Hillary Clinton and I agreed on one thing the other week when she urged folks to "go to the Derby on Saturday and place just a little money on the filly". As a woman I rooted for the filly as well. Clinton obviously saw the lone female contender in the Kentucky Derby as a symbol of her own "run for the money". I'm sure she would not want the same results; the filly finished second and had to be put down.

In its 134-year history only three fillies have won the Kentucky Derby, first of the races in the Triple Crown for three-year-olds. Eight Belles had only raced against fillies before, but when her entry was approved her owner decided to give it a try. She was a big girl, stunning black, seventeen hands high, with four straight wins to her credit, a far better record than the mediocre field of colts she would face.

With millions watching on television she ran a fine race coming in second of the twenty-horse field. Then, in the quarter of a mile past the finish line, she fell to her knees. As the television cameras focused on the jubilant owners of the winner, Big Brown, two ambulances pulled up to Eight Belles. She had broken one ankle and in trying to get up broke the other, bones sticking out. Her jockey walked away as she was euthanized on the spot. Many in the crowd wept.

The racing industry needs to grant these animals another year before pushing them onto the track. Swallow the cost, do the right thing. And the trend toward speed rather than stamina should stop. These horses are now designed for shorter and shorter racing careers, their solid torsos balanced on long, fragile legs. Like American cars built of fiberglass for better mileage, their bones are light for speed, but woe betide you in an accident.

For some reason American trainers are permitted to use pain-killers and medications not allowed in most countries that enable unsound horses to race. And these frailer, less sound horses are passing on their genes. Money is not only talking here, but screaming, the money men hoping the fans won't hear the din. To save their sport from public disgust and government intervention, owners and breeders need to give the horses time to grow up.

Flat racing is not the only brutal horse sport of course. Three-day eventing is a killer as well. Just before this year's Kentucky Derby the Rolex Three-Day event saw two horses destroyed in one day. Britain's Grand National, a gruelling race of over four miles with thirty jumps, has an equally lethal record. On the first day of the three-day Aintree Grand National meeting in 2000 three horses were killed and a fourth collapsed and died. That year five horses fell at the first fence in the Foxhunters' Chase, raced on the Grand National fences. And in the following race on the same course another horse took a fall at the penultimate obstacle and was killed. The chief veterinary officer of The Jockey Club explained to the weak-kneed public that year,

There are six vets on the course and there is all the emergency equipment you could possibly ask for. The facilities are truly excellent.

We are very sad. But accidents do happen. It's a risky sport and you have to accept that.

So this year saw just another accident at the Kentucky Derby, another horse dead on the track under a clear sky, perfect conditions, vets standing by with state-of-the-art equipment. Some pundits have speculated that it is the sight of unexpected death that disturbs the audience. But it isn't just the unexpected deaths. Actually they are becoming expected. It is the senseless maiming and death of beautiful animals. Maybe when racing truly was the sport of kings, the kings were as hard-nosed as the current members of the racing fraternity. But the public has a heart and won't be comforted indefinitely by transparently lame excuses. Time for those in charge of racing to do the right thing otherwise it won't be the horses that need euthanizing, but their sport.

Joyce Lee Malcolm is Professor of Legal History at George Mason University, School of Law in Virginia. She specializes in legal and constitutional history, and is the author of six books - including Guns and Violence: The English Experience - with a seventh now in press. Her work on the right to be armed has been cited in court opinions including the US Supreme Court.

Martin Crimp's The City is currently playing (24th April - 7th June 2008) at the Royal Court and in common with so much of his work, the play is marked by an engagement with current events: the city in question has been compared with Fallujah. It is therefore opportune to be reminded of an earlier War on Terror in Cruel and Tender, recently revived in Cambridge.

Like the Greek tragedy on which it draws - Sophocles's Women of Trachis - Cruel and Tender takes aim at a quintessentially male hero. Crimp turns Zeus's son Heracles (or Hercules in Roman myth) into The General, a sinister militarist who combines the menace of the Dublin gangland figure of the same name (a.k.a. Martin Cahill) with the presence of Othello. For it soon becomes clear that the man for whom his waiting wife Amelia pines is far from being the subject of universal adulation. He is in fact a war criminal, whose methods - to borrow the language of Apocalypse Now - are deemed to be so "unsound" that the government is beginning to distance itself from him.

It is strong stuff, and it is perhaps for this reason that the first twenty minutes or so of this short play - are something of a rant. The General's wife ruminates about whether all men are rapists - she hopes not, but only because she cannot bear to be thought the victim she so clearly is. There is also some clichéd exchanges about men being conditioned to kill, hardly enlivened by the ostentatious brandishing of toy guns.

By the time the two Africans waifs – Laela and her "brother" ("The General's" son) - arrive the message could not be clearer. So far, so dark, and so black and white. It is only the commanding figure of Amelia - the subject of a mesmeric performance by Marieke Audsley - who holds the whole thing together at this point.

Having advanced an impeccably liberal critique of the War on Terror, however, Crimp then proceeds to subvert it. The African leader slain by The General had literally torn the food out of the mouths of the people - or so Laela tells us. We are given the distinct impression that the world is better off without him. Amelia reflects on her trendy university friends who rejoice at the death of soldiers younger than them who have sacrificed their lives for their freedoms.

And in a striking scene, The General, who finally bursts upon the stage in person shortly before the end, reminds his son that he had risked his skin daily in order to allow him to spend his days in freedom - or at least in front of a computer playstation.

Running parallel with all this is a love story. Amelia and The General lacerate each other with affairs - she speaks of each one of them being like having "acid thrown in her face". And yet there is a brutal honesty between them, which compares favourably with the equivocations of the weaselly government spin doctor. Amelia pronounces fiercely,

I happen to believe that love and truth are same thing.

In the end, we do not really know what we are supposed to make of The General. What or whom are we to believe? Is The General just a recruiting-sergeant for terror as is suggested by his reference to three heads leaping up whenever he lops two off? Or is he one of Auden's necessary murderers, who does the dirty work of the War on Terror, the "Dirty Harry" which some think the West cannot do without?

Crimp's references to the defence of our freedoms here are surely not purely ironic. If The General's final blustering promise to defend himself behind the glass screen is a reference to the trial of Milosevic before the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague, it cannot have escaped Crimp's notice that it took a fairly drastic breach of customary international law - the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia without United Nations sanction - to put him there. Sometimes it take a general to put "The General" behind bars.

Dr Brendan Simms is Reader in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

The decline of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister has been as precipitous as it has been unexpected, with the latter being arguably the main point: how many can actually say that, a year or even six months ago, they foresaw the catastrophic ratings of either Brown or the Labour Party? How many can honestly say that they thought that Boris Johnson would defeat Ken Livingstone? Surely not many.

Brown's decline has also been very curious in that he has made few catastrophic mistakes - although he has certainly made many smaller ones - and the economy, although threatened and battered, is ostensible performing well. To me, an air of mystery pervades the Prime Minister's decline. A decline of this magnitude without any real and plainly identifiable cause seems very strange. On the face of it, too, Brown's personality does not seem to be an automatic vote-loser: on the contrary, a rock-solid, experienced, serious-minded Prime Minister would surely seem a winner, to wavering Tories as well as to Labourites, and a welcome contrast to the spin doctor-driven banalities of Tony Blair.

Since its great victory in 1997, when it won 43.2 per cent of the vote, compared to the Tories' 30.7 per cent, it has been downhill all the way for Labour, Blair or no Blair. At the 2001 general election, Labour elected 413 M.P.s (compared with 418 in 1997) on 40.7 per cent of the vote, compared with the Tories' 31.7 per cent.

At the 2005 general election, Labour's overall vote declined in relative terms by 5.5 per cent, to only 35.3 per cent of all votes cast, compared with the Tories' 32.3 per cent. Yet Labour elected 356 M.P.s, the Conservatives only 198, in what was surely one of the unluckiest Tory election results ever. (The Liberal Democrats elected 62 M.P.s on 22.1 per cent of the vote.)

