I wrote ‘hug a hoodie’ and I’m proud of it

Danny Kruger, who was David Cameron’s speechwriter, defends his most notorious piece of work for the Tory leader and says that love is a neglected crime-fighting device

It happened to be the day that Boris Johnson took office as Mayor of London with a mandate to tackle youth crime. My wife and I were coming out of a house in Camden where we had been viewing a flat to rent. Standing on the steps with us, the owner of the flat suddenly saw the retreating rear of his moped, two boys aboard and half a dozen of their friends pelting along behind.

Like the pair of prats we were, the owner and I tackled youth crime. When we caught up with the pedestrians, we received between us a black eye (owner) and cut lip (me), and no moped.

My main memory of this incident is rather horrid: the spit-filled mouth of the little rat-faced boy who punched me. Short, white, in a grey hooded tracksuit, he shouted at me with all the rage of Cain: the most astonishing indignation.

‘Man hands on misery to man’, said Larkin, ‘it deepens like a coastal shelf’. The metaphor is too gradual. In this generation there seems to have been a vertiginous drop, a sudden deepening out of sight. There is a cohort of youths in London (their existence was starkly revealed in the investigation into the murder of Damilola Taylor) who are both effectively unparented, and unknown to the authorities: kids not on child benefit lists or school rolls or the records of the social services. They are few, of course, but they stand as representatives of a generation of scowling young Londoners.