James Kirkup

This is an age of anger. Social media amplifies rage and exaggerates polarisation. Twitter isn’t Britain, but too many people in politics and journalism spend too much time on the site and – consciously or not – start to mistake its shallow extremes for real public opinion. The result is a public discourse more often driven by fury than understanding. Just about any question or issue can unleash this lab cultured rage. Some people are angry about being asked to wear a mask to avoid spreading a disease that might kill someone else. Some people are angry about an alpaca. So where’s the anger about Afghanistan? A Suez moment is passing almost unremarked Afghanistan, where two decades of Western intervention is ending in bloody failure.

$10million, or £7million. That’s what David Cameron is now reported to have made from Greensill Capital, the company he helped lead to ruin. The number, reported by the BBC, is news, not least because Cameron himself had refused to disclose it. Speaking to a Commons committee investigating his failed lobbying for the failed company, the failed former PM would say only that he had been paid a 'generous' sum by Greensill. That one word, 'generous', speaks volumes about Cameron and the Greensill episode. Let’s start with the obvious fact that Cameron used a word rather than a number to describe the money he got (I’m not sure 'earned' is the right term) from Greensill. It seems fair to ask if that was because he was in some way embarrassed by it.

In 1983, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a great American sociologist and politician, wrote: 'Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.' Then the internet happened. Anyone who has spent five minutes online, especially on a social media site, is aware that everyone now has their own facts, carefully chosen to support whatever argument or narrative they favour. Any contested issue that’s debated online (i.e. all of them) sees people on different sides of the argument adduce statistics, quotations and any other material helpful to their cause. Take this stuff far enough and you get people prioritising subjective experience above objective fact.

I am coming out of semi-retirement from writing about sex and gender to write this, because it’s about women in prison, a group that desperately need more attention from people interested in politics and policy. The High Court has been considering the question of transgender women (i.e. people who were born male) in the female prison estate. That’s after a legal action was brought by a woman in a female jail who says she was sexually assaulted by a trans prisoner. The prison service hasn’t denied that this assault took place.

On days like this, I despair of the media-political village where I’ve spent most of my adult life. Because that village is going to get very, very excited about some things that the Prime Minister said about one of his ministers on WhatsApp – even though it doesn’t really matter. By now, you know that Boris Johnson wrote ‘totally fucking useless’ in an exchange with Dominic Cummings, and also said things about possibly removing Hancock from his job as health secretary in the early stages of the pandemic. You know that because several thousand political journalists, tweeters and others have shared it, often with words like ‘bombshell’ and ‘dramatic revelation’.

A soccer contest is upon us. I know nothing of football as a sport, but even a dunce like me knows that these things are about more than 22 men chasing a ball for 90 minutes. Big sporting events such as Euro 2020 matter, especially for England and Englishness. Any big England game is a rare chance for people to fly the flag and briefly talk about Englishness. But we need to do more than talk about this when the football team is playing. A proper national debate about English identity is overdue and badly needed. New polling from British Future this week showed that only two thirds of BAME people think 'Englishness' is open to them. Worse, 14 per cent of white English people still think only white people can be English.

While Westminster fixates on Dominic Cummings, what could well be a bigger political challenge for Boris Johnson is being somewhat overlooked. That challenge is called Steve Baker. Baker has now launched his long-whispered campaign over net zero and the policies it entails. He’s in the Sun today talking about issues including gas boilers and the need to replace them with something that doesn’t burn gas. Reaching net zero carbon emissions means a boiler switchover has to happen, and soon. Homes account for about 14 per cent of the UK’s carbon output, and weaning the country off gas boilers is possibly the trickiest bit of making net zero (a legal requirement, remember) actually happen.

I used to write a lot about sex and gender here. I don’t do so quite as much these days for a few reasons, one of which is that the issues involved are now better recognised and better handled by people whose job it is to deal with the complexities of policies and conflicts of rights and arguments. An example of that came at the weekend when Baroness Falkner, the new chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, told the Times that women should not be penalised or abused if they believe that transgender women do not become female by dint of their professed identity. ‘Someone can believe that people who self-identify as a different sex are not the different sex that they self-identify,’ she said.

I’m almost starting to admire David Cameron. Almost. There is something that borders on the impressive about the former prime minister’s dedication to the destruction of his own reputation. He may have been a casually idle premier, but he’s really rolled up his sleeves and got stuck into the job of trashing his own name. How many times did he use the private jets of his collapsed finance firm to travel between his houses? Can’t remember. How much did said collapsed financial contraption pay him for services including pestering senior civil servants with texts signed ‘Love, DC’? Not saying, but it was much more than the mere £150k he got for being PM. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Social class is dead. Education is the political dividing line that matters. This has been apparent since (at least) the 2016 EU referendum, although it has not been recognised by enough people who do and write about politics. The results of this week’s elections should drive the point home. According to early analysis of polling by elections demigod Sir John Curtice, there are some parts of England where the Labour party actually made some modest gains in yesterday’s elections. In places – mostly urban – where a high proportion of the population has a university degree, Labour got a small positive swing.

Ah, Hartlepool. The by-election there brings back memories: I am old enough to have reported on the last one, back in 2004, when Peter Mandelson went off to Brussels and left behind what was then a fairly safe Labour seat. My slightly faded memory of that 2004 vote informs my view of what is apparently the most important question in British politics today: who will win the latest Hartlepool by-election? And my view is this: it doesn’t really matter.

I am not a football fan. Reactions to plans for a European super-league remind me why. According to the BBC ‘critics say the move is being driven purely by money.’ Whereas in the prelapsarian days of, say, last week, professional football was all about craft and community? Free marketeers should be relaxed about this. You could argue that the super league members’ decision is a matter for them and them alone. They are private businesses supplying a product – entertainment – to paying customers in a market. If they want to supply that product via slightly different arrangements, why should anyone else care? If the public anger in today’s headlines and pixels is really that deep, there’ll be no demand for the product and the league will fail.

David Lammy, the shadow justice secretary, has been doing his LBC radio phone-in show. If you believe LBC, he has 'schooled' a 'caller' who told him he is not English. If you listen to the exchanges in question, you’ll realise he did something much more impressive, and important than that. The clip, which is all over social media, is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssLC4U7u9t8 The short summary is that 'Jean' tells Lammy he cannot be English because of his Afro-Caribbean heritage. Lammy, who was born in London, politely examines her arguments and disagrees. There is no shouting and no fighting – that suggestion has been added by LBC to stir up anger and get some clicks.

Say what you like about David Cameron, the man never stops trying to exceed expectations. I once thought that he’d never do anything sadder than giving his wife’s stylist an honour then running away from parliament like a child. Then he proved me wrong by publishing his memoirs. And now, demonstrating his unstinting commitment to the cause of his own humiliation, he has reinvented himself as a shoddy lobbyist. When he naffed off after making a horlicks of the referendum, Cameron warbled the usual shiny words about duty to the nation. It turns out he meant it: in these dark times, we all need a laugh, so we should thank him for cheering up a gloomy nation by means of his own embarrassment. Public service takes many forms.