The psychology of welfare-bashing: Why Benefits Street isn't a fuss about nothing

This week I’ve been reading The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. This blog isn’t really about the book itself, but about a few interesting psychological studies I came across within its pages which I found interesting in light of the Benefits Street debacle. 

It’s now a well-known fact that the British public’s perceptions on welfare and immigration are woefully inaccurate. We’ve all heard the statistics -  surveys suggest people think around a quarter of the benefits bill is fraudulently claimed, when the actual figure is less than 1%. Pretty much the same applies to the proportion of immigrants claiming benefits. I think these studies help to illuminate why that is, and what might need to be done about it.

The first set of studies were about the impact of different types of information on our perceptions and decisions – and, I think, help to show why the Benefits Street debate is definitely not a mountain being made out of a molehill.

 “When college students who are deciding what courses to take next semester are presented with summaries of course evaluations from several hundred students that point in one direction, and a videotaped interview with a single student that points in the other direction, they are more influenced by the vivid interview than the summary judgements of hundreds. Vivid interviews with people have profound effects on judgement even when people are told, in advance of seeing the interviews, that the subjects of the interviews are atypical. Thus seeing an interview of an especially vicious (or humane) prison guard or an especially industrious (or slothful) welfare recipient shifts people’s opinions of prison guards or welfare recipients in general.”

It’s pretty obvious that vivid personal stories stick in people’s minds more than cold facts and figures – but I think this really brings home just how insidiously influential things like Benefits Street can be, and how big a challenge we face in trying to turn perceptions of welfare around. Even if we managed to get the facts about the benefits system into every school, workplace and newspaper tomorrow, Channel 4’s portrayal of the inhabitants of James Turner Street would probably still influence viewers’ opinions far more.

Much as I loved Parasite Street, which applies some of the techniques used to demonise benefits claimants to highlight the excesses of neoliberal capitalism, it’s not – and isn’t meant to be – a direct counter to negative stereotypes about people on benefits. For that, if these studies are to be believed, we need to put people face-to-face with ‘deserving’ benefit claimants to balance the negative TV coverage that’s out there. I think the ‘Who Benefits?’ initiative is a really nice idea – but we desperately need more like it, and they need to pack more of a punch.

The second study relates to the same type of informational bias, but this time it sheds some light on the role of the press, as opposed to TV:

“Researchers asked respondents to estimate the number of deaths per year that occur as a result of various types of misfortune. The researchers then compared people’s answers to actual death rates, with striking results. Respondents judged accidents of all types to cause as many deaths as diseases of all types, when in fact disease causes sixteen times more deaths than accidents. Death by homicide was thought to be as frequent as death from stroke, when in fact eleven times more people die of strokes than from homicides. In general, dramatic, vivid causes of death (accident, homicide, tornado, flood, fire) were overestimated, whereas more mundane causes of death (diabetes, asthma, stroke, tuberculosis) were underestimated.

Where did these estimates come from? The authors of the study looked at two newspapers, published on opposite sides of the US, and they counted the number of stories involving various causes of death. What they found was that the frequency of newspaper coverage and the respondents’ estimates of the frequency of deaths were almost perfectly correlated.”

Again, it’s not rocket science that people’s assumptions about the world will be influenced by the way it’s depicted in the newspapers they read – but I was certainly surprised by the sheer extent of that influence implied by this study. I don’t know if anyone’s done the same sort of analysis between people’s perceptions about the level of benefit fraud, or the number of immigrants claiming benefits, and the coverage of the tabloid press – but it would be interesting to see the results.

The Daily Mail may be the by-word for right-wing raggery, but I reckon it’s the Daily Express that is the biggest culprit here. Back when I worked in parliament, the press office used to send round the headlines of every major paper as part of their daily news update. It was a fascinating window into the pre-occupations of the British media – among other things, I discovered that the Telegraph really hates Scotland, with ‘Scotland rubbish, study finds’ appearing on their front page roughly once a week. But I digress.

The point is that I realised it was the Express, not the Mail, whose headlines were consistently, shockingly hate-filled. The Mail at least makes a pretence at being a serious paper, and its main front page story would normally bear at least some relationship to the actual news going on in the actual world. The Express, on the other hand, just peddles hate, day after day after day. Now Immigrants Are Coming to Eat Your Babies. Outrage As Gypsies Get Solid Gold Caravans. Did Teenage Mum On Benefits Kill Diana? Literally. Every. Single. Day.