In very many seats, the Tories lost narrowly to either party, and turnout in many Labour seats was abysmally low. But only a very small number of changed votes would alter the results dramatically. In 2005 Labour polled 9,562,000 votes, the Tories 8,773,000, a difference of only 789,000, or roughly 1230 votes per constituency. It seems very likely that Tony Blair's presence as Prime Minister made the difference possible three years ago.

Indeed, as many commentators have noted, the rot within Labour runs very deep. It is difficult to see why any young person wanting to engage in politics would join the Labour Party: right-wing activists would join the Tories or some other right-wing party; left-wing and progressive activists would almost certainly join the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, or the like. The traditional working class is almost extinct, and the power of the trade unions is greatly lessened. There is no longer an assurance that a Labour government will protect the interests of the poor, or that it differs in any real way on economic matters from the Tories.

The foundations of the Labour Party, in terms of the recruitment of its future leaders, are rotten and rotting. Essentially, it appears to be composed of members of the public sector, local government activists, some self-made businessmen, and members of some ethnic minorities. Frankly, it appears on the way out as a major party, especially once it loses office and the patronage powers of office disappear.

On the other hand, it is also important to note that one can exaggerate the uniqueness of the depths to which Labour has now sunk in public opinion surveys - according to one, to 24 per cent compared with the Tories' 49 per cent; parties have declined to these levels before and recovered or almost recovered, especially in recent decades. Gallup Polls and other surveys of voting intentions have been taken since 1939 and, on a continuing basis, since the mid-1940s.

Prior to the 1990s, only on a few occasions did one of the two major parties sink to levels which Labour is currently polling, bearing in mind that the Liberals were not really a major party in terms of their electoral share until the 1970s. In October 1956, for instance, during Suez, the Gallup Poll put the Tories at 42 per cent, Labour at 47 per cent.

The first really catastrophic decline (to 31 per cent for the Tories) came in 1962-3, during the Profumo Scandal. During the late 1960s Labour declined to previously unheard-of levels, reaching only 28 per cent of the vote in May-June 1968. Yet the Tories almost won the 1964 general election, and Labour only unexpectedly lost the 1970 general election.

A more general pattern of sharp declines set in when Michael Foot was Labour leader in the early 1980s, and then, on a more extended basis, after "Black Wednesday" in September 1992, after which the Tories under John Major consistently polled atrociously until the 1997 election, reaching a nadir of only 21 per cent on several occasions. In this case, the Tories never bounced back. On the other hand, the massive polling majority enjoyed by Labour at that time - 61 per cent in December 1994, for instance - was also not reflected in the actual general election results.

So there is some hope, but only some, for Gordon Brown, although he has certainly been dancing on eggshells since he became Prime Minister. In retrospect, it appears that David Cameron's strategy of reaching to disaffected Labour and Liberal Democrat voters with a "green", softer image and agenda, so difficult for most Tories to swallow, was the correct one. It is not too late for Gordon Brown to rise from the dead, only very difficult.

William D. Rubinstein is professor of modern history at the University of Wales-Aberystwyth. He is the author of Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain since the Industrial Revolution, (Social Affairs Unit, 2006) and co-author of The Richest of the Rich: The Wealthiest 250 People in Britain Since 1066, (Harriman House, 2007).

Comparisons between war and business are quite frequent in lectures, not least at leadership conferences, with military leadership and strategy providing obvious sources of inspiration. There is value in this approach, but comparisons should be drawn with more care than is often the case. This is because there are also obvious contrasts.

The most important is not, in fact, killing, as modern militaries spend surprisingly little time doing that. This can be demonstrated, for example, by the Japanese armed forces, one of the biggest in the world. Taking this further, the key military function of deterrence is not shared by business, and no business would devote the resources spent on nuclear weaponry and then not use them. Industrial backup systems do not compare.

Linked to this monopoly is a clear facet of military leadership that was isolated by Norman Dixon in his instructive book on The Psychology of Military Incompetence. Dixon pointed out that the very bureaucratic factors that led to success in peacetime military leadership, such as worship of the system and being a safe pair of hands, were actively harmful in wartime; and vice versa. This abrupt switch between two different states is not seen in business.

Yet, contrasts should not detract from some valuable parallels in the subjects of military science and business management. A key parallel is the tension in the former over the emphasis on technology, and thus on effectiveness and change through technological enhancement. This is the approach very much taken by those who detected a Revolution in Military Affairs in the 1990s and 2000s, and also by those who saw such a Revolution on some earlier occasions, for example with gunpowder.

Other approaches toward development and capability, however, clash with this one. A key one is the argument that, rather than capability being set in the abstract, not least by the technological proficiency of the weaponry, it is necessary to draw attention to the variety in military and political environments faced by armed forces and the diversity of tasks they are set. This ensures that military forms and methods that may be pertinent in some cases may not be effective in others, and may indeed detract from effectiveness.

This task-based account of military capability has obvious applications in business management, as it leads to a requirement to focus leadership priorities and training very much on specific needs in particular conjunctures. Far from a "borderless world", or isotrophic (equal at every point) surface, profitability thus is in a dynamic relationship with changing circumstances, or, looked at differently, is endlessly redefined. Linked to this, there is a need to abandon systemic models and advances in favour of an approach orientated on fractured markets - geographical, social and cultural.

This means that coping with uncertainty becomes a key method, and indeed goal, in both business and military training, ethos and operations. For both business and military, this coping has to be more rapid than that of opposing organisations, a process which is referred to as getting inside the decision loop.

To imagine a system without risk is inappropriate as that means an over-determining organisation. Such an organisation will not confront, first, the uncertain nature of its environment and, secondly, the way in which the organisation must create a capacity to conceive of multiple solutions if the first tried does not produce the anticipated yield. Instead, a rapid action-reaction ethos and method is necessary as an integral part of the system, whether business or military. This may not be the lesson in terms of inspiring charismatic leaders that some seek, and indeed advocate in leadership classes, but such leaders can only operate if they also have and use intelligence. This is an underrated capacity at present, not least because of anti-élitist currents in culture as well as left-wing assumptions, even policies, that are frequently based on a denial of differential ability.

Yet the need for intelligent (as opposed to charismatic) leadership cannot be pushed off onto the task of able staff officers and their business equivalents. Those at the top also need to be planners and with the informed scepticism that comes from appreciating that alternatives have to be considered, and even at the very moment that the dimension of morale cannot lead to public discussion of such an option.

To this end, it is not necessary to serve in the armed forces. The key requirement is to be able to think, in order to replicate the mental dimension of coping with uncertainty and planning, in terms of a purposeful goal illuminated by an informed scepticism about capabilities and methods.

Jeremy Black is Professor of History, University of Exeter. He is the author - amongst much else - of The Slave Trade, A Short History of Britain, The Holocaust, and The Curse of History.

As Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone drew many of his - publicly funded and extremely well paid - advisors from one particularly obscure Marxist sect, Socialist Action. One might have thought that - with the political demise of Ken Livingstone - the era of the advisors to the London Mayor coming from Marxist sects would be at an end. This does not, however, appear to be the case.

Yesterday's Sunday Times records that Munira Mirza has been appointed as Boris Johnson's "cultural advisor". The piece points out that Munira is the third person to be appointed by Boris Johnson who used to work for the think-tank Policy Exchange.

To my mind, much more interesting is the fact that Munira is very much part of the tight-knit little coterie which came out of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

While the Revolutionary Communist Party has ostensibly dissolved itself, its former personnel are still much in evidence and are still operating as a tight-knit group. They are still noted for taking provocative positions. There is Frank Furedi himself, Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas and Mick Hume of The Times and Spiked Online. Lesser figures include Bill Durodié of Cranfield University, Ann Furedi, Frank Furedi's wife and the Chief Executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, and - allegedly - the contrarian film maker Martin Durkin.

Munira Mirza herself runs what in less charitable times would have been described as a front organisation - the Manifesto Club. Its strap-line is "history is still young". This might seem just an anodyne bit of snappy copy, but it fits rather well into what is the overall perspective of the Revolutionary Communist Party coterie. Their perspective is that Marx is right, only that previous Marxists have got the timing wrong. We are still in the productive stages of capitalism - the time for revolution will still come, it is just that history is not ready yet.

