or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailor-made clothes, sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage after an exciting game of football which was won by an odd goal in the last half-minute. There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay…”

Actually, they’re not quite as reactionary as you might think. The working-class scholarship boys are far brighter and more likeable than the aristocrats and stockbrokers’ sons, and they all go out of their way to shield their Indian chum Hurree Jamset Ram Singh (er, “Inky”) from the “colour prejudice” of their American classmate Fisher T. Fish.

But in essence Orwell was right. Greyfriars is a deeply conservative place, unchanging and hierarchical, menaced by an endless stream of loafers, ruffians, footpads and foreigners. I bow to nobody in my love of Billy Bunter, the “schoolboy Falstaff”, the jam-sodden embodiment of greed, laziness, stupidity and cowardice. Though when I was looking for a bedtime story for my son, even I drew the line at Billy Bunter Among the Cannibals.

Bunter wasn’t my only favourite. The first story I ever wrote as a boy was an illustrated sequel to Swallows and Amazons, rather undermining the innocence of Arthur Ransome’s original by equipping the characters with automatic weapons. But today I would give the gold medal to Richmal Crompton, the shy, unmarried invalid whose William Brown stories sold some 12 million copies between 1919 and 1969.

Originally written for middle-class mothers and published in women’s magazines, they chronicled the adventures of a mischievous 11-year-schoolboy in a Home Counties village. And if you’re looking for an antidote to connection and compassion, a repudiation of everything Meghan and Harry stand for, they are perfect.

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For generations of readers, William and his fellow Outlaws Ginger, Henry and Douglas were as familiar as their own friends and family. Then there was the supreme villain for any 11-year-old boy, the terrifying, invincible Violet Elizabeth Bott, a monster of narcissistic self-pity. ‘I’ll thcream and thcream until I’m thick.’ That would make a good motto for somebody.

William himself is an inveterate culture warrior, an unashamed lover of flags and statues, the personification of the anti-woke spirit. Although he chafes under parental authority, he reserves his greatest contempt for idealists, do-gooders, artists and intellectuals. In one story, a League of Nations enthusiast arrives in the village and implores the boys to give up their weapons as a first step towards world peace. William pretends to go along with it, tricks his enemies into disarming, and then seizes their catapults and air rifles and turns them on his foes. Connection and compassion are definitely not his thing.

In another story, with a general election looming in 1929, the children organise their own mock election. Henry, the gang’s brainbox, lays out the position:

“There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to make things better, but they want to make ’em better in different ways. There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ’em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by takin’ everyone’s money off ’em, an’ there’s Communists an’ they want to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves.’

No political scientist could put it better.

At first, attracted by the thought of so much violence, William flirts with the idea of Communism. But eventually he stands as a Conservative, influenced by his father’s friend, a big game hunter from the African veldt. The day of the election comes. Addressing the other children, William simply lists the man’s kills: buffalos, lions, elephants, even hippopotamuses. At last, slowly, grandly, he reaches his peroration: ‘An’ this man is a Conservative. He votes Conservatism at gen’ral elections.’

He wins in a landslide.

Crompton’s best stories date from the war. In one story, William half-hears his family discussing Norway’s Nazi puppet Vidkun Quisling at breakfast, and becomes convinced that a man called “ole Grissel” is at large in the village, preparing the ground for ole Hitler’s invasion. Later, he arms his friends with an air gun, bows and catapults, and scours the lanes for enemy parachutists. An actor appears, dressed for an entertainment at the local aerodrome. The Outlaws knock him senseless and call the police. The man denies everything. But William has a crushing, unanswerable riposte: “If you aren’t a parachutist, why are you dressed up as a woman?”

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Is there any hope for such stories today? Probably not. Given the ultra-woke instincts of most children’s publishers, I suspect they’re sunk forever. There is too much stoicism and not enough self-pity, too much pluck and not enough diversity. I certainly can’t see Meghan enjoying Billy Bunter’s outings to Egypt, China and the South Seas. As for William Brown, his attitude to anti-racism campaigners, curriculum decolonisers and mental health professionals doesn’t bear thinking about. Sad to say, the only reason Richmal Crompton hasn’t been cancelled is that so few people still read her.

