This month marks 30 years since the first publication of the Modern Review, the magazine which I co-founded with Toby Young, my then soulmate, and Cosmo Landesman, my then husband. Toby was a teenager when I met him in 1984, his academic family living next door to Cosmo’s in Islington. When I abandoned my first marriage and small son at the age of 24 to elope with Cosmo, I promptly annexed Toby as my amigo-in-chief. (We were such a close threesome that my son, Jack, was blessed with the middle name Tobias.)

It all started on a sunny spring day in 1990; as we queued for a rollercoaster at Thorpe Park, Cosmo and Toby were talking about Intellectual Stuff while Jack and I — both video game addicts — chattered away about Mario. When Toby joined our conversation, I remember marvelling at his ability to one minute bang on about the Frankfurt School and some bird called Theodora Dorno, and the next do an impression of Bart Simpson. It occurred to me that he was a new type of person — as much concerned with Baywatch as Beowulf — who needed a new type of magazine. And so we started to plot: “I’ll be boss because I’m the rich one and Toby, you’ll be the editor because you’re the clever one.”

It certainly helped that I was loaded. Sometime in the Eighties, in my late 20s, I was earning more than the Prime Minister and the Chancellor combined, simply by writing for newspapers and magazines. Then I pocketed an advance of £100,000 to write a smutty novel about a girl reporter on the make, called Ambition. But there’s only so much cocaine a person can take — and even after I gave away a not insignificant proportion of my earnings to charity every month, there was still quite a bit left, so I started us off with a few thousand.

A saintly patron since my impoverished teenage days, Peter York, declared his willingness to invest — and John le Carré sent us a cheque too. But it was tireless Toby who did the legwork; after a year of begging letters he amassed £16,666.50 — just £1,983,333.50 short of his £2 million target.

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Toby used to say that he had “negative charisma”; he’d walk into a room and everyone would loathe him. Cosmo told me that he’d given Toby the classic anti-hero novel What Makes Sammy Run — and Toby read it as a users’ manual rather than a cautionary tale. But I never saw that: I adored him. He was full of life — more exuberant than anyone I’d ever met. So I wasn’t surprised when he gathered around him a coterie of very clever youngsters who got it completely.

LOW CULTURE FOR HIGHBROWS was our strap-line; inside our first issue of Autumn 1991 our two-page mission statement was accompanied by images of Bart Simpson and Roland Barthes. “Imagine if FR Leavis was editing Smash Hits!” I said at the time.

The run-up was very dramatic — as Toby put it a decade ago: “We couldn’t afford a laser printer, so the literary editor, who also happened to be the assistant arts editor of the European, sneaked us into Robert Maxwell’s newspaper emporium and showed us how to use the equipment. When Maxwell found out he applied for an injunction against the magazine and, when that failed, pursued us through the courts for damages.” On the eve of the court case, which would have without doubt bankrupted us, Maxwell went for a midnight swim — and we were off.

I didn’t keep anything from those days, but Cosmo still has a collection of old copies, including an ironic “home-shopping catalogue” supplement that features a Julie Burchill doll, basically a Barbie dressed in black with dark hair: “Pull the string and she tells you how much she earns.”

The covers and headlines were funny and forthright – “KEANU REEVES – YOUNG, DUMB AND FULL OF COME”; “WHY PRINCE CHARLES MAKES ME SICK” (Guess who by?); DI HARD: WHY DIANA IS OUR POP PRINCESS; (Me again!) POSH SPICE – IS SHE FUCK!; WAZZA MAZZA WIZ GAZZA? (David Runciman — now a distinguished academic.)

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Our writers were brilliant and diverse. Nick Hornby before he was famous. The eternal enigma that is Ian Penman, who I chased down and snogged into submission. A review by one of the Velvet Underground — Sterling Morrison — of a book about the Velvet Underground. A very amusing ongoing column by Cheers writer Rob Long of conversations with his agent. A young Louise Doughty, now a famous novelist, visited D.M. Thomas for writing tips and found a dirty old man. Mark Steyn took down the untouchable Dennis Potter; Richard Littlejohn took a hatchet to the hypocrisy of the broadsheet newspapers and their parasitical relationship with the tabloids.

There was an ongoing column — so pertinent now — called If I Ran The BBC, written variously by Garry Bushell, Mariella Frostrup and Quentin Crisp. See what I mean by diverse? Today, when the word is deployed by the likes of the BBC, it just means people of various hues and sexualities all saying the same thing on everything from the importance of breakfast to the horridness of Brexit.

As for me, when I wasn’t drooling over pop stars half my age, I was getting into massive squabbles with academics. The best one, with Professor Camille Paglia, ending with me elegantly advising her to “Fuck off, you crazy old dyke”, became such a classic spat that it remains plastered over the internet — sadly, unlike the rest of our wonderful publication.

From a starting circulation of 5,000, we were soon up to 30,000 — not a lot, but imagine if there’d been Google back then! When one of our journalistic heroes, the brilliant James Wolcott of Vanity Fair, came to London to write a profile of us, we couldn’t believe our luck. But a few years down the line (or lines, considering the amount of coke I was keeping my young Stakhanovites going with) all was not tickety-boo between Toby and myself.

