‘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’. Damian McBride had sent emails to Derek Draper proposing the posting of rumours about the private lives of prominent Conservatives.
When Gordon Brown dropped in to the hub he would find Liam Byrne, Tom Watson, Sue Nye (now a peeress; in 2010 the diary secretary blamed accidentally on air by Brown for getting him to meet Gillian Duffy in Rochdale), along with Jeremy Heywood, his principal private secretary. On a spoke clung Damian McBride weaving webs.
Such dangerous hubcraft sounded new, but the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood got there first. From 2006, viewers learnt of a Hub occupied by the mysterious Torchwood Institute, situated below ground in Cardiff Bay. In 2009, the Torchwood Hub was destroyed. Now, through what the Doctor would call a ‘controlled temporal implosion’, Yvette Cooper wants hubs brought back.
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