For me, though, her stories will live forever. Bunter and William will be charging around my imagination till the day I die, or at least until I lose my marbles. And when I think of Orwell’s imitation, I can’t help smiling in recognition:

“Lord Mauleverer has just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. After tea we shall sit round the study fire having a good laugh at Billy Bunter and discussing the team for next week’s match against Rookwood. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever…”

The irony, of course, is that Orwell loved them as much as anybody. He’d have had no time for The Bench, would ole George.

Was there a nadir? Was it the WAG parade at the World Cup in 2006, when Victoria Beckham drank bottles of Veuve Clicquot through a straw? (“We became a bit of a circus,” one player sagely reminisced a few years later.) Was it Ashley Cole’s admission, in 2006, that he nearly “swerved off the road” with anger when Arsenal offered him a new contract with a £55,000 weekly wage? Perhaps it was Wayne Rooney’s “romp with a granny” — or was it a naked Frank Lampard, jeering at grieving Americans in a Heathrow hotel bar on September 13, 2001? England expected that most footballers would try and sleep with their teammate’s wife.

That was off the pitch. On the field, if you can endure the recollection, they were even worse. England played like a scratch team dredged from the remedial unit of a Victorian institution. They burned up at tournaments in 2004, 2006 and 2010. They didn’t even qualify for Euro 2008. The game, through the Premier League, had never been more lucrative. The reputation of its players had never been lower. In a strange way it was appropriate. If England’s footballers were hideous in the 2000s, it was because England was. If they were trashily materialistic, it was because England was too. They were no better, and not much worse, than anyone else in public life at the time. That was the tragedy. “Morally corrupt” was how a group of bishops described the New Labour years in 2008. God only knows what the Right Reverends would have thought if they’d seen Footballers’ Wives.

Now the face of football is changing. England’s players are a source of pride rather than embarrassment. In 2018, led by Gareth Southgate, their impeccable manager, they reached the semi-finals of the World Cup — a moment of full-spectrum, flags-out, boozy national unity that most fans, inured to washout after washout, never thought they’d experience. Success brought English players an earned prestige, even an authority, that they hadn’t enjoyed since Italia ‘90. No more tragedy. They were just heroes. What would they do with it?

The answer, at least partially, lies in an office on Great Titchfield Street, Fitzrovia. That’s where Roc Nation Sports International’s headquarters is based. Founded in 2008 by Jay Z, Roc Nation has since washed into every cove in the modern entertainment industry. They manage artists and athletes, produce TV shows and films, and run a music label. Team Roc, a division within the company, is dedicated to efforts around social justice: bailing out BLM protestors in America this summer, offering pro-bono legal support for their families, creating buzzy media campaigns, and leveraging Roc Nation’s impressive celebrity roster to boost stories.

Their work blurs the lines between politics and sport, entertainment and activism. “We don’t consider ourselves a traditional agency — we really are a movement,” Roc Nation Sports International’s president Michael Yormark told the Telegraph in June.

The movement found a standard bearer in Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford, who became one of Roc Nation’s European clients earlier this year. An icon of the 2018 World Cup, and a courageous high-pressure penalty taker, Rashford grew up in a single-parent family in Wythenshawe. When he heard that schools would be closing as part of the wider national lockdown in March, Rashford, who’d relied on free lunch programmes as a child, turned to Kelly Hogarth, his personal publicist, and VP of strategic communications at Roc Nation Sports International — what could they do to help poor children secure vital meals?

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Even hermits know what happened next. Rashford’s — and Hogarth’s — free school meals campaign, mammothly popular and relentlessly sincere, forced the Government into two U-turns. ‘RASHERS FOR PM’, screamed the Daily Star, one of dozens of headlines he made over the summer, then the autumn. Old media was full of sympathetic interviews with Rashford, or commentators, such as Matthew Parris, who were scared of criticising the campaign, for fear of sounding mean. Who, after all, wanted children to go hungry in a plague year?