Perhaps we had just been too close not to combust, like a passionate love affair. The New Lad fad had arrived, and as someone who’d been a feminist since the age of 12, when I shoplifted The Female Eunuch, I didn’t want us associated with it — we were too good for that.

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Take Elizabeth Hurley. I thought she was a smasher, and was delighted when she agreed to read excerpts from Ambition as a free giveaway with the magazine. But I was starting to feel I knew her nipples better than my own. She obviously felt the same and upon hearing that Toby was planning to publish some revealing photographs of her, hired a scary law firm to dissuade him. Quite right too. “We’re not bloody Loaded!” I snarled at him.

But it was to be another vamp who put an end to our phenomenal fun. Toby mentioned that he had met — and slept with — a girl called Charlotte Raven and was employing her as an editorial assistant. Her name alone thrilled me, and when I heard that her dad was rich, and discovered that we had a pleasant time in bed — mostly at Blakes Hotel — I decided on a whim that I wanted her to be editor instead.

Toby, understandably, closed the magazine down in the summer of 1995. Charlotte compared him to Hitler, which is when I started to go off her. Our relationship was never going to last; I had my eye on her younger brother within three months, whom I’m still married to after a quarter of a century.

But I think the Modern Review would have folded within the year anyway. We were victims of our own success; all the broadsheets started to poach our writers. As John Harris of the Guardian put it: “Out of all proportion to its meagre resources, it soon comprehensively redrew the cultural map, forever wiping the high-cultural smirk from the face of Britain’s critics.”

What happened to this silly lot of self-important kids? I’m still looking for trouble — and finding it — at the age of 62. Cosmo wrote an excellent book called Starstruck in 2009. Charlotte has a terminal illness; her book Patient 1 is published in November. Toby did the best of all of us; now founder and director of the Free Speech Union.

Could the Modern Review happen today, in this weak world of echo chambers, cry-bullies and cancel culture? I suspect not. We no longer live in a time when two people can be rude to each other without running to the authorities. I feel sorry for the brightest kids of today, desperately wanting to be journalists but terrified that one unconventional thought might find them finished before they’re started.

As for me and Toby and Cosmo and my bright little boy Jack, whose beautiful mind was eaten alive by madness and who took his own life six years ago, we’ve all lost a lot along the way in the 30 years since we queued up, waiting for thrills. But we’ll always have that rollercoaster.

I don’t want to say I’m exactly like Cassandra. But I do want to say that everyone is ranting and raving about false positive rates at the moment, almost as if they didn’t listen when I was ranting and raving about them back in early April. It all seems to stem back to an article on Toby Young’s “Lockdown Sceptics” site a few days ago, in which the author correctly pointed out that if a test has a 1% false positive rate, that doesn’t mean that only 1% of positives are false.

From there it’s sort of spiralled out of control, with, among other people, Julia Hartley-Brewer saying that “the Government is planning to lockdown our country again when there is no evidence of a second wave” and John Redwood demanding that “government advisers today need to tell us how they are going to stop false test results distorting the figures”.

Here’s what’s going on. First, it’s absolutely true that the “false positive rate” does not on its own tell you the percentage of positive results which are false. Imagine this: you’ve got 10,000 people; you have a test that gives you the correct answer 99% of the time (i.e. 99% of people who do have the disease get a positive result, and 99% of people who don’t have the disease get a negative result); and you have a disease that only 0.1% of the population has (which is roughly what the ONS reckons is the real prevalence of Covid in the population).

So out of the 10,000 people, there are 10 people with the disease. Your test will probably tell you, correctly, that they all have the disease. But it will also give false positives to 1% of the 9,990 people who don’t have the disease. So it will probably tell about 100 entirely healthy people that they have Covid-19. So in this situation, given that a disease that only 0.1% of people have, a positive result on a test with a 1% false positive rate means you only have about a 9% chance of actually having the disease.

This is all very straightforward and exactly what Bayes’ theorem tells us. If you get a positive test, your chance of actually having Covid is dependent not just on how accurate (or technically how “specific”, the technical term for how good it is at avoiding false positives) it is, but also how common the disease is in the population.

What Hartley-Brewer, John Redwood and others are suggesting is that this means that, actually, there’s no real reason to believe that there is a second wave, because the positive test results hugely overstate the real number of cases. I think they’re wrong about that, and quite crucially wrong. Let me try to explain why.

(Once again, my thanks to the indefatigable Kevin McConway of the Open University for helping me understand this stuff, and once again, any errors are mine, not his.)

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Let’s start with the least important thing first. The sceptics’ argument assumes that the tests are applied to the population entirely at random. Only 0.1% of the population has the disease, so only 0.1% of the people you’re testing have the disease. But that’s obviously false, because the people who are coming forward to get a test usually have some reason to think they might have, or might have been exposed to, the disease. So the figure will probably be higher than the 0.1%-ish prevalence in the population. Even if the true number is only 1%, that makes a huge difference: suddenly, plugging that into our equation above, you’d be looking at 50% of positives being false, not 91%*. The risk of false positives is hugely sensitive to quite small changes in the true incidence rate.