Michael Mosbacher is Director of the Social; Affairs Unit. He writes the above in a personal capacity - the views expressed are not those of the Social Affairs Unit, its Trustees or Advisors.

The Disrespect Agenda is an extremely useful squib. It's an unexpected firework, you might think, coming from where it is. Here's one conservative 60-something who gets quite strong impulses to daub graffiti and professes a taste for roaring crudities with the crowd at a football match. In short, he likes the primordial unruliness of the English. He criticises "rat-boys", and superannuated Young Fogeys too. But the joy of this book is that it is positive: it likes the majority of the modern British experience.

Dr Allison can't abide the "respect agenda", not least because it was for a while a big plank in the wobbly New Labour platform. You'll have gathered that this book doesn't have the Daily Mail's neuroses. That said, one of the many seeming inconsistencies of the piece is that Dr Allison thinks parents don't deserve respect but does repeatedly insist that children need two of them.

It doesn't matter that such a book is not wholly coherent. Its non-trivial larkiness is a fair exchange.

The fundamental ethical law is that those who want respect should receive contempt - just for wanting it.

But don't be fooled. Dr Allison doesn't think we should only respect people and institutions that have earned our obeisance or admiration. He thinks the monarchy deserves respect, and not least because that's what it's for, whether there’s any merit in the monarch or not. Rather similarly, he dislikes most government, but thinks you had better obey the state, because that's what it's there for. I think he's a bit of a Hobbesian. Who isn't?

Dissing humanism
From the off, this is a bumpy ride. But it gets bumpier. Dr Allison thinks that we misdefine and deify respect because we've got a rights agenda which flows from a humanist agenda. This is to say that we anchor our thinking in the rights of the person - any person, whether they be monster or fool.

This is very nearly a philosophical book. Dr Allison quotes and likes Hume and Mill and quotes but doesn't like Bernard Williams. Lincoln Allison is a happy Utilitarian and counterposes that doctrine with the humanism which he assumes always weighs the rights of the person too heavily against the happiness of the greater number.

This is useful stuff, but may not hold all that much water. I cheerfully define myself as a humanist, and do so on the basis that my cast of mind was mostly established by being taught, and accepting, that Erasmus and Sir Thomas More were terrifically important. They were humanist as opposed to obscurantist. I find it very hard to abandon an underlying affection for their way of thinking, even though it was much more religious (never mind better educated and cleverer) than any of mine.

Actually, Dr Allison's utilitarianism is a version of humanism. After all, utilitarianism is just one way of balancing the all-important rights of persons.

I'm not sure whether Dr Allison's ambitions are philosophical. They may be, since he accuses two other conservatives (one of them, Christie Davies, a Social Affairs Unit regular) of not being philosophical enough. Actually, I doubt this is a very philosophical book. It leaves too many stones unturned, too many paths unexplored. Its author may hope to achieve all kinds of things with The Disrespect Agenda, but to my eyes at least, its main value is that it lays out the archipelago of contradictions which is modern - perhaps any - conservatism. Using it, you can work out where you are and (to over-do the mapping idea) decide how to get to where you might like to be. We meet lots of writers and ideas, often in anecdotes and all briskly, and get a better grip on our own inclinations as we go.

Modern morals and manners
This is an important book for the Social Affairs Unit because it will help friend and foe understand the kind of argument this think tank is engaged in. The undogmatic Social Affairs Unit is trying to help people think through "morals and manners for the twenty-first century" and does so from what many would say is a broadly conservative point of view. Oh dear. You may say: how very New Labour. Doesn't the Social Affairs Unit's mission translate as "Traditional morals and manners in a modern context"? So be it. At least the Social Affairs Unit isn't frightened of the nation's back-story.

And whatever else we are, it isn't socialist. But as Dr Allison says, it is no longer enough for conservatives merely to define themselves as fighting socialism. We have won that one (at least unless there's a colossal recession). We know that we are for the idea that a good society depends on the voluntary activity of individuals and their myriad associations. We want more of that stuff, dangers and all. After that, we are fractured.

My own line is to stress that the conservative is always conflicted as between his authoritarian and his libertarian inclinations. (And between tradition and progress; and the rich and the poor.) Most of the time Dr Allison seems cheerfully keen on the freedom bit of that equation. Indeed, he really plants his flag firmly on a hill marked "libertine". He has spotted that the English are in some special and rather good way uncivilised.

I agree with that but only when I'm in the mood to remember that conservatives have to wrestle with the real vitality of the country they say they love. I didn't agree whilst I read Dr Allison's passages on a train and a nearby nihilist hooded oik played music on his mobile in loudspeaker mode. The oik was probably on his way home to a nice semi in Horsham, and that's what really ticks me off. What is it with this widespread emulation of the gormless? Oh, I know. It's a deep resentful kick against compulsory but unenforceable un-meant niceness. Which is Dr Allison's point.

Disinhibited and disrespectful
For my money, Dr Allison is weak, or rather, unthoughtful, on the thorny matter of how order and freedom are in a perpetual tussle to create liberty. The British are famous for their reserve and stoicism: that's how we got the Civil Service, the Stones, Shakespeare and the SAS. I like Jane Shilling's remarks in The Times on how Britain is now "disinhibited".

She might have said that we are now super-disinhibited. We always were a curious mixture of reserve and expressiveness. Perhaps Dr Allison would argue that we should shed more inhibitions. For my part I wish he had said more about the way misrule, in its better forms, is temporary and quite limited and that we have rather lost that sense of contractual naughtiness. It is hard to dispute that we are less well-mannered than we once were. The issue becomes how to balance the need for control versus chaos. And that often becomes a balance between institutions and individualism.

Sorry - but we should respect politicians
And here's my real beef with the book. Dr Allison says we should never respect politicians. I simply don't understand this. Rather as in the case of the monarchy (or the state), we should go out of our way to show that we respect the political process even whilst we see the flaws in its day to day reality.

Come to that, Dr Allison is less funny (or less insightful) than he thinks in his writing on parents and teachers. He certainly, for instance, doesn't help me work out what a person owes his not-especially loveable elderly mother. If not love, then what? Duty? Respect? Charity? Dr Allison says we should be nice to our parents because it makes for a nicer world. Wouldn't it be utilitarian to suitably compensate the world for one's failure to one's own? So why does it seem obvious to me that one “owes” something to one’s parents which hasn’t necessarily been earned and which can’t be discharged by any amount of generosity to anyone else? It seems feeble not to recognise that filial duty (or whatever) is a very big deal.

Respecting the past? Or moving on?
Moving on, Dr Allison lets us poke about in other matters which divide conservatives. One is the degree to which we are nostalgic, and as such rather keen on old-fashioned social mores. One of his heroes is Samuel Smiles, whom he rightly identifies as a liberator. As anyone who reads Smiles' Self Help will have to admit, his was a celebration of social mobility and the inherent human quality of enterprise to be found anywhere in society. Dr Allison suggests that Smile'’ view is that respectability

has an enormous propensity to decay into a kind of pseudo-respectability, in which materialism and hypocrisy are major components. And, even more fundamentally, it establishes structures in which petty tyrannies and repressions flourish.

It is often assumed that conservatives are necessarily middle or upper class. This made some sense when the lower classes divided themselves into the untroubling sort who respected those above them (and sometimes succeeded in joining them), and the troublesome sort who argued and struggled for the abolition of the upper classes (and sometimes succeeded in joining them). Dr Allison notes that the working class were at least as respectable (even the non-conservative amongst them) as the middle classes, and sometimes even more prone to outbreaks of unruliness. The point is that Dr Allison finds as much merit in the working class as in the middle class and that usefully reveals a further conservative complication.

Unpopular conservatives
In reminding us of the sheer variety of conservatisms, Dr Allison helps remind us how silly it is that modern conservatism is widely perceived to be a minority sport. It seems to be the preserve of admirable if prickly types - anally-retentive purists and prigs, at their worst - who have endangered the Conservative political party and allowed New Labour's mush to seem almost attractive.

