Status Anxiety: Held captive by Captain Kidd

I think I may soon have enough material for another comic memoir, this one charting my increasingly accident-prone career as a political campaigner. I’m not talking about setting up the West London Free School, which is still going swimmingly, but the strange direction my career has taken as a consequence of the political platform the school has given me. In How to Lose Friends and Alienate People in Westminster, I would blunder from one disaster to another, giving Gordon Brown a run for his money as the Mr Bean of politics. Who knows, it could even become the basis for an amusing sitcom in which Simon Pegg reprises his role as me. Not so much Yes, Minister as Your Fly’s Undone, Minister.

For instance, a few weeks ago I wrote a blogpost for the Telegraph in which I pointed out that the cuts are actually quite mild. Far from decimating our public services, all the government is proposing to do is peg back public spending to the level it was at in 2008/09.