We don’t know the true incidence rate of people coming forward to get tested, but we can be confident it’s higher than the background rate in the population. That said, it doesn’t change the underlying point, that some number — perhaps some large number — of the positive results are false.

But here’s the second point, which is that it doesn’t really matter. The number of positives has increased, and assuming that your testing process hasn’t changed — that the tests haven’t literally become worse in some way — then your false positive rate shouldn’t have changed. If your number of positives has gone up, then that must be because the true positives have gone up.

Let’s go back to our 10,000 imaginary people and our 99% specific test. If absolutely nobody has the disease at all, then you’ll get about 100 false positives. If 1% of people have it, then you’ll get about 99. If 10% of people have it, you’ll get about 90. Whatever is going on with the disease, whatever the real-world prevalence, the number of false positives won’t ever make your data show an upward curve.

But if the number of real-world cases goes up, your true positives will go up very quickly. If absolutely no one has it, obviously you’ll get zero true positives. If 0.1% of people have it, as we saw, you’ll get about 10 true positives. If 1% do, you’ll get about 99 (assuming a false negative rate of 1%, which isn’t right, but for simplicity). If 10% do, you’ll get about 990. If you ever see your number of positives going up, it must be because the number of real cases is going up, unless your testing regime has changed. And we are seeing the number of cases go up, so, almost certainly, the number of actual cases is going up too.

Admittedly, if the government started doing many times more tests than it had been in previous weeks, you’d see the absolute number of false positives go up — but it seems unlikely that the problem with our testing regime, at the moment, is that it’s expanded too fast. It’s also worth noting that even though we don’t know the true false positive rate — there’s no perfect standard to judge it against — we know that fewer than 1% of all the tests the ONS performs come back positive, so the true positive rate cannot be higher than 1%.

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Will there be a second Covid wave?

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And the important thing here is that we’re dealing with an epidemic, and exponential numbers. How fast the number of cases is doubling is much more important than the actual number itself. As Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance said in their press conference on Monday 21 September, that number appears to be doubling every seven days. If the real number of cases is only half what the tests say, that only makes a week’s difference to how quickly we have to respond to it. We should really remember that from last time around.

That’s not the only thing, of course. These tests are one strand of evidence, but there are others. Most notably, the ONS survey on which Hartley-Brewer and the others base their 0.1% figure (and therefore their “91% false positives” claim) itself shows a significant rise in prevalence. The dataset is here; the estimated percentage of people who had the disease was 0.64% at the end of April, when the survey began (it was probably even higher in March), and dropped as low as 0.03% in late June and early July. But since the end of August, it’s risen back up to about 0.1%. So we’re nowhere near the early peaks, but the number has trebled in the last two months, with especially rapid growth since mid-August.

If you want more evidence you can look at the KCL-ZOE Symptom Study, which tracks the number of people reporting Covid-like symptoms, and which also says that there’s been a rapid growth since the end of August, taking us back to about where we were in early June.

Then there are hospitalisations, which, again, are absolutely nowhere near the horrors of early April, when about 3,500 people across the UK were admitted on a single day; but nor is it particularly near the low point of 22 August, when fewer than 70 people were admitted across the whole country. Now it’s around 250.

Hospitalisations lag behind infections, and deaths lag behind hospitalisations: deaths in the UK dropped to fewer than 10 a day in early September and reached 22 on 16 September, so we may be about to see a real increase there. (The data there gets a bit complicated, because deaths take some time to be reported — sometimes months — so those likely aren’t the final figures. But I think it’s reasonable to say, looking at the graph, that the beginnings of a rise are visible. Again, it’s nothing like the April-May peak, but I think it’s real.)

Is this “evidence of a second wave”, as Hartley-Brewer argues it isn’t? Well, it all depends on what “second wave” means. There’s absolutely no evidence that people are dying, or getting hospitalised, or even getting infected, at the rates they were six months ago. But there is evidence that they’re getting infected at the rates there were maybe seven months ago. Eight at a push? I don’t think we’re going to go waltzing merrily down the exact same path as we did last time, but we should have learnt by now that exponential curves can go up pretty quickly if you don’t take action.

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None of this is to say that the false positive rate complaint is garbage — Hartley-Brewer, Redwood et al are right to say that the number of positive test results does not, on its own, tell us about the number of actual cases.

And there’s a bigger point, which McConway pointed out to me, which is that you see charts like this one going around, showing the number of test-confirmed cases, and which make it look as though the numbers we’re seeing now are in any way comparable to the numbers back in March and April. But back then, as McConway says, “the only way you could get a confirmed test in April was if you were in hospital, pretty much.”

The true peak was many, many times higher than the number of test-confirmed cases; we are now doing hundreds of times as many tests. It’s not enough, but it’s loads more than in those hectic early months. So the number of positive results — false or true — will be many, many times greater, per actual case in the community, than it was back then. Those sorts of comparisons are silly and spurious, and it’s right to say that we’re nowhere near those numbers.