This is what we’re up against – and we urgently need to get better and smarter at fighting it. It’s going to be an uphill battle, since another thing we know from the psychological evidence is that people are likely to ignore new evidence that contradicts their existing opinions – and disdain for the welfare state is becoming seriously entrenched. I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that we have a historic responsibility to rehabilitate the welfare state in the minds of the public – before we lose it altogether.

The corporate lobbyists at the heart of government

The latest climbdown on the so-called ‘Gagging Bill’ is good news. But it can’t undo one of the most damaging effects of the whole sorry saga: the almost complete diversion of campaigners’ attention away from the issue of corporate lobbying, which is what the Bill was supposed to be about.

 This matters. A lot. Because even if we had been debating weedy proposals for a ‘lobbying register’ instead of the proposed new restrictions on charity campaigning, we’d have been tinkering at the edges of the problem. The biggest and most powerful corporate interests don’t need to rely on lobbying agencies to make their voices heard in the corridors of power: increasingly, they are being deliberately embedded into the policymaking process.

Before I discovered the bullshit-mine that is Michael Gove, I used to blog about this quite a lot. Here, for example, and here and here and here. For those without the time to plough through my back catalogue of ranting, a quick recap: the government has a little-known policy called ‘one-in, two-out regulation’ (previously known as ‘one-in, one-out’, before they made it even more dangerous and nonsensical than it already was). Essentially, any department that wants to introduce new regulations affecting business (or the voluntary sector) has to get rid of twice as much existing regulation.

 This is measured through the ingenious means of ‘regulatory impact assessments’, which estimate how much new regulations will cost those affected. Departments then need to find regulatory ‘savings’ worth double that cost burden if they want to go ahead. These impact assessments have to be reviewed by the Regulatory Policy Committee and the Reducing Regulation Committee before new regulations can be passed. Put this together with massive spending cuts and the net effect is that departments are making policy with both hands tied behind their backs – which, of course, is exactly the point.

When I first learned about the labyrinth of committees involved in ‘one-in, two-out’, I smirked for a while at the irony of such an elaborate bureaucracy being set up to police the reduction of bureaucracy, and thought no more about it. Then, through an accident of my previous job, I came across a guy called Alexander Ehrmann – essentially, the chief lobbyist for the Institute of Directors. And, on the IoD website, I discovered that Alexander Ehrmann was a member of the Regulatory Policy Committee.

Well. Mind. Blown. Just when I thought this policy couldn’t get any more outrageous, it now turns out that the people passing judgement on the assessments which accompany new rules are not Ministers or civil servants, as I’d naively assumed, but representatives of the regulated. Basically, this government is inviting paid corporate lobbyists into the policy making process and all but giving them a veto over new regulations.

This made me wonder who else was sitting on this little-known yet immensely influential body. So I had a look on the RPC’s website. The list of “independent experts” currently serving on the RPC certainly makes for interesting reading. Say hello to:

• Jeremy Mayhew, a councilman of the City of London Corporation, the ancient and powerful body which effectively represents the interests of high finance (natch - their tentacles seem to extend everywhere, so it's hardly surprising to find them popping up here); 
• Michael Gibbons, a company director with extensive interests in the energy industry (both past and present, including a current directorship at a power company and a prominent role in an industry trade body); and 
• Professor David Parker, the government’s official historian of privatisation (who knew such a beautifully Orwellian thing existed?!). 

The eight-person committee includes just one woman, and just one representative of labour. Oh, and they happen to be the same person – Sarah Veale, Head of the Equality and Employment Rights department at the TUC. Now there’s government efficiency savings for you.

The committee has no publicly available conflicts of interest policy. When I emailed them to ask for a copy of any such policy, I was told: “We operate an internal policy which ensures that any members who have a conflict of interest on policy areas are not involved in the committee reviews of impact assessments relating to those areas.” Well, colour me reassured. How exactly this is supposed to work for people like Ehrmann, who must have an ‘interest’ in almost every regulation that crosses their desk, is not entirely clear.

But of course, that’s the point. The phrase ‘conflict of interest’ has almost no meaning under a system like this. These people are not there in spite of their corporate interests: they’re there because of them. In a Thatcherite mindset obsessed with the idea that giving business what it wants will get the economy moving, corporate connections are not ‘conflicts’ to be minimised but valuable expertise to be drawn upon. In other words, regulation is being systematically and deliberately put in the hands of the regulated.