Actually, of course, conservatism is more or less what almost all adults live by. It is more or less capable of coherent expression. But conservatism is complicated because it is most of society. It is where one is when one isn’t a revolutionary or a radical. It is conflicted and contested because it is the widespread habit of building a rule-based society. It needs to chafe as little as possible and to be capable of change.

The politics of the country doesn't stack up that way. The Tories still have the problem of “entitlement” and Labour can still play the underdog. As Dr Allison might put it, the Tories are thought pompous and to demand respect. In his book, they are bound to be deserving of contempt. Labour plays to that by insisting on everyone's right to sneer at the Tories. So the old stereotypes persist. Tories crave respect and look undeserving; Labour offers resentment and is forgiven its chippiness.

Conclusion
If it were just another diatribe against political correctness, this book wouldn't be new or much use. It isn't especially constructive, in the sense of giving us a recipe for the good society. But it is of value because it forces us conservatives to reconsider the necessary dark heart of our dislike of the politically-correct. We who are inclined to lament the "retreat of respectability" have to remember that politeness won’t build the world we want.

Lincoln Allison's book is a delightfully un-neurotic, unfussed account of many of the contradictions which ought more to entertain than daunt the conservative.

Richard D. North is the author of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence and Scrap the BBC!: Ten Years to Set Broadcasters Free.

Ten years ago or more I read Ruth Dudley Edwards's early detective stories and enjoyed them enormously. They were clever, well-plotted, with attractive characters, witty dialogue and free of the tiresome left-wing attitude that so many detective fiction writers seem to consider to be de rigueur these days. Then, for one reason or another, I did not read any of the later novels (she, too, had a gap in writing them, returning to the genre after a number of hefty historical volumes) until I started on the latest one, Murdering Americans.

Many things seem to have changed. In the first place, Dr Dudley Edwards's detective novels do not seem to be published or even reprinted in Britain. Even the excellent Murder One bookshop in Charing Cross Road, seems to stock very few of her books and all of them in American - and, therefore, considerably more expensive - editions.

There have also been changes in the books themselves, though I have been vaguely aware of the introduction of a new character, the formidable Baroness Troutback known to one and all as Jack. Still, the changes have been extensive and not, in my opinion, particularly beneficial.

There was also Robert's girlfriend, the FCO high-flyer Rachel Simon and after the third novel, a cat called Plutarch with lots of personality. What do we have in the latest novel? All these people have been shunted to the sidelines with Ann Milton disappearing completely, an event that I might have to investigate by delving into the novels in-between.

Jim Milton is now a Commander and Ellis Pooley an Inspector, getting married to the gorgeous, highly intelligent and very right-wing Mary-Lou who is black and from a Baptist family from the American South. She seems to be a budding media personality. Rachel Simon has lost her job and is relying on Robert's future career as a detective story writer. The two young couples get married at the beginning of the novel and much hilarity ensues from the mismatches of the various families.

At the centre of the novel is "Jack" Troutback and she is a Character with a capital "C". One of my failures in the classic detective fiction department is that I dislike Characters with a capital "C". I have no difficulty in smiling at eccentricity, whether it is Sherlock Holmes's anti-social activity or Hercule Poirot's pernicketiness. But I have never taken to Sir Henry Merrivale (HM) or Dr Gideon Fell, indistinguishable from each other, in my opinion, as are the two authors, John Dickson Carr and Carter Dickson, being really the same person.

Baroness Troutback is rude, self-obsessed with lots of idiosyncrasies like smoking cigars or pipes and singing big-band songs very badly as well as voraciously bi-sexual and unable to give a coherent account of anything, being rather anxious to make elliptical statement. Thankfully, the social revolution since the days of HM has allowed lowly followers to tell the Character to get a move on as they haven't got all day. Her take on being anti-PC is to be unpleasantly offensive to anyone who comes her way. "Jack" Troutback is clearly not based on any real member of the House of Lords. Those ladies are formidable but never rude, especially not to waiters who cannot answer back.

The plot revolves round an incredibly PC college in New Paddington, Indiana, called Freeman University, where a totalitarian regime has been imposed under the guise of diversity by the criminal President, the tyrannical Provost and her thug of a henchman. Through a number of interesting developments, Baroness Troutback, the head of a college in Cambridge, is invited to be a Distinguished Visiting Professor (DVP).

Understandably, she does not like what she finds. She does not like the food, the people, the habits, the fact that it is no longer the forties or fifties in middle America, the diversity police, the control freakery or the destruction of anything resembling academic standards. Lady Troutback seems sublimely unaware how much of what she dislikes exists in England, which, in a head of a Cambridge college and active member of the House of Lords is surprising, to put it mildly.

Still her rudeness becomes an asset when she tackles the poisonous PC and diversity brigade. She senses that there is some criminal activity in the background and hires a couple of young private eyes who die in a mysterious car accident. There is also the unexplained death of the previous Dean who maintained high academic standards, so we know who is responsible for his demise.

There is also the mysterious and completely ineffectual guerrilla organization that wants to fight back but does not know how and clearly needs a Boudicca, to wit, "Jack" Troutback. The organization goes under the initials VRC, which stands for Vast Rightwing Conspiracy and takes much inspiration from Ayn Rand and the science fiction, I mean fantasy, writer Terry Goodkind.

So the lady decides to fetch Robert Amiss, who, at least knows what goes on in Britain, though his knowledge of America, libertarian writers and philosophy is so poor that several chapters are happily spent on him being enlightened in the rather odd certainty that the reader is on his level of ignorance.

Among other things Amiss, who was a bright and witty young man in the early books (he is still witty but has turned into a nitwit), does not know is the role the blogosphere has played in America. Apparently, Freeman U is so isolated that they know nothing about right-wing websites, writers or bloggers.

This novel came out last year when the blogosphere led the campaign against the bipartisan immigration amnesty and defeated it. Nobody in this novel knows anything about such matters and blogs are seen as itsy-bitsy little online diaries. Now that is so last century.

While "Jack" is doing the fetching somebody murders the tyrannical Dean and her thuggish sidekick. Needless to say, the police are moronic.

Once Robert has understood what the situation is he starts organizing a revolution, something the poor benighted Yanks cannot manage for themselves. It seems that they need a former junior British civil servant to explain to them how to set up anonymous e-mail addresses.

For all of that, the revolution is quite fun and the reclaiming of Freeman U to academic rigour and American pride is very satisfying. Ruth Dudley Edwards is a superb writer. There can be no question about that.

In the meantime "Jack" Troutback solves the murders by intuition. To be fair, who was responsible for the first three is clear from the very beginning. It is the murderer of the Dean and the thuggish sidekick that is solved by alchemy on the last page of the penultimate chapter.

Did I really dislike this novel? No, actually, it is an excellent read, witty, well-written, clever characterizations and excellent dialogue. But it is not a detective story. It is not even a particularly accurate description of American academia though some of the hits are palpable, indeed.

Maybe Ruth Dudley Edwards will now return her characters to England, reinstate Robert Amiss and his cohorts to the centre of the next novel and sideline the insufferable Baroness Troutback, bringing her out whenever an attack dog is needed on some pompous diversity guru.

Dr Helen Szamuely is a writer and political researcher as well as editor of the Conservative History Journal and co-editor of www.eureferendum.com.

Eighteenth-century travel writing is conventionally treated as a specialised form of literature that is of most concern because of its relationship with the Grand Tour, both in the sense of the accuracy of what was reported and with reference to how far the literature shaped the tourist experience.

This, however, is too narrow an account, because the literature was also of importance in influencing (and reflecting) more general ideological currents and indeed was given a prominent role, as a result, in Tony Claydon's thoughtful and ambitious Europe and the Making of England 1660-1760 (Cambridge, 2007).

Secondly, and related to this, travel writing is of interest because of what it indicates about the role of the interaction with the outside world in shaping British thought in the age of Enlightenment, with this writing seen as a particularly important form of the discovery of enlightenment.

Another element of range is provided by the purpose of writing. In particular, there was a contrast between writing for the anonymous market of strangers, who purchased copies (or viewed paintings), and writing for oneself or for select relatives and friends.