But I’m very wary about being complacent. I was sceptical, a few months back, about claims that locking down a week earlier would have saved half of the lives lost; maybe I was right to be, but even if that was an overstatement, I think most scientists agree that faster action could have saved many thousands of lives. If the curve is going up, that’s what matters, not whether the exact number is 6,000 cases or 3,000.

The Government seems to be taking some sort of action this time, and hopefully it won’t repeat all the mistakes it made back in March and April. There were plenty of Cassandras back then, rightly warning of the doom to come, and being ignored; hopefully this time they’ll be listened to.

* There’d be 9,900 people without the disease in your 10,000 tests; your test would give you false positives on 99 of them. But there would be 100 people who actually had the disease, and your test would identify 99 of them correctly. So that’s 50% true and 50% false positives.

My own new book, Head, Hand, Heart, shares some of this critique, but my complaint is more that the type of merit that the modern meritocracy favours has been too narrowly focused on Head/cognitive ability. In order to shift more prestige and reward to the relatively neglected Hand and Heart aptitudes, we may, paradoxically, require more meritocracy in those spheres.

And while all of these books critique the principle, none of them really answers the question: if it is not merit that determines the allocation of reward and status, then what does?

Most mainstream politicians in developed democracies remain firmly wedded to the idea of meritocracy. It seems, after all, to combine fairness — rewarding people according to their abilities, not their family connections — and efficiency — getting the right people into the appropriate top jobs for the benefit of society as a whole. Moreover, it is easy and objective to measure through exams and related tests, or at least appears to be so.

Partly for those reasons, it was the moderate Left that first took up the banner of meritocracy and equality of opportunity in the 1980s and 1990s. It challenged undeserved privilege while avoiding the unattainable, and unpopular, goal of socialist transformation and equality of outcome and provided a story for the moderate Left at a time when it was conceding much of the economic argument to the Right. Meritocracy, it might be said, was a substitute for socialism when the latter seemed unviable.

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The war on social mobility

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Thatcherites didn’t talk about meritocracy so much but practised it, including in the Tory party itself where the estate agents were taking over from the grandees with estates. By the Major years, and even more for Cameron modernisers, meritocracy and equality of opportunity had become part of political common sense for Tories too. A new political consensus had been born.

Much of the intellectual Left, including in the UK, has now discarded the meritocracy banner. It is not hard to see why. It has been in the ascendancy as a political idea at a time when income inequality, especially in the US, has been reaching grotesque levels and social mobility seems to have slowed or even stalled. Meritocracy, by allowing a few people from disadvantaged homes to climb the ladder, stands accused of providing a fig leaf of legitimacy to old and new unfairnesses.

In the US, of those born in the lowest 20% of the income spectrum, only 5% make it to the top 20%. Meanwhile, more students from families in the top 1% of the income spectrum attend Ivy League universities than students from the whole of the bottom 50%. It is a similar story in the UK with those from the richest 20% of families seven times more likely to attend a Russell Group university than those from the bottom 40%.

Moreover, our experience with partial meritocracies has focused attention on just how hard it is to establish meaningful ones. In a free society that allows parents to pass on advantage to their children they will do so, and even without the extra leg-up of private education that will often be decisive in shaping life chances. As Polly Mackenzie puts it: “There are endless debates about whether ability comes from our genes, or the environment in which we are raised. It doesn’t matter… My parents gave me my genes and they gave me my childhood.”

So meritocracy can quickly ossify into a kind of oligarchy. Even if you don’t mind the tyranny of the talented, just wait, it will become the tyranny of the talented’s children, as American philosopher Tim Sommers pithily puts it.

The apparent impossibly of anything but a partial and flawed meritocracy has switched attention to the undesirability of the very principle itself. Much of the recent critique draws on the work of the pioneer meritocracy sceptic Michael Young, a socialist and one of the authors of the 1945 Labour manifesto. Young did not like meritocracy partly for simple egalitarian reasons: he did not like any inequality of reward and status whether based on merit or inheritance or anything else.

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Michael Sandel is not a socialist but his book The Tyranny of Merit shares Young’s dismay at the idea that where we stand in the social pecking order is fair because it is merited. This can create despair among the losers, especially in modern secular societies which have eroded traditional meaning-generating social roles and religious consolation. And it can create hubris among the winners who believe their high status is deserved, ignoring both the luck and the social infrastructure that underpins their success.

Michael Young’s son Toby (who was a pupil of Sandel’s in his youth) takes a different view. “I like meritocracy for the same reason that my father disapproved of it: because it helps to secure peoples’ consent to the inequalities that are the inevitable consequence of limited government. I say this not as someone fond of inequality but as someone who believes limited government is preferable to a large coercive state.” Meritocracy does this by helping to create wealthy, dynamic societies; by allocating reward in a way that at least seems fairer than the alternatives; and by creating opportunities for some of those born on the wrong side of the tracks.

