Diary – 9 November 2002

I am in the midst of a tour promoting a book, The Political Animal. Like all journeys in this country, it is almost impossible to travel anywhere with any confidence that you will arrive within a day of your anticipated time. A trip to Norfolk, which ought to have taken three hours, lasted five. The return journey, involving jams on the M11, closure of the M25 and so on, took five and a half. Complaints about the ludicrous state of the British transport system have become so commonplace that we all just ignore them. ‘It took me two hours to get through the Dartford Tunnel.’ ‘I travelled five miles on the M6 in an hour and a half,’ they go on. The trouble (and reassurance) is that the British are a people with very low expectations in almost everything. The state of the roads is an excuse for smug people who never have to travel anywhere off the beaten track to drone on about the superiority of the railways. But what is left of the railway system serves only the major conurbations, and does so with by now predictable ineptness. I was delighted to hear a guard recently come on the public-address system to announce, ‘We are sorry for the late-running of this train. This is solely due to management incompetence.’

One does not, of course, see a truly representative cross-section of Britain on these publicity tours: sadly, we have been invited to no book fairs in Merthyr Tydfil or Accrington. But, from Norwich to Glasgow, one is struck again and again by how remarkably prosperous Britain looks. If I was Harold Macmillan, I might be tempted to say that it really did look as if most of our people had never had it so good. But something keeps troubling me.