The former, the views expressed in travel literature, are more accessible, through being printed, and the texts themselves are easier and more attractive to read than subsequently published accounts that were never intended for publication. In addition, much of the work on tourism has been done by amateurs lacking the time or resources to search for manuscript sources, and by scholars of literature whose forte has generally lain elsewhere. Both groups have concentrated on readily-accessible published material by prominent figures, without appreciating that such accounts should be regarded not as necessarily typical of the writings and views of tourists, but as works of literature.

Travel literature can be seen to be removed from the experiences of ordinary tourists, not least because, in some cases, it is probable that it was written to be read, as much as a form of fiction, as interesting works at times similar to picaresque novels, rather than as objective descriptions of the travels of individual tourists. Travel literature indeed provided an opportunity for autobiography and literary amateurism, often in the readable context of a heroic or mock-heroic journey. Such literature, however, was not uniform and, in the later eighteenth century, there was a move from the supposedly objective to the frankly subjective, in, for example, the writings of William Beckford.

At the same time, there was a degree of continuity because new works were in many senses explicitly or, more commonly, implicitly commenting on what had come before. Thus, in her Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (1789), Hester Piozzi, who visited Italy in 1784-6, cited Addison, Brydone, Burney, Chesterfield, Cook and Orrery, Hamilton, Howell and Moore.

If borrowing was common, it also was in other aspects of the culture of print, such as cartography. The well-travelled John, 3rd Earl of Bute, who visited Italy in 1768-71, noted that travel writers drew heavily on other works, and was unhappy with what he found in their books. He thought many of the subjects useless or improper, which he blamed on the fact that "writing is become a trade".

As a trade, the frequency of publications suggested that there was a considerable market for such works. This can be atomised, not least between the often very factual nature of guidebooks and the more fluent accounts of travellers. In the former, the narrator was in the background, while, in the latter, he was to the fore, most obviously with Tobias Smollett's Travels through France and Italy (1766). There was clearly a market for both, but the latter enjoyed more attention in the culture of print in Britain.

Authorial intention was not the sole issue. The conventions expected by the market, reviewers and readers, as well as of writers themselves in this context, had to be respected in published work. This can be seen in the correspondence of James Russel, whose Letters from a Young Painter Abroad to his Friends in England (1748-50) were, in part, influenced by the demands of his family, specifically his father and his bookseller brother. Demands upon James, who was in Italy from 1740 until his death, included for a description of a trip to Herculaneum, as well as

some short account of Loreto, Bologna, Ancona and Venice: and some relations of diverting events,

I am truly sensible of the favour you have done me in touching them up, in such a manner, as has made them so acceptable to the public.

writing letters, in order to supply matter for a second volume.

Studying the writing of the Grand Tour has, thus, to confront the limitations of the sources. There is also the question of the agenda-setting by previous commentators, the effect of which was noted in 1763 by Margaret, Lady Spencer:

The chief things thought worth seeing at Turin were, the King’s Palace, the great Theatre, a hunting house of the King’s, and the Church of the Superga from whence there is a glorious view…

This pictorial quality was capable of different moods: there was a contrast between the emphasis on precise accuracy and that on the emotions conjured up by the scene, in short between the narrator as photographer and the narrator as painter. In the former, the writer was in the background and in the latter in the foreground. Each style had an appeal, although the former is less apparent to our post-Romantic sensibility. We are more engaged with the individual response, which make the accounts that sought that approach more interesting than those concerned to provide a uniformly-pertinent response.

Both aspects can also be seen in the social, political, cultural and other reflections of tourists. To take the last, the former are apt to provide a listing of prominent paintings and sculptures, while the latter focus on the individual response. The varied nature of the literature thus serve the different purposes of response.

Jeremy Black is Professor of History, University of Exeter. He is the author - amongst much else - of The Slave Trade, A Short History of Britain, The Holocaust, and The Curse of History.

Professor Antony Flew, author of An Introduction to Western Philosophy (1971), first made his name as a very young philosopher in 1950 by arguing that God wasn't worth believing in. Now aged 85, he's changed his mind. He doesn't say he was wrong to be an atheist. Rather, he insists that he was always prepared to go where the argument took him, and now new evidence goes strongly toward the existence of God, "a divine Source" and "an infinite Intelligence".

He has come to

accept the existence of a self-existent, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, and omniscient Being.

The upshot is that Professor Flew is arguing a fairly weak version of theism. He thinks it's reasonable to believe in a God who can do anything. He thinks lots of unbelievers are unreasonable. This is not very dogmatic or comprehensive stuff.

What I believe (not much)
One has to put one's own cards on the table. I am a whimpering agnostic whose lack of belief has never been tested by terror. Given the mysteries of the universe, I can easily imagine a (very weak Flew position) that there was a Source and one might as well call it God. But I am as impressed as the early Flew was by the problem that wondering about the beginning of the Source is no easier than wondering what the beginning of the universe might have been if it wasn’t the Source. Either on the issue of the godly Source, or on the more specific issue of what God is like and what "he" does, I am fond of the idea of faith, but I don't have it.

If I did suddenly get faith, I imagine it would be of the Christian variety, not least because of the sort of argument put by Don Cupitt (who was Dean at Emmanuel College, Cambridge during my brief and inglorious philosophy studies there in the early 1970s). Cupitt made a rather post-modern argument: Christianity may or may not be true, but it is a most satisfactory and sophisticated telling of a necessary story. When you're trying to colour in the ineffable, Christianity does well. Antony Flew seems to agree: he says that Christianity is "the one to beat" when it comes to religions.

By reason alone
It is crucial to faith that reason is subordinate to it. Anyway, this isn't a problem for Professor Flew, who insists:

My discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith.

Professor Flew now argues that Big Bang theory requires one to posit something which was where and when it all started, and even to kick it off. Flew then argues that the evidence for the sheer rationality of the universe's evolution of life - especially the codes within DNA - is so strong that one has to assume that a rational being has been at work.

I am more inclined to think that modern science merely updates previous arguments for the existence and rationality of God. It doesn't very much reinforce them.

But anyway, new science tends to pose new problems for the argument. For instance, if God was so darned clever in laying out a coded narrative, why did he bother to have a story with a beginning and a very, very long series of middle acts in which species came and went and laid down fossils, and then proceeded to the bits of the story we know about from human experience? Who was all the coded stuff intended to interest considering it was lived out whilst there wasn't anyone about with a brain big enough to discover it? Was God a tease? This is really just a modernised version of the issues Edmund Gosse's very touching father Philip wrestled with as he tried to merge Darwinism with his Plymouth Brethren faith, and the attempt doesn't get any more convincing as time goes on.

It is good fun, by the way, to note that Antony Flew quotes all sorts of heavyweight physicists who believed in God, Einstein and Heisenberg included. He cheerfully prays them in aid of his case though many of them were believers when Flew wasn't one, and most of the science which made them theists well pre-dated the sort of science which Flew argues has necessitated his change of mind to their way of thinking.

Conclusion
I doubt that anyone who has grappled with the nature of religious belief will be changing their mind as a result of this book. But that's not to say it isn't valuable. For a start, it is a very readable memoir from a man who was at the heart of the philosophical debates of the mid twentieth-century. It is a lively account of why Flew early on rumbled the excesses of the logical positivist school which tried to outlaw all discussion about things which weren't knowable. So it becomes one of the most easy-going guides to some very difficult ideas. Bits of it have some Americanised and even flip language, but they may well come from Antony Flew's co-author.

One of the comforting features of the book is that it reminds one that clever people and some of their most challenging thinking doesn't really add up to a row of beans. It is hard not to assume that this old theist is doing lots of wishful thinking, just as he did when he was an atheist.

Richard D. North is the author of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence and Scrap the BBC!: Ten Years to Set Broadcasters Free.

There are reports of chaos in many police stations as a result of the Legal Services Commission insisting on calls for legal assistance being channelled through a call centre. Some may remember the Legal Services Commission, or LSC as it is commonly known, as the Legal Aid Board: it is the body which administers the legal aid scheme.