You’ll be hearing much more about this from me over the coming weeks. But for now, I’ve got a favour to ask: if you’ve learned something from this post, if you’ve been at all shocked or dismayed by what you’ve learned, then please: share it.

We are scratching the surface of something deep and troubling here, and as far as I can tell, almost nobody seems to know about it. It’s time they did. The battle over charities’ right to campaign appears to be largely won; the battle for the soul of government urgently needs to begin.

New year, same old Gove

At the end of my last blog, I returned, like a stuck record, to Michael Gove’s politicisation of history teaching. And, right on cue, he’s just popped up to say that anyone who thinks World War I was a senseless waste of human life is obviously a dangerous leftie and basically an enemy of the state.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Gove criticised what he called “myths” about the war and the “left-wing academics” who perpetrate them, suggesting that they reflect “an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage”. It’s about one step away from ‘THE MAN WHO HATED BRITAIN’.

Even more objectionably, he then tries to claim a monopoly on respect and compassion for the people whose slaughter he’s defending – implying that these sinister red historians have cast British soldiers as “dupes”, and that by questioning this year’s centenary ‘celebrations’ they are attacking “the very idea of honouring their sacrifice”. Apparently, “These arguments are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue rather than a sober academic contributing to a proper historical debate.” Whereas of course, Gove’s arguments are thoroughly grown-up and in no way boil down to ‘What? You disagree with me? Oh my God I can’t believe you just said you hated Britain and all the soldiers!!!’

In Gove’s mind, we can only truly honour the memory of the millions dead if we convince ourselves that their deaths were in the service of some gloriously noble cause. “Even the battle of the Somme, once considered the epitome of military futility, has now been analysed in depth by the military historian William Philpott and recast as a precursor of allied victory.” Well, hooray. I’m sure my dead great-grandfather will be just thrilled. And I’m certainly grateful to Gove for making me see that all those times I felt desperately sad and angry about the way his life was cut short, I wasn’t actually ‘honouring his sacrifice’, I was succumbing to my innate left-wing tendency to denigrate Britain.

I suppose the one silver lining to all this bullshit is that it really brings the political nature of Gove’s agenda for history teaching out into the open. Although he pays lip service to the idea that history is about debate, it’s pretty clear that he really thinks it’s about propaganda. To see why, it’s worth quoting from his offending Daily Mail article at length:

“There is, of course, no unchallenged consensus. That is why it matters that we encourage an open debate on the war and its significance.

But it is important to recognise that many of the new analyses emerging challenge existing Left-wing versions of the past designed to belittle Britain and its leaders.

Instead, they help us to understand that, for all our mistakes as a nation, Britain’s role in the world has also been marked by nobility and courage…

But whatever each of us takes from these acts of remembrance and hours of debate it is always worth remembering that the freedom to draw our own conclusions about this conflict is a direct consequence of the bravery of men and women who fought for, and believed in, Britain’s special tradition of liberty.”

In other words: “By all means let’s have a debate, but let’s be clear that if you’re on the wrong side of that debate, you’re almost certainly a commie with quasi-treasonable motives. Oh, and the only reason we can have the debate in the first place is because actually I’m right! So nurrrrh!”

And that’s what is so terrifying about Michael Gove. He seems to derive his intellectual opinions directly from his political prejudices and then to genuinely believe that everyone else must be doing the same, and therefore that he doesn’t have to listen to them. I’m a patriot, therefore World War I must have been justified, and anyone who says otherwise obviously hates patriotism. I hate unions, therefore the opinions of unionised teachers who oppose my reforms are obviously some kind of left-wing plot and can be safely trampled over. I think education should be about Facts and Grammar, and anyone who says otherwise is obviously a wishy-washy leftie who doesn’t want kids to achieve.

Of course, we all do this to some extent. But surely the process of education should be about controlling these tendencies, not actively cultivating them? I think my friend Cathy put her finger on it when she asked yesterday: “How can so unwilling a mind be in charge of education?”

