Stop shouting at Hilary Mantel – there are real outrages to address

It started the other week, when David Cameron was in India. Although it started like a bout of malaria starts, so I suppose the more precise term would be ‘recurred’. There he is in Amritsar, touring the site of a massacre, possibly in that hat. And all Britain wants to know is what he thinks about what Hilary Mantel thinks about the Duchess of Cambridge. What, I thought to myself, the hell is wrong with us?

It’s a pretty expansive ‘us’, this, and it includes Cameron himself. ‘Actually, I haven’t read it,’ he should have said when asked, thousands of miles away, about an essay in the London Review of Books, ‘because I’m here on a trade mission in the second largest country in the world, perhaps you’ve noticed, where the right sequence of negotiations could earn actual hundreds of billions for our fading little country with its spiralling basket case of an economy.