Only monsters: when the Daily Mail tried to peg Rashford as a hypocrite for owning multiple homes, it was like watching a giraffe try to ride a bicycle. When you own new media as much as Rashford does — with 900,000 more followers than Boris Johnson on Twitter — attacks from mere newspapers don’t work. Alongside Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling and Aston Villa’s Tyrone Mings, who both campaigned for BLM after the death of George Floyd, Rashford was suddenly leading a generation of politically self-aware England players. The normally sedate New Statesman editor, Jason Cowley, called them — without mentioning the squadrons of PR flacks writing their tweets — “activist super players”.

Footballers, not poets, became England’s unacknowledged legislators. Rashford received an MBE, and millions of school children received lunch.

Traditional broadcast and print media never did more than boost Rashford’s signal. The narrative was too sexy — star footballer routs out of touch toffs at the top — for them to attempt anything else. To understand what was interesting about Rashford, and by extension Roc Nation, you had to go to the trade press, and media companies which focused on sports PR. The Rashford campaign was the subject of huge features in AdWeek and SportsPro, and he won PR Week’s “Communicator of The Year” award. What earned Rashford praise from them wasn’t feeding children. It was the exciting way Roc Nation has fused social justice and sport in order to boost Rashford’s profile, the better for him to serve as a conduit for digital marketing operations, the spread of branded content, and the sale of boxfresh trainers.

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The bottom line wasn’t doing good; the bottom line, as SportsPro noted, was that during the campaign, Rashford’s Twitter following had grown by 65%, whereas the total social following of Manchester United — which hasn’t run any political campaigns this summer — had grown a sluggish 8% in the same period. Simon Oliveira, a long-term advisor to David Beckham, labelled Roc Nation’s efforts “genius”.

For experienced sports marketeers like Oliveira, Rashford’s campaign set a new precedent. During Beckham’s glory days, the most social justice a player would indulge in might involve being chauffeured, blatantly hungover, to a children’s hospital to sign autographs, or to a community centre to cut a ribbon. Nobody cared what Gary Neville thought about child tax credits. Complicated policy matters were for Oliver Letwin or David Laws or Ed Balls to work out. Roc Nation and Rashford changed all that. “The barriers have been well and truly broken,” Oliveira wrote over the summer. “Top-athletes, and the organisations they represent, can collectively reach more people than almost any politician and connect.”

The next horizon stretches beyond Rashford. His authenticity, precisely calibrated by the 20 “subject-matter experts” who work for Roc Nation in that Fitzrovia office, is rare. As the first “activist super player” to cut through with the public, Rashford was able to give the impression of spontaneity, relatability and unfilteredness prized by PR world, whatever the contrary reality. Other PR firms will go further than Roc Nation, and take stands on issues with far less room for consensus than feeding hungry children during a pandemic.

This represents an enormous shift away from sport as it was traditionally understood in England. It would be wrong to say that sport was apolitical, but it has rarely been a space for activism. According to the historian Derek Birely in Sport and The Making of Britain, sport had a “chauvinistic” side, but its role lay in “providing a safety valve, escape, sublimation, [and] socially acceptable outlets” for aggression. For Robert Colls, in This Sporting Life: Sport & Liberty in England 1760-1960, sport was defined by “knowing that not everyone is political”.

That knowledge is being replaced with the more contentious model of player-activism found in American sports. English football is already embroiled in a domestic culture war over the practice of “taking the knee” in support of BLM, and an international culture war over the Premier League’s “Rainbow Laces” campaign against homophobia. Perennial plans — looking ever more likely to come to fruition — for a European Super League will cement the game’s money-making capabilities, while severing the connection between England’s biggest clubs and their localities.