We meritocracy sceptics have to acknowledge that Young junior is still winning this argument, the meritocracy critique remains more persuasive in the seminar room than in the cauldron of modern politics. When I say to people that turning society into a competition that the most able win and the majority lose is a recipe for creating populist resentment, most people readily agree. Most people also accept the general egalitarian/Christian sense that all humans are of equal moral worth which ultimately underpins the meritocratic critique.

But these vague sentiments do not translate into practical policy ideas beyond the familiar notion that we should tax the rich, push minimum wages as high as possible and respect essential workers, even if low skilled, as we did in the early days of the pandemic.

The issue is this: there will always be hierarchies of competence and ability and those will tend to generate related hierarchies of both status and income. We can (and do) mitigate the latter but it is much harder to do something about the former. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has eloquently put it: “The goal is not to eradicate hierarchy and turn every mountain into a salt flat; we live in a plenitude of incommensurable hierarchies, and the circulation of social esteem will always benefit the better novelist, the more important mathematician, the savvier businessman, the faster runner, the more effective social entrepreneur.”

It is not in the gift of politicians to control the distribution of status, beyond some nudging at the margins, and when they have tried to do so and claimed to be implementing Marx’s “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” it has not turned out well.

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Moreover, nobody, not even Michael Young, really objects to the principle of meritocratic selection for jobs, particularly the most important ones. We want our best nuclear physicists to be in charge of our nuclear research programme; it is not something that can be chosen by lottery. And who wants to be operated on by a surgeon who failed their exams? So, the puzzled voter might ask, “you want meritocracy for jobs, but you don’t want a meritocratic society, how does that work?”.

It is a subtle distinction but a real one, somewhat akin to Lionel Jospin’s wanting a market economy but not a market society. And the key word is want. The minimum that meritocracy critics require is an acknowledgement of what Sandel calls the “dark side” of meritocracy, that it is a pragmatic labour market principle not an ideal for the good society. The reward to merit should be balanced by other principles such as the equal moral worth of all citizens and an awareness of the fact that merit is generated by society, through family, education and so on, as well as by the individual. (Listen to Yascha Mounk’s excellent interview with Sandel on his The Good Fight podcast.)

This, however, does not produce an especially distinctive politics for meritocracy critics, beyond a mild form of social democracy. My own approach in Head, Hand, Heart offers an alternative with more traction. I argue that the problem is not so much meritocracy itself, though the principle deserves a proper scepticism, but rather the rise and rise of the cognitive meritocracy in recent decades. This has over-promoted one form of human aptitude. The political task is to try to spread some of the reward and status hoarded by the cognitively blessed to those with aptitudes related to Hand (technical and craft) and Heart (caring and emotional intelligence). It is a call for a wider understanding of what constitutes merit and indeed skill.

The cognitive takeover of the past 40 years has been actively promoted by public policy and has now become dysfunctional. It has created too narrow a definition of a successful life: do well at school, go to a good university and into a decent professional job. It has also, with the expansion of higher education driven forward by Tony Blair, created a single ladder up to safety and success through the modern university. There used to be many more little ladders up and more promotion from below in big organisations, now around 40% of jobs are graduate-only.

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By Peter Franklyn

So, the answer is not so much to suppress the idea of meritocracy — which remains the worst system for allocating reward apart from all the others — but to spread it more widely. This is easier said than done. Non-cognitive forms of merit in craft or care are often harder to quantify. As Madeleine Bunting points out in her new book Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care the containment of pain and distress is elusive and hard to measure, and care is usually embodied work in a culture dominated by the abstract and analytical.

And we typically apply cognitive criteria even in non-cognitive fields. If you ask an economist why people working in care homes are so poorly paid he or she will say because anyone can do it. But that is just saying that minimal qualifications are required. Anyone who has worked in a hospital or care home, or even visited one, knows that there are good carers, middling ones and poor ones, as in other areas of life. Yet we often lack the meritocratic selection mechanisms for distinguishing and rewarding them.

The ‘spreading rather than suppressing’ approach to meritocracy now has history on its side. For we are reaching Peak Head. The knowledge economy doesn’t need as many knowledge workers as had been assumed, and AI is increasingly coming for the middling and lower cognitive jobs. Education policy, social mobility policy and even economic policy in the UK have all been partly premised on the idea of an ever expanding cognitive-professional class of graduates. But in recent years this has slowed to a crawl: in 2000, the proportion of the workforce in the top two social classes in the UK was 35%, today it is 37%.

Higher education is still pumping out graduates while the graduate premium is less than 10% for the majority of men (once you control for education differences prior to college) and more than one third of graduates are not in graduate jobs more than five years after graduating. This is creating a crisis of expectations which may lie behind both the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn eruptions. Meanwhile there are recruitment crises in nursing, care homes, skilled trades and middling technical functions.

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Which is worse, work or no work?

By Ian Birrell

Much of the expansion of the cognitive meritocracy was necessary at the time. And it is far better to have a mass graduate elite of one third of the population than the much narrower elite when I went to college. But no thought ever seems to have been given to what I call the 15/50 problem, meaning when 15% of your school peers go to college and you don’t it is not a big deal, when nearly half go and you don’t it is a different matter.