Rewriting history: Mandela and the limits of 'legitimate' protest

Nelson Mandela's death made me realise just how little I actually knew about the history of apartheid. Even though these are events barely before - and some within - my own lifetime, I'm just ever so slightly too young to remember them first-hand, and certainly didn't learn about them in school. It's got me thinking about how short historical memories can be, and how quickly we become dependent on received wisdom and official versions of history. I'm reading Long Walk to Freedom in a vague effort to rectify this, and am currently getting acquainted with a new Mandela, one who hasn't been much talked about in the past few weeks – the angry young radical of the 1950s.

In the days following Mandela's death, it was fascinating to see a few Facebook friends posting tributes which referred to him as a paragon of non-violent resistance. But of course, Mandela at one time headed up the military wing of the ANC. In Long Walk to Freedom, he makes clear that “for me, non-violence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.” In the early 1950s, with the Nationalist government seemingly intent on closing down all legitimate expression of dissent, he says:

“I began to suspect that both legal and extra-constitutional protests would soon be impossible. In India, Gandhi had been dealing with a foreign power that ultimately was more realistic and far-sighted. That was not the case with the Afrikaners in South Africa. Non-violent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do. But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end.”

All of this raises really interesting questions about the limits of the state's monopoly on legitimate violence, and about what we should do when peaceful resistance to tyranny fails. Given that we’re living in a country where even engaging in peaceful civil disobedience is likely to get you spied on or whacked with sticks or both, it would be nice to think that Mandela’s death might have prompted some introspection about these issues – and about what lessons we can learn from Western leaders having been so catastrophically on the wrong side of the argument in the 1980s. Instead, Mandela the militant seems almost to have been airbrushed out of history.

This is a really interesting case study of what happens when someone violates near universally-accepted social and political norms, yet is almost universally regarded as a hero. Mandela’s probably quite unusual, maybe even unique, in having that stature. The Mandela denounced by Thatcher and Reagan as a terrorist and the Mandela who won the Nobel Peace Prize are, after all, the same man. It’s a truism on the left that “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter”, but seemingly not in wider society – certainly not post 9/11, when 'terrorist' and 'freedom' have been carefully constructed as polar political opposites.

So, perhaps inevitably, the tension between these two Mandelas is apparently being resolved by ignoring the first and co-opting the second. As ever, when the facts come into conflict with our existing beliefs, our beliefs tend to hold the trump card: we deal with the resulting cognitive dissonance by reinterpreting or selectively remembering the facts to bring them back into line with our view of the world. If Mandela is a good guy, he must conform to all the things I assume a good guy does. Thus, the challenge Mandela's history poses to the accepted definition of a 'good guy' is swept away. For those of us who don't know much about South African history, this process of reasserting the dominant narrative is even easier. Why would you even be aware of Mandela’s militant past if you only know him as a quasi-mythical liberator, one of the most politically uncontroversial figures since Jesus?

For me, the whole episode is an interesting window into the way dominant ideas entrench themselves both in official versions of reality and in people's own minds, and thus become stubbornly difficult to shift or challenge. And at a time when we have an Education Secretary who thinks school history lessons should be about political propaganda rather than critical thinking, that's something we should all be concerned about.

Tory stories #2: Can't pay your bills? Blame the greens!

Further to my last blog, it strikes me that one under-remarked aspect of the current row over energy bills is the way the Tories have leapt on Labour’s narrative about living standards and appropriated it for their own purposes. Don’t blame the big six for soaring energy bills: blame the tree huggers and their nasty environmental levies!

When Ed Miliband put living standards at the heart of his conference speech, for the first time in three years it seemed like Labour had a message that would resonate – and, moreover, one that would put the Tories on the back foot. Yet within a few short weeks, they’ve already made a bid to claim ownership of this agenda. Not only that, they’ve done so in a way which actually gives them a platform from which to pursue their own agenda – and which, as a convenient side benefit, allows them to blame Ed Miliband for the problem. Again.

 You’ve got to hand it to them. You might have thought that being forced to react to Labour’s narrative would at least shift the centre of debate a bit, perhaps generate some token concessions towards a more progressive politics. Instead, we’re seeing the living standards message being pressed into service to undermine support for efforts to tackle climate change, to push the centre of debate even further to the right. (The way Nick Clegg seems to have found out about the announcement also suggests the knives are out when it comes to coalition politics.)

I know there are good arguments for funding some of these things out of general taxation rather than fuel bills, which are a fundamentally regressive mechanism – although that only really holds if it’s paid for by raising taxes rather than cutting something somewhere else – but that’s not really what this blog is about, not least because I have no illusions that I’m at all qualified to pontificate on energy policy. What I’m interested in here is the Tories’ expert manipulation of the terms of debate, the way they pounce on any hint of successful agenda-setting by the left.