Call centre staff have often been using contact details which are out of date and bungling referrals through insufficient knowledge of what is required. LSC spokesmen have dismissed the problems as teething difficulties, but the muddle was all predictable. (See my earlier, CDS Direct - call centre advice for suspects in custody: Jan Davies explains how a little noticed reform of the legal aid system will undermine a suspects' right to legal representation ).

The rules for the use of the call centre are farcical: for example, if a solicitor is instructed by a suspect's family that he is in police custody, they can attend without going through the call centre: if they are contacted by the man himself they should not. The Criminal Law Solicitors Association is collecting the tales of inefficiency and encouraging its members to make formal complaints.

Unfortunately, this area in which criminal legal aid work is being made inefficient is not the only way in which the LSC's constant interference is causing difficulties. Its contracts for barristers to work on very high costs cases (frauds and other cases which result in lengthy trials) have been treated with contempt by members of the Bar as inequitable. Out of 2,300 barristers who were offered contracts to undertake such work only 203 have signed up.

On 14th January 2008 new contracts for criminal legal aid work came into force. All solicitors' firms doing such work had to indicate by 31st October 2007 that they would be prepared to sign the contracts, and had to give this indication before the contract had been sent to them, In July new contracts of 18 months' duration only are to be issued and then the system is to be plunged into competitive tendering. The LSC prefer to call this Best Value Tendering, presumably on the basis that this sounds softer, but the process is to be competitive and is intended to drive prices down.

14% of solicitors' firms who were doing criminal work are said to have decided not to bother continuing. Some new firms have signed up, but these are likely to be sole practitioners or very small firms fragmenting from those who have given up altogether, operating on shoestrings from home or with very short leases and intending to give up when competitive tendering is introduced.

On 29th November 2007 the Commission issued a press release. It was an interesting piece of spin. The Commission described a Court of Appeal judgment as a welcome "clarification" and said:

This now enables us to move forward with greater certainty.

The contract for civil work contained clauses which allowed the Commission to amend it almost at will. While it is inevitable that during the life of a long contract there will have to be some amendments in response to changing circumstances, the Commission had given itself a very wide power to amend it indeed, to the point where they would be able to re-write the contract. The Court of Appeal described the contracts as "an extreme case", and the Commission will now have to pay not only the costs of the entire case, including the costs of the Law Society, but also damages. It will be interesting to know what the ultimate cost of all this will be to the taxpayer.

You might have thought that having lost so decidedly in court the Commission would have taken the opportunity to reflect and to consider how the judgment impacts upon clauses at present in the criminal contracts issued in January. There was no sign of any humility in their press release, which contained the usual buzz phrases about a "sustainable" legal aid system and "progressing" with reforms.

Even after the court judgment the criminal contracts still contained a clause which said that the Commission may "at our discretion" add to the specification of what is required under the contract "at any time". There were provisions for consultation to take no longer than 6 weeks, or even as little as 21 days, but the amendments could be with individual contractors as well as generally. Put bluntly they wished to amend the contract whenever they felt like it and with whomsoever they pleased. They also wished to terminate the contracts at short notice, but said they would do so:

only when we consider it necessary or desirable to do so in order to facilitate a reform of the Legal Aid Scheme.

It is impossible to run a business with this uncertainty. Firms with long office leases will be seeking to escape from them. Staff will not be offered any sort of job security. No sensible person is going to want to enter criminal legal aid work. The Commission talks about firms needing to "restructure", by which they mean sacking the experienced and qualified staff and employing low paid people to do the bulk of the work. A person with a problem is unlikely to see a solicitor at the start of his case.

In 1994 Mike McConville, Lee Bridges and others published Standing Accused. It was widely read, particularly by the Legal Aid Board which was said to have funded the research. The book describes the behaviour of what I would call the bucket firms - firms which employ a large number of unqualified staff, in which files are passed around like unwanted parcels and there is little care of cases. The abuses it described were very familiar to those associated with large firms, yet the book's illogical conclusion was that large firms were to be preferred. This theme has been taken up enthusiastically by the Legal Services Commission, although as the House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee noted in a very thorough and thoughtful report published in May 2007, there is no evidence to support the contention that quality is provided by the large firms.

In any event, although the Commission may want to deal with large firms, the reality is that they are not there. Lord Carter noted in his report published in 2006 that 33% of criminal legal aid firms in 2004-5 had an income of less than £100,000: it can be presumed that these were either sole practitioners or very small firms indeed.

Criminal work and established large firms do not mix. In a traditional firm the partners are concerned with fee targets. The criminal work is rightly seen as low paid and the partners will not want the Commission's auditors crawling all over their office, ticking boxes and rifling through files and telling them how they should run their business. The sole practitioner will typically be someone who began his career in a traditional firm, left when that firm decided to give up crime and set up on his own, being prepared to exchange a low income for the satisfaction of running his own ship. (I am using the word "his" to describe the solicitor, but of course it could also be "her". Women who have found it difficult to achieve partnership in a male dominated firm have made a success of running their own small business.)

The situation is different in London and in some major cities like Liverpool, but in the small or medium sized town you are unlikely to find a large criminal firm. The patchwork of small firms has served the system well, and there is considerable anger at the prospect of being subjected to a competitive tendering process which will undermine the good relations that firms that have with each other. Those who maintain that large means quality usually have no knowledge of the informal working relationships between small firms. We all have each other's home numbers and can easily get help with any police station or court emergency.

I would not expect my doctor or dentist to have to submit to competitive tendering. I know that my doctor is not a businessman but first and foremost a professional, and I want him to concentrate on my health. Similarly, I would not want my dentist - always supposing that I could find someone who still did NHS work - to be looking over his shoulder at auditors rather than concentrating on my teeth. I would also know that once a doctor has been refused a contract he is not going to be there the next time there is a round of competitive tendering - and it is proposed that competitive tendering for legal aid contracts should be every three years.

But sadly, the general public has little regard for solicitors. It is not until a member of their family is in trouble with the police that anyone realizes that solicitors do provide a service. People may be shocked by the treatment of lawyers in Zimbabwe or Pakistan, but their concern rarely extends to interest in our own legal system. Personally, I am considering setting up in business on Brighton Pier, or some other suitable place, and telling fortunes. It would be less stressful and possibly more secure.

Jan Davies has been practising as a solicitor in the criminal courts for over 20 years. She was a founder member of Reading Solicitors Chambers and between 2001 and March 2007 was a senior crown prosecutor in Oxfordshire. She now practises as an advocate in both magistrates and crown courts as an associate member of Reading Solicitors Chambers. She is the author of The Criminal Advocate's Survival Guide (Carbolic Smokeball Company, 2007).

We are headed for a long, long election campaign. The politicians are not sure what they're fighting over, but they know their competing charm and offence offensives have started. Oddly, the newest feature of the campaign may be that victory goes to the party which understands that the British would quite like to have a government again.

The end of baby boomer politics
We've had it with baby boomer politics. We've had it with coteries and courts, dens and sofas. But if we are fed up with that private politics, we are also tired of the public face of politics. We are told that modern politics is about TV studios: that poisonous truth may be about to become untrue. Westminster and Whitehall might yet make a come-back, as bastions of decently-argued policy and its delivery. This is a switch away from post-60s trends. But it needn’t be a backward step to snobbery and stuffiness.

British baby-boomers (the generation born between 1946 and 1964) have damaged the government of their country. They grew up believing they had the key to the universe and everything, but have left their children with a large repair job.

They were the generation of peace, love and Les Événements - but forty and more years on, their passion for immediacy and informality, and their perpetual pseudo-dissidence, have left Britain a much less sound democracy. Their thought-leaders in universities, publishing, the arts, the media (of course) conceived of themselves as liberationists. They didn't notice how perilously close this comes to a creed of demolition. The politicians amongst them wear suits now, but they have a horror of institutions, hierarchy and structure.

They were out of step with their country. Most British people are tolerant and pragmatic, but not nearly as liberal as the new media and political elites think they are or ought to be. The left has had to adjust to a new mass understanding
that capitalism improves living standards. Even the Imagine and Blowin’ In the Wind generation has stealthily changed: the Aldermaston marchers and Grosvenor Square warriors are now Saga tourists (and their children and grandchildren are on an Asian gap year).