This is not, of course, an argument against the importance of intelligence and knowledge in our society both for individuals and for a post Brexit Britain that must remain a global centre of education, science and innovation. But we have got things out of kilter. The mass knowledge economy jobs are going and the future is likely tilt more towards care, coding and craft. The idea that a majority of people would be taking up prestigious professional jobs requiring analytical intelligence and delivering a sense of purpose and even self-expression, is not going to happen. Most people still regard work as just a means of earning a living and get their sense of meaning and self-expression away from work. This may apply to even more of us in the future.

Nietzsche spotted a long time ago that the idea of democratic equality runs up against the reality of big variations in human ability and that democracy would thus find it hard to escape a plague of mass resentment. It has done pretty well so far, at least since the Second World War. But if mass resentment is not to make a reappearance, people need to feel respected and useful. That in turn requires a better spread of reward and status across those three clusters of aptitude relating to Head, Hand and Heart. Democracy is now demanding it.

Head, Hand, Heart, The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century is published by Allen Lane

Young himself has had to resign from a plethora of positions in the face of a huge social media backlash for some of his previous puerile comments. He is now fighting back against the ‘tyranny of opinion’ warned against by John Stuart Mill.

Anyone can defend opinions they agree with. It takes a true liberal to stick up for those with whose opinions we find incredibly irritating or fundamentally disagree with. As a liberal, I shudder at the way today’s liberalism has mutated into the epitome of illiberal.

I joined the Liberals when I was 16; not as a cunning career move, but because I believe in the equal worth and value of every person. I believe that every person should be free to live as they see fit, to hold their beliefs and to express them as they wish. I reject forced conformity, whether from the law or from social pressure.

Today’s liberalism does not uphold these liberal values.

Eyebrows were first raised when thinkers such as Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell were no-platformed for their views in the name of liberalism. Then, last year, when the police turned up at the workplace of Harry Miller to ‘check [his] thinking’ because of some of his tweets, it began to look like we were heading full tilt into Orwellian territory.  These days, it is perfectly normal for so-called liberals to condemn the views — and even the thoughts — of those who do not sign up to all their beliefs; even those who once would have been part of the same ‘tribe’. Liberalism has lost itself.

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So I applaud the intent of the Free Speech Union in pushing back against some of these expressions of ‘liberalism’. But I think it should work both ways.

Today, it is almost impossible to avoid the eggshells littering the terrain of public debate, as we try to remain ‘politically correct’, fearful of saying the wrong thing. But lest you find yourself nodding along, it’s important to take a step back and realise that the liberal Left are not the only PC police. I do hope this new Union, many of whose members come from the Right of the political spectrum, will also be taking issue with the ‘PC brigade’ of their own tribe.

Five minutes on social media will give you a window into a world where all sides seek to judge and condemn. And the language of the Right is just as explosively politically correct as that on the Left. While they may not seek physically to no-platform those whose views they don’t like, there is an aggressive hostility about their tone which seeks to shut down the other side just as effectively.

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Right-wing PC views condemn any publicly-declared statement of compassion from the Left as simply ‘virtue-signalling’ which therefore must be vilified. For example, Barack Obama was dubbed a ‘virtue-signalling doormat’ by Piers Morgan for claiming that having more women in authority would improve living standards.

Those who express certain concerns around social and racial justice are dismissed as ‘woke’, which is now a kind of shorthand for not worth listening to.

The Right-wing PCers are concerned about belligerently policing the trappings of nationhood and national heritage. There is outrage when Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t sing the National Anthem and contempt for anyone not wearing the right kind of poppy 24/7 during the Remembrance period. Meghan and Harry are lambasted for not being royal in the right way: an Express columnist recently called the pair “freeloaders” and a “joke woke couple”.

This synthetic anger springs from the conviction that previously mainstream views are now being marginalised. They think, therefore, that they can hit back with as much offence as they believe they are receiving. But this simply intensifies the downward spiral of public debate.

We have arrived at the point where the self-righteous are judging the self-righteous for being self-righteous…self-righteously. My point is we’re all guilty.

I do believe that political correctness can actually be a good thing. When applied properly it speaks of treating people with dignity and respect, and not dismissing or denigrating them because they are different from me. But the negative side of this is that it is often zealously policed by disapproving Twitter warriors, ready to orchestrate a pile-on.

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It is inevitable that in a polarised social-media-driven society, some of what we say will trigger offence. But this does not mean that we should deliberately set out to cause it. Perhaps we might feel that, given that people are going to be offended anyway, we don’t need to bother trying to be respectful or restrained in our language. But I want to call out both approaches — while being aware that this warning also applies to my own interactions on Twitter.

Those behind the Free Speech Union and those who are fighting back against the rise of liberal illiberalism will say that they want to restore traditional British values; freedom of speech being among them. That is all well and good. But I would add civility to this list. And I would also add the often-overlooked Christian value of grace.