Maybe it’s the Oxford Union training that does it. Competitive debaters are always told that the most successful way to neutralise an opponent’s argument is to agree with its essence before turning it to your own purposes. The Tories are absolute masters at this, while the left have consummately failed to take on the Tories’ own false narratives about the financial crisis and its aftermath.

And yes, that includes everyone’s new favourite rent-a-rant, Russell Brand, whose interview with Jeremy Paxman I watched in quiet bemusement as to why so many people I knew were gushing about it. Yes, there was some good stuff in there. But there was also a huge amount that was cringeworthy and will surely have confirmed every negative stereotype some viewers had about the left. Oh, and ‘all politicians are venal and corrupt’? Fine, if your goal is to win over anti-politics UKIP voters – but it’s neither true nor constructive. Frankly, if Russell Brand is our new secret weapon in the fight against Tory spin, I think we are in serious trouble.

Tory stories: How the right creates its own reality

'Framing’ seems to be the new buzzword on the left at the moment. NEF* have just released an important new report, ‘Framing the Economy: The Austerity Story’, which deals with something that’s nagged at me for a long time: how successful the right has been at shaping the narrative about the economy and welfare, and how poor the left has been at articulating a competing story. Ever since 2008, I’ve found the sheer effectiveness of the Tory spin machine hugely unnerving. They don’t need to respond to political realities, because they create them, shamelessly and repeatedly, irrespective of the facts.

A classic example of this was George Osborne’s speech to this year’s Tory conference, which I had the misfortune of witnessing whilst up there with work. To be honest, the whole thing was head-wrecking, but in this context one particularly shameless passage stands out. He starts off talking about the 1980s, with what seems like a tone of humility:

“We shouldn’t pretend we got everything right. Old problems were solved. But some new problems emerged. In some parts of the country, worklessness took hold and we didn’t do enough to stop that.

“Labour made that problem of welfare dependency worse… What a waste of life and talent.

“Well, never again. We’ve capped benefits and our work programme is getting people into jobs.

“But what about the long term unemployed? Let us pledge here: We will not abandon them, as previous governments did.”

And suddenly, in an astonishing rhetorical pirouette, we’re talking about the government’s latest plans to penalise people on benefits. I’m sure you know the details (already immortalised in this awesome game), but let’s recap:

“Today I can tell you about a new approach we’re calling Help to Work. For the first time, all long term unemployed people who are capable of work will be required to do something in return for their benefits.

“They will do useful work putting something back into their community. Making meals for the elderly, clearing up litter, working for a local charity. Others will be made to attend the job centre every working day.”

Let’s just break down the logic of that passage a bit.

1. Thatcher made lots of people unemployed.
2. This led to welfare dependency.
3. So we must help people back into work.
4. By forcing them to do menial unpaid work or attend job centres daily.

Every time I read this back it blows my mind. What Osborne is actually saying here is, ‘Ok, so we may have screwed entire communities in the ‘80s by creating mass unemployment. But wait: now, we’re screwing them again, by capping their benefits and forcing them to comply with draconian and humiliating conditions just in order to survive!’ But somehow, like some mad political contortionist, he’s managed to turn this into a superficially plausible political story about welfare – and not just that, but a story in which the abject failure of Thatcherism actually becomes a justification for dismantling the welfare state. 

And that’s what I think is really significant, and disturbing, about this example. Tories are not just good at spin: they’ve carved out a bewilderingly successful niche in using the failures of their own ideology to justify more of the same. The most obvious example is the way the financial crisis, essentially an almighty failure of neoliberalism, has been rebranded as a failure of socialism and used to justify austerity – not to mention no-holds-barred deregulation in pursuit of a return to the same failed growth model.

Take the Tory response to Labour conference, which has been repeated with terrifying discipline by pretty much every Conservative politician who’s given an interview in the past few weeks. Here’s their response to Ed Balls’ conference speech:

“It's the same old Labour. They still want more spending, more borrowing and more debt - exactly what got us into a mess in the first place.”

Here it is again in response to Ed Miliband’s speech. And again in response to the Labour reshuffle. In fact, you can find the same quote pretty much verbatim in any number of articles and interviews. If you don’t believe me, just Google it.