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The four divisions of English football were always a parody of the class system; if the top clubs jet off, it will mirror the growth of our own transnational elite, who, like Manchester United, would rather play in Milan than Middlesbrough. Look on the bright side: United will be able, finally, to compete with the Dallas Cowboys for overseas markets on a more equal footing.

Top players in such a system will be like the American celebrities repped by Roc Nation. Extraordinarily wealthy and influential, but blandly removed from the audiences they sell their apparel and their opinions too. Maybe it will be then, when Jack Grealish is co-hosting a podcast with Greta Thunberg, or Mason Greenwood is co-authoring a popular book about antiracism with Reni-Eddo Lodge, that fans will feel a touch — just a breath — of nostalgia for Wayne Rooney and Ashley Cole. They were not good men, but at least their cynicism was genuine.

Until this weekend. At which point a screeching U-turn was performed — though this may have been lost amid the hubbub in America. Now, free school meals will be provided to eligible children during the Easter, summer and Christmas breaks next year.

The debate, as it raged over the past months, was partly philosophical: is it correct for the state to step in where parents have failed, either through neglect, poverty or sheer ill fortune? The Conservative MP Brendan Clarke-Smith, taking the argument for personal responsibility to its logical conclusion, provoked mirth by telling the Commons that he didn’t believe in “nationalising children”.

Another feature of the argument — and a frequent component of all such ideological wrangling — was the light it shone on what politicians and commentators would define as food poverty in contemporary Britain. Indeed, some of those opposed to Labour’s motion clamoured to demonstrate that it is possible to eat well on a shoestring and that food poverty is more often a consequence of irresponsible choices than genuine financial hardship.

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When I was researching a book on low-wage Britain, I stumbled across an article in the Daily Mail about a woman who managed to survive on £1 a day. “Frugal Kath Kelly, 51, ate at free buffets, shopped at church jumble sales and scrounged leftovers from grocery stores and restaurants,” ran the story. “She even collected a staggering £117 in loose change dropped in the street.”

The story was written in admiring tones — Kath Kelly was presented as a sagacious and resourceful example to the poor. The underlying message was that the lower orders were feckless and stupid. Instead of sourcing and preparing healthy ingredients, they chose to plonk themselves in front of a television set and inhale pot noodles and multipacks of crisps.

There is a George Orwell quote that is trotted out during every debate about food, with Orwell arguing that poverty and unemployment lends itself to the desire for “tasty” food over dour offerings such as kale and brown bread. “The less money you have,” writes Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, “the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.”

But is it actually more expensive to eat well? And how much does it cost to eat nutritious food in Britain in 2020?

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Nutritious ingredients such as lentils (£1, all Asda prices), potatoes (49p), chickpeas (33p) and half a dozen eggs (75p) certainly go further than salt and sugar-filled ready meals (£2) or a calorie-dense stuffed crust pizza (£3.50). The food blogger Jack Monroe has demonstrated conclusively that it is possible to make tasty and nutritious meals on a budget: her website showcases recipes for Cornish fish pie, mustard chicken, salmon and pea pasta — each meal costing less than £1.50 to prepare. But the cost of these meals per person is typically based on making enough for four to six people, which is not applicable to every family. They also don’t take account of the cost of electricity and gas, and the limited storage and cooking space that people may have access to.

Moreover, there are other impediments to eating well on a budget. A lack of education about culinary preparation is one commonly cited factor, though that has been mitigated in recent times by the emergence of budget-food celebrities and more generally by access to the internet. Though a strangely snobbish attitude toward frozen food lingers in Britain, with one in three believing it is inferior to fresh food. Bizarrely considering the popularity of frozen food in France, a nation viewed as infinitely superior to us in terms of diet, 30% of Brits agreed with the statement “frozen food is not for people like me” according to a 2015 survey.

A lack of education has become a catch-all explanation for many contemporary phenomena, from bad diets, to Brexit, to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. However, a 2013 study concluded that unhealthy diets seen in poorer socioeconomic groups may be related to different physical activity levels. For example, the study found that adults of lower socioeconomic status were more physically active and expended more energy than those of higher socioeconomic status, perhaps explaining their higher consumption of sugar- and fat-rich foods.