The Imagineering generation comes of age
In place of the old politics of division, the 1990s saw the creation of a new politics of the imagination. It was as though the old, very temporary, glamour and magic of John F Kennedy had been revived by the generation which most fell for it. Bill Clinton's triumph was to be thought the first black President, a victim for the therapy age. The trend lives on. Barack Obama, like JFK, wraps himself in unspecified "change" and has managed to seem to be a movement rather than a campaign. Tony Blair pulled off an even smarter actorly stroke. Even more than Kennedy, he inhabited the change that was required. He was the muse of a Britain rebranded in the baby boomer image.

The '68 Revolution hits Downing Street
From start to finish, Tony Blair never understood government. He only knew how to make it work less well. From start to finish, hardly anyone noticed. The result was that he achieved very little. He couldn't even see that Whitehall was ready to delineate and deliver the next stage of the Thatcherite reforms he wanted and she hadn't risked. He got one big result: having sidelined representative democracy, he could embark on an unpopular war. (Leave aside my view that this was his one noble act.)

The issue now is whether a post-baby boomer generation will reinvent good government. I think they may. Modern young people - those under 30 or even 40 - are aware that they have been failed. They have not had the luxury of growing up alongside - even against - real adults who understand social responsibility and structures, and their political equivalents. Sensing this deficit, they are probably up for some quite big shifts. They are the post-dissident generation.

The essence of the present failures of government are easily grasped. For ten years, the New Labour project was successful in undermining Westminster and Whitehall. Tony Blair had reason to fear parliament, home as it was of Labour MPs who hated his reforms. Whitehall horrified Blair, perhaps because it talked about detail. Whitehall knew that things didn't happen merely because they could be imagined and had been announced. Sweat, brains and constancy were required.

The enduring facts of government
Government has struggled with delegation and it always will. From Robert Peel to Harold Wilson and beyond, ministers have wrestled with an intolerable work-load. The answer has been to build a strong, responsive, impartial and apolitical Civil Service in Whitehall. It is corralled into departments, each headed by a member of parliament appointed as a minister with collective responsibility in Cabinet. The Prime Minister is primus inter pares, both supported and challenged by his ministerial colleagues, each with a three-way charge. They are in the PM's Cabinet; they are parliamentarians; and they hold an appointment from the Crown. It's not simple or pretty, but it can and has to be made to work.

Anyway, we have had the remarkable spectacle of four successive Cabinet Secretaries - the most senior men in the Civil Service - queuing up to denounce Blair's "coup" - the silent but deadly trashing of that system. One may wonder why they didn't speak out at the time, when it would have helped much more.
Tony Blair gave us government which could produce a blizzard of eye-catching initiatives before breakfast, but couldn't deliver them in a decade. Our sprightly leader produced a style of government which was casual but closed. He made a Kremlin out of Camelot. Even now, only Sue Cameron's pieces in the Financial Times give us much insight into Gordon Brown's paranoid continuation of Tony Blair's folly.

Restoring things requires us to understand representative democracy, as understood by Edmund Burke and nearly everyone else. This is to say that our version of democracy allows the mass of people to choose an elite - part professional, part patrician - to run its affairs. Subtle but robust institutions ensure that the many tensions within the mass are represented as decisions get made.

Modern government has some schisms and fractures, but no Great Rift. It isn't prone to great narratives. We have no need of Mr Blair's Messiah Politics. The next generation of politicians have to be midwives to a painful evolution of the welfare state and maybe of post-materialist consumption. We need to understand and nurture political and managerial elites in Westminster and Whitehall. These people will have difficult and quite tedious work to do, and will make many mistakes. We need to elect, appoint and retain the best talents we can find. These men and women are not likely to be as well paid as they would be in the private sector. So they will need to be rewarded in respect.

The details of modern representative government will have to be negotiated. Should Civil Servants be more accountable to Parliament, or to ministers, or to their own structures? Can we outsource even more Whitehall functions? How strong should political parties be? What does proper consultation look like? Is politics a profession or a hobby?

What matters first is to get it across that a Prime Minister is only as good as his ministers, and ministers are only as good as their civil servants. And the core of all that is that the PM isn't a visionary, a rock star, a protestor, or a campaigner. He isn't a father to his people, as one suspects Brown would like to be. I know that politics is a retail business. It has to flirt with populism and appearances. But the public are ready to accept that PMs - and all other politicians and civil servants - need to respect and be respected within a great tradition which they can reform but must not traduce. The baby boomer way needs to be history. I am a conservative, and have a certain faith that the Tories will "get" this stuff quicker than anyone else. The LibDems could be very helpful in applauding anyone else who gets it. In the unlikely event of Labour really getting it, they might be rewarded with another term of office.

Richard D. North is the author of Mr Blair's Messiah Politics: Or what happened when Bambi tried to save the world (Social Affairs Unit, 2006) and its 2007 digital update Mr Blair's Messiah Politics: A story of inspired government, 1997-2007.

When I was a medical student, we were taken on a visit to the local prison. Our visit coincided with that of a group of magistrates. One of the magistrates said, as he prepared to leave the prison, that it was so comfortable that he wouldn't mind a little spell in it himself. As these were still the days of slopping out - of night-waste deposited in buckets in cells - I could only conclude that his concept of comfort was rudimentary, or he was lying, or the prison had successfully pulled the wool over his eyes. Of course, most public institutions are excellent at the latter procedure, although it must also be admitted that there are none so blind as will not see.

So when I heard that the assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers' Association had claimed that prisons were now so comfortable that prisoners did not want to leave them even when they had the opportunity to escape, and indeed that some prisons had been broken into rather than broken out of, I was apt to dismiss what he said.

It is certainly true that conditions in prison - at least the physical ones - improved greatly in the years in which I served as a doctor in a prison. It is true also that in my youthful travels in Africa and Latin America, I stayed in rooms that were less comfortable than modern prison cells in Britain. Still, I think it unlikely that many readers of this would find conditions in most British prisons very congenial.

In addition, about a third of prisoners, according to my rough estimate, prefer life in prison to life outside. They used to tell me this in confidence, sotto voce, so that the others did not hear: for to admit that you actually liked prison, and got on well with the officers, was to lose caste, to appear weak and even sissy.

The rather surprising preference of some prisoners for life in prison first occurred to me (and induced me to ask prisoners the question) when I saw them returning to prison and greeting the staff like long-lost friends. On one occasion, a remand prisoner returned from his court appearance in a state of high dudgeon. I asked him why he was so angry. He said:

I got three months.

Good result? Three months is no use to me. I was hoping for at least twelve.

Incapable of self-regulation, they nevertheless like routine, predictability and boundaries. These prison provides for them, often for the only time in their lives; they have never achieved them for themselves. Prison is for them a refuge from chaos, the nearest thing they will ever know to a spiritual retreat.

The chaos of their lives can hardly be exaggerated. Their relations with women are so unstructured, and bring them so much grief in the sense of aggravation, that escape from the female presence (it is rarely company) is also a relief for them. Any nagging sense of responsibility for the children that they have carelessly fathered is also suspended while they are in prison, and they are glad of it. If freedom entails responsibility, they want none of it.

I am here only relating and paraphrasing what many prisoners have told me themselves. It is possible, of course, that they told me what they thought I wanted to hear, though they were not generally so considerate or obliging, and I did my best not to mould their answers to my questions. In any case, their conduct often suggested a willingness or even eagerness to go to prison: such is the demoralisation of our police force that you almost have to make special efforts to be apprehended by it, let alone apprehended by it repeatedly, as recidivists by definition were.

All of this would suggest to some people that our prisons are indeed too cushy, too comfortable; if life is better inside than out for many young men, then the easiest solution to the problem would be to make life inside a good deal less comfortable, until it no longer seemed preferable to life outside.

While I can see the logic of this, I fear it as a proposal because it could so easily give free rein to the potential sadist that lurks, if not in every human breast, then at least in many human breasts. And the scope for sadism in enclosed institutions is very great.