Grace is the gift of something wonderful and undeserved. It is epitomised in Christ’s offer of forgiveness, and to release us from our anger and hurt. In return, we are asked to offer forgiveness to others, even when it is not sought. Our culture finds this concept almost impossible to grasp. Yet such an understanding would surely allow a healthy national debate, in which different opinions can be permitted and debated without the other side feeling threatened.

The Christian apologist Michael Ramsden makes the point that we live in a time of competitive victimhood. Everyone defines themselves by how they have been ill treated by others. And this increasingly goes for the Right, as they push back, ever more vigorously, against the liberal thought police.

It is appropriate to seek justice for our grievances, but if our pursuit is motivated by bitterness, we will be left with resentment, even when justice is achieved. As long as we take this approach, there will be no forgiveness in our public debates. So while we may protect free speech, public discourse will always be tainted with a tone of calculated offence.

So my challenge to us all is that we are willing to give up our anger and replace it with an attitude of grace. This applies to both Left and Right; Remainers and Leavers. Otherwise our current tribes and divisions will continue to define us for years to come.

On page one we discover that “In Parliament, naturally and properly, everything said is recorded and published verbatim.” A page later we learn that “predictably, and perfectly properly, the Attorney General said…” Two pages on and we can read of how “I therefore intervened good-naturedly, saying ‘I do not normally offer stylistic advice to the Attorney General, but his tendency to perambulate while prating is disagreeable to the House.’” A witticism that I am sure readers will (both good-naturedly and perfectly properly) be grateful to the former Speaker for capturing between hard covers.

The audience for this book is anyone eager to relive the glory days of the 2019 Parliament: anyone keen to reminiscence about what happened when Parliament was prorogued and then de-prorogued. The difference this time is that it can all be refracted through the lens of John Bercow’s own personal views, which had previously been a mystery.

So the reader can be reminded of that day last year when Parliament reconvened and Geoffrey Cox referred to a matter that “in advocacy terms” is “what we used to call a ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’ question.” But here we have an added editorial.  Of this comment Bercow writes, “The reference to the ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’ question rightly went down extremely badly in the House, especially but not only with female colleagues.”

While examples of others’ verbal malpractice abound, it is to the author’s credit and the reader’s good fortune that an example is always on hand to showcase best practice. Through tense times our guide remains resolute. “What I was not prepared to do was to behave hypocritically,” he informs the reader. “The abuse of power was foiled, but make no mistake. That is precisely what it was: an abuse of power.” And again, “It was never any part of my role to serve as a nodding donkey or quiescent lickspittle of the executive branch of our political system.”

Happily Unspeakable is not just a blow-by-blow account of last autumn. It is also the story of how John Bercow came to be the man he almost is. We learn of his parentage, of how his maternal grandmother was said to have had a brief affair with “a local toff” who “promptly scarpered, offering not a penny piece to support her in the raising of my mother, Brenda.”

We learn of his schooldays, of how young John played the recorder “without distinction” but excelled at tennis and politics. How different the history of politics — not to mention recorder playing — might have been had such talents been reversed. We also learn of how, at Finchley Manorhill, the young Bercow was struck down by acne. “At first, it was a modest affliction – I would apply a cream and the problem would go.” Later gels and “liquid solutions” were proffered, but the problem did not go away. “It festered. It intensified.” Rarely has a work’s better subtitle hidden in such plain sight.

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It is with a certain inevitability that this youth found his way into 1980s party activism. The combination of ambition and resentment hurtled him into the Finchley branch of the Conservatives, where perhaps his zeal was a tad overzealous. He describes how in January 1981 he “made a fateful political choice” and “the most shameful decision I have ever made. I applied to join the Monday Club, a hard-Right Conservative pressure group that had been set up in the 1960s.” The group’s policies included support for minority rule in what was then Rhodesia, a stance with which the Thatcher government — “I later came to believe, both justly and wisely” — disagreed.

Yet whatever the missteps, the ambition made up for them, and by the time the decade was out the thrusting young Right-winger was on the up — only for the fates to choose this moment to take a run at him.

At “a large dinner” in Nottingham around the time of the 1992 election, organised by the Conservative Students conference, Bercow met a tall young blonde woman “who was looking more than a little bored”. This lady who he feared was “way out of my league” turned out to be one Sally Illman. Unfortunately she was already moving to the Left and rejected his early wooing attempts, reportedly viewing the young Bercow as “far too staid”. Over the ensuing years he worked on two uncomplementary projects: one was advancing within the Conservative Party. The other was advancing on the woman who would become Sally Bercow.

Although he occasionally tries to suggest there were hurdles, during these years the party’s support for Bercow was remarkable. Its desire to find him a Parliamentary seat was so considerable that before the 1997 election he was actually helicoptered from one constituency association audition to another. This worked, and in 1997 he ran as the Conservative candidate in the safe seat of Buckingham and retained the seat for the party.

But in the wider country the Blairite era had begun. And as the mores of the time changed and the wellsprings of power shifted, so Bercow’s politics strangely shifted too. The former firebrand of the Monday Club became obsessed with Left-wing social justice, racial issues, LGBT equality and the importance of “diversity”.