This could have been – and probably was – written before Ed Balls or Ed Miliband even opened their mouths. It certainly bore very little relation to anything they said. (If in doubt about this, bear in mind that the first line of the Reuters piece in which the quote above appears reads: “Britain's opposition Labour party sought on Monday to convince voters that it can be trusted with the economy by promising iron discipline on spending.”) And this is how the Tories create their own reality. They don’t need to respond to what the left actually says: instead, they decide what it has said and hammer it relentlessly into the public consciousness.

It’s particularly frustrating that they can get away with this at a time when experts are warning that the Help To Buy scheme risks creating another housing bubble – which, er, is actually what got us into a mess in the first place. Indeed, elsewhere in Osborne’s speech was the claim that we can’t hope to stop the next crisis, but by continuing to slash welfare we can build up a big enough budget surplus to somehow ride it out. Great stuff George – let’s not try to fix the problems that made our economy fall over. Instead, let’s destroy everything that makes our country civilised as if that will somehow help when it inevitably happens again. And he accuses the left of being unambitious for Britain!

We urgently need a more compelling response to this endless stream of manure. As NEF puts it: “The battle for the economic narrative will be won with stories, not statistics. It is time the opponents of austerity tell a story of their own.”

* Full disclosure: NEF have just given me a job. Although very exciting, this has nothing to do with the content of this post. No, I mean really.

Michael Gove and Nevile Gwynne: BFFs

Waking up to the Today programme always carries the risk that you’ll start the day with a strong urge to hit something. But why oh why did this morning have to begin with me being subjected to Nevile Gwynne and Michael Gove’s increasingly vomit-inducing mutual appreciation society?

Gwynne (a retired accountant and old-school Latin teacher with seemingly no distinguishing qualities) scratched Gove’s back a few months ago: in a ludicrous publicity stunt for his book ‘Gwynne’s Grammar’, he and his publishers gave a ‘Bad Grammar Award’ to a group of academics who’d written to Gove criticising his educational reforms. I thought this smelt fishy at the time, and it turns out so did a lot of other people – a blog I wrote digging around the subject went unexpectedly viral and still gets more hits every week than anything I’ve written before or since. 

Now it seems Gove has returned the favour. He’s issued a memo to Department for Education civil servants about how to write well, in which he describes Gwynne’s Grammar as “a brief guide to the best writing style” - thus giving this tedious old fraud another chance to spout guff on national radio. (It’s not clear whether copies of Gwynne’s Grammar are being bought at the taxpayer’s direct expense, or if officials are expected to purchase them out of their own frozen wages.)

Gwynne duly seized the opportunity to describe Gove as “possibly the most important person in education there’s been” – what, ever? And that wasn’t even the lowest point of a truly dismal interview, in which Gwynne was asked piercing questions like “Ah, so you’re a fan of Michael Gove?” and “But lots of people don’t like Michael Gove – isn’t there a risk he might put people off buying your clearly marvellous book?” Interestingly, Gwynne responded to this latter question by saying darkly, “Well, don’t forget, Mr Gove has got against him, as have I, pretty much everybody in high places in the academic world.” Oh, you mean like those academics you conveniently ridiculed in the national press a few months back for entirely spurious reasons? Still, one thing’s for sure: nobody could accuse Nevile Gwynne of being an academic. His sole academic qualification is a BA in Modern Languages, meaning he has about as much claim to be an expert on grammar as I have to be an expert on political thought.

In fact, I think the lowest point of the interview was probably when the interviewer asked breathlessly, “So if these officials read your book, it’s not just that they’ll improve their style, they’ll improve their thinking as well?” Lest we forget, one of the things I discovered when researching that blog I mentioned is that Gwynne cannot write for toffee. His website is a rambling, incoherent mess of paragraph-long sentences and genuinely ungrammatical nonsense. From everything I’ve seen of him, his thinking is not much better. Yet the Today programme treated him with almost ludicrous reverence, acting like he is the world authority on the English language he so obviously isn’t. At the end of the interview, John Humphrys even chipped in: “Why is he not Sir Nevile Gwynne, for heaven’s sake?” Um, maybe because he’s a complete nobody with no real qualifications who you have inexplicably decided to give airtime to plug his tedious little book?

Seriously, guys. If you want me to continue running the daily risk of waking up to George Osborne, you really are going to have to do much better than this.