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A critical factor in poor dietary choices in the UK is a lack of time. Britons work some of the longest hours in Europe and have some of the largest waistlines. A 2014 survey found that three-quarters of British workers said a bad day at the office was the main reason for bingeing on foods such as pizzas, burgers and curries.

Moreover, eating for many occurs “on the go” — as a thousand advertorial blandishments like to phrase it (although less so during the Covid-19 pandemic). The reality is somewhat less glamorous: the “buffet” car aboard most trains is a degradation of the act of eating; the typical offering is a choice of sweets, crisps, stodge, grease and other high calorie snacks. And while it may be relatively easy to source cheap ingredients from the supermarket, motorway service stations feature a “choice” that is usually limited to McDonald’s, KFC, or a cold and unappetising salad box. It’s hardly surprising so many choose the unhealthy option.

During my brief stint at working in an Amazon warehouse, my diet was appalling. Orwell’s point about the unemployed seeking out something “tasty” to ameliorate misery also applies to the working poor. I didn’t go home and cook up a hearty stew of lentils and pearl barley after a gruelling 10-hour shift: I collapsed on my bed with a McDonald’s and a beer. Most human beings would do the same under similar conditions.

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For those on low wages or benefits, poverty is the thief of time. Being poor invariably consists of countless hours spent waiting around for public transport, bosses, landlords or public sector bureaucrats. And that’s before one adds up the additional time it takes to care for a family. Even if it can be done relatively cheaply, preparing a healthy meal invariably takes longer than putting a pizza in the oven.

There have often been moral panics about what the poor are spending money on and what they are eating. In Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, inmates in the workhouse receive “periodically small quantities of oatmeal” and are served “three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays”. When Dickens was writing in the 1830s, the New Poor Law had recently been introduced with the intention of making life for those without work as miserable and as harsh as possible. Those is the workhouse were to be fed no better than the poorest labourer; by such methods men and women would be forced to accept the lowliest job they were offered.

We no longer dictate the food those on unemployment benefits must consume (though the argument that we ought to is a frequent saloon-bar trope). But a peculiar moral tone to our conversations about food persists. This is not confined to one political tribe. Nowadays liberals too are often heard laying down pious strictures as to what the poor should eat and drink. Sugar taxes have been introduced and junk food advertising is set to be banned before the 9pm watershed. Newspapers such as The Guardian have called for the government to go even further in terms of regulating what people eat.

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Food taxes are not necessarily wrong per se — there is evidence to suggest that levies on fizzy drinks (which are empty calories after all) can encourage people to make healthier choices (what’s wrong with plain old water?). But financially penalising people for their dietary choices feels like the complacent and morally satisfying option. Perhaps it would be better to pay more attention to the material conditions that give rise to the use of junk food as an emotional palliative in the first place. Binge-eating is more often a response to external pressures than a signifier of innate moral deficiencies.

And, despite the good news this week about the Covid vaccine, things are going to get far harder over the winter before they get better. Ministers have also been warned that the weekly shop is likely to become more expensive in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

It would be too reductive to remove individual agency from the healthy eating equation altogether. Yet we should ask more penetrating questions as to why poorer families often have such gruesome diets — questions that go beyond Dickensian moralising about personal responsibility and “nationalising children”, but which simultaneously eschew the sanctimonious finger-wagging of the “nanny knows best” approach.

There are myriad reasons why Britons eat poorly. Addressing them will require a radical reappraisal of our work-life balance and a better understanding of the indignities that are a daily feature of life on the breadline. Changes wrought by the pandemic may inadvertently bring about the former. But is a Conservative government — against some of its deep-rooted ideological inclinations — ready to see life through the eyes of its poorest citizens? Never say never. But the fact it was forced into an embarrassing climbdown by a Premier League footballer over school meals for poor kids doesn’t bode well.