Having alienated the leadership of his own party throughout the 2000s, he made the wise decision to suck up to any and all members of the party opposite, which happened to be the party of government. His questions to the government benches became positively adoring.

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And so a decade after his eyes first locked level with her knees, Bercow finally proved himself worthy to marry Ms Illman. Of his own attractions he remained clear-eyed: “I am not good-looking, but rather rat-like and somewhat intense.” Yet he is generous enough to recognise his own virtues: “I do not panic, get tongue-tied or descend into umm-ing and ah-ing in responding to questions.”

In 2009 Michael Martin stepped down and it was the Conservatives’ turn to nominate a Speaker. Labour were more than happy to elect to the post someone from the Conservative benches who they knew was loathed by his own party. So to the Speaker’s chair Bercow was dragged, and there he sat and reigned for 11 glorious years.

All humiliations behind him, today he stands at the summit of national and international affairs, a vantage point from which he is able to pass judgement on the whole carnival that has passed before him. Doing his bit to earn out his publisher’s advance he declares David Cameron to be “insubstantial”, an “opportunist lightweight” and “a 24-carat snob”.

William Hague he calls “impersonal, mechanical, an upmarket, efficient hack – and an ex-teenage nerd who as a schoolboy had pored over parliamentary debates”. Terms in which the teenage Bercow could never be described.

Now that the modernising speaker’s gown is off, the venom is continuous and one-directional. He claims that Toby Young’s views show him to be “a misogynist who also held deplorable views about gays, the disabled and the poor”. He describes Theresa May as “wooden as your average coffee table, a worthy public servant but as dull as ditch-water”. Michael Gove is “oleaginous” while Boris Johnson is variously described as “disingenuous”, guilty of being “accused of bigotry” and “at his occasional best, a passably adequate politician in an age not replete with them”.

Newspaper editors who ever ran anything critical about the silly and self-destructive Sally are dismissed as “snobs and chauvinists”. By the book’s end Bercow is lashing out in all directions like a schoolboy in the playground trying the “windmill” manoeuvre with his arms circling wildly against larger foes. He dismisses the Conservative party membership who gave him his career as being — in their totality — “elderly and extreme”. Anyone who ever expressed criticism of him ends up being dismissed as “bigoted”.

His positively pontifical reviews of world leaders who spoke in Parliament during his tenure extend to an actual Pope – Benedict XVI. He quotes Sally’s criticism of the former Cardinal Ratzinger that he had among other things been reluctant “to come clean about his involvement in the Hitler Youth as a young German”.

Nevertheless one learns a number of things from Bercow’s exegesis of Benedict’s Westminster speech: “The Pope’s stance – which of course reflected that of the Catholic Church…” On Benedict, Bercow continues, “Perfectly reasonably, he spoke in English, but his delivery was uninspiring.” How sad that neither Sally or John chose to give a pep talk to the pontiff.

Perhaps all this makes Bercow sound ungenerous, and yet he is reliably effusive in his estimations of his self. Frequent examples are given of his own witticisms. “Sometimes I would just say, ‘We have got the gist’, ‘I think a question mark is coming now’, or ‘The abridged rather than the War and Peace version would be appreciated’.”

“Whether I was a good Speaker is not for me to say,” he concedes at one point. But analysing the various pros and cons of his years in the chair, on balance he writes “It is only fair to recall that, alongside the complainants, many constituents professed themselves perfectly happy… I could not please everyone but I must have been doing something right.”

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Any time that Parliament has an opportunity to praise the Speaker the results are quoted. “Of all the Speakers who have sat in the Speaker’s Chair since I was elected, he is the best” is one quote from Harriet Harman that Bercow feels compelled to save from the dustheap of Hansard. He also unexpectedly finds himself innocent of all bullying charges against himself, including one about which he writes, “In my opinion, the disagreement between us did not constitute bullying in any way.” Which — perhaps predictably and even properly — must surely constitute an end to the matter.

Unspeakable is an autobiography and so charges that it is self-serving are unfair. But the work does provide an opportunity to survey and summarise for ourselves — as all autobiographies must (look how addictive this style is) — whatever the life of its subject amounts to.

To this observer it is clear that perhaps there once was a John Bercow. An ambitious, thrusting, embittered person he became an avatar of ambition for whatever age he found himself in. In one era he thought it advantageous to believe one thing. When the mores changed the same person found himself hammering his fists just as vociferously for another cause.

The best evidence of his fundamental absence lies not in his actions but in that one constant give-away: his language. Not just the caveats and quibbles or the odious, affected flourishes and archaisms, but a whole language and manner into which the man so deeply dug his life that he eventually stood no hope of extracting himself.

There is footage somewhere online of Bercow caught by a reporter in the streets of London last year. Bercow is in his civvies. Yet he immediately slips into that strange register into which his life has become caught: all menacing jollity and forced, frustrated badinage.

After reading his life story the reader is left with an impression of a man who has spent his life doing an impression of a man. Whatever else once existed long-ago disappeared in a small puff of unwise, and probably improper, self-regard.