‘Did she mean youth clubs?’ asked my husband when I said how annoying I found the promise made by Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, to provide ‘new youth hubs to steer young people away from violence’.
No, she definitely said ‘hubs’. Everyone has to have a hub now. Sophy Ridge has one on television at seven o’clock every evening. A hub was an almost magical thing when Gordon Brown as prime minister introduced one to Downing Street. It was credited with being inspired by one at the Daily Telegraph.
‘Mr Brown has decided to spend some of his time working in Downing Street surrounded by his closest aides,’ reported Rosa Prince in 2008. ‘The Telegraph operates a unique “hub-and-spoke” office at its headquarters. The key section heads meet centrally and their team each have a spoke stretching away from the “hub”’.
But the next year, she wrote that ‘the very openness which the layout was intended to foster now threatens to widen the fallout from the emails scandal’.
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