I do not know whether, had I worked in prisons in the 1920s, say, I should have found the same mentality among prisoners. Probably: for, where human beings are concerned, there is nothing new under the sun. It is the numbers that alarm me. I suspect that they are far larger than they used to be, for our social mechanism of producing sturdily independent and responsible adults, what used to be known as the free-born Englishman, has been comprehensively, and I suspect deliberately, smashed up.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. He is the author of the author of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy.

Alan Bennett has always insisted that he is not much interested in spying, but fascinated by exile. In his two short plays, An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution, [performed as the double-bill "Single Spies" at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, 21st -26th April, with Nigel Havers and Diana Quick] the contrast between the banishments of Guy Burgess and Sir Anthony Blunt is made clear in the very opening scenes. In An Englishman Abroad, Burgess (Havers) is rotting in a shabby Moscow apartment, his Soviet-issue dentures don't fit, and the scavenged tomato is treated as a delicacy. All the decencies of life, soap, scotch and cigarettes, have to be cadged or stolen from visiting foreigners such as the actress Coral Browne (Diana Quick). In A question of Attribution, on the other hand, Blunt (Havers) is still in office as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute; he had been unmasked many years earlier, but granted immunity in return for cooperation with the authorities.

But both are unmistakably in exile. Burgess is cut off from his tailor, his friends - Auden, Cyril Connolly, Isherwood - and above all from gossip; in the background a rendition of the Eton boating song on the balalaika signals his homesickness.

Of the two, we feel sorrier for Burgess who has almost shrunk from his former bull-like dimensions to fit the frame of a fey and fragile Havers. When Burgess is serenaded by his Russian companion, Tolya, it is tempting to feel that he has suffered enough. The Climate of Treason - to borrow the title of Andrew Boyle's classic - may have sunny spells (which burst through in Burgess’s forced eulogies on the vitality of the Soviet system), but it is essentially inhospitable.

The two plays are less eloquent on the question of motivation. Coral Browne asks Burgess straight out why he did it. Because he responds, "it seemed the right thing to do at the time"; Blunt says something very similar to his MI5 interrogator. Interestingly, Bennett places very little stress on the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazism, which the traitors themselves often cited in their own defence.

What both pieces show brilliantly is the nature of concealment. Bennett's Burgess reminds us that he never denied his homosexuality or his communist sympathies. This openness became his best disguise: surely somebody so obvious could not be a spy. Burgess hid in plain sight. Bennett's Blunt is continuing his game of hide and seek even after his unmasking. His fascination with Titian - as a series of probing exchanges show - is a reflection of his own predicament and our own obsession with the spying game. As the piece unfolds, the painting more and more resembles a Russian (Soviet?) doll as the various layers are stripped away and x-rayed to reveal more figures, first a third man (Philby), then a fourth (Blunt himself) and finally a fifth (still the subject of speculation). Bennett's point is that there will always be another man: our imagination requires it. And - he wonders - does it really matter whether he exists or not?

Does it matter? That is a question which Bennett often asks in both plays. It is a phrase that trips easily from the lips of a Burgess and a Blunt, to whom few things matter much and most don't matter at all.

In the end, there is actually very little doubt where Bennett himself stands. Coral Browne tells Burgess bluntly that he

pissed in our soup and we drank it.

The treason which Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross committed may not have mattered much to their friends, but for many brave men and women fighting on the other side of the iron curtain against communist dictatorship British treason meant imprisonment and even death. It did matter.

The author thanks Dr Anita Bunyan for her comments on this piece.

Dr Brendan Simms is Reader in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

I am very well travelled within England. I am from the North, live in the Midlands, frequently visit the South East and I've taken many a holiday in the South West. I have played cricket, watched football and given lectures and papers all over the place and, as if that wasn't enough, for fifteen years I wrote "travel" articles about places, mainly in England. I know all the counties well except one: Suffolk. So last week I set out for Aldeburgh to remedy the exception, not so much because it was the home of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears as because it is as far from anywhere not in Suffolk as it is possible to be.

Suffolk is a flat county, the eighth largest in England with around 1,500 square miles and something under three quarters of a million people. It has no motorways, no "first class" cricket and one professional football club, Ipswich Town, which I have always considered too far to go for an away game. It probably has a university these days, but not one I've ever heard of nor been invited to. In short, it is "periphery" rather than "core" even though much of it is within a hundred miles of London.

It is not part of what geographers call the "coffin", the rectangle of land from Southampton to London to Leeds to Liverpool (very roughly) which had most of the demographic and economic growth of the twentieth century. However, in the last twenty years of the last century Suffolk did some catching up as the population went up by 13%.

Indeed the county's greatest pilgrimage these days is to Sutton Hoo, the boat-burial place of Saxon kings on a ridge above the River Deben where the greatest hoard of Saxon treasure was discovered in 1939. We owe this discovery to a medieval farmer whose ploughing lopped off one end of a barrow and thus inadvertently fooled later (mainly Tudor) looters as to where any treasure might be located, but it changed our view of history and the "Dark Ages" because of the high quality of workmanship and the items with origins in Byzantium and India.

You could argue that there isn't much to Sutton Hoo as it stands because most of the artefacts are in the British Museum, leaving a field full of bumps and a shed with a pedagogic display on the Anglo-Saxons. But our guide, a lady whose age I found difficult to estimate, made it all a five star experience, bringing life and atmosphere to her tale of ghostly visions and the dogged determination of the local, thirty-bob-a-week, archaeologist, Basil Brown.

If another feature of Englishness is the dissolute, devil-may-care, heroically eccentric aristocracy, then the greatest of all may be found in Suffolk: the Herveys of Ickworth with their rotunda of a house which they furnished on a four year trip to the Mediterranean. Their sexual history is jaw dropping and it may be that the tradition is not dead: Lady Isabella Hervey (born 1982) has been voted (among other things) "World's Sexiest Aristocrat".

But Suffolk excels generally at the English art of re-inventing itself to fit what we think it should have been. If I had a pound for everything I saw or consumed which was "traditional" or "Suffolk" (or even both) I would have left the county with a large profit. It's strong on real ale, of course, with Adnam's of Southwold and Greene King of Bury St. Edmunds. And real food: dressed crab from a fisherman's hut on Aldeburgh's shingle beach, excellent kippers for breakfast, splendid platters of traditional Suffolk cheeses (none of which existed thirty years ago), local bacon, sausages and so on. Anyone who thinks that the campaigns for English food and "local sourcing" led by Gordon Ramsay, Rick Stein et al. have not had effect should visit Suffolk.

Most impressive of all is the traditional Suffolk wildlife engineered by the combined efforts of the National Trust, Nature Conservancy, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and local authorities. As we entered Southwold a marsh harrier reared up over the car: there was once thought to be only a single breeding pair left in the country. Bitterns boomed over Minsmere; they were once thought to be completely gone from the British mainland. We sat for some time watching two avocets, each standing on one leg with its heads tucked underneath its wing as if trying to ignore the vulgarities of the ducks and terns squawking around them.

And architecturally, Lavenham is the most perfect medieval town. That is to say, it is actually early Tudor, but Suffolk was, as ever, behind the times and its eccentrically shaped and leaning timber-frame buildings completely fulfil our image of the medieval.

As a man of the hills I have to concede that flat land is a great deal more varied and interesting than I tend to assume. The Sussex Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty contains reed beds, mudflats, woodlands, coastal heaths, inland heaths and shingle as well as farmland and every kind of river, mere, broad, dyke and pond. From most of them you can see the largest building in the region, which is the nuclear power station at Sizewell. It looks like a cross between a very large warehouse and a mosque. For some people this might be thought to "ruin" the place. But you could take the more inclusive view of my eldest son towards the concept of the seaside. Sniffing disdainfully at Cape Cod he remarked that,

This is not real seaside. Real seaside smells of chips and you can always see a nuclear power station.

You get to Thorpeness by walking north from Aldeburgh, either up the beach or on the path through the nature reserve inland. As you approach the skyline is dominated by two buildings which appear to be a normal East Anglian clapboard house suspended over a forest and a Norman castle. They are in fact "the house in the clouds" (you can google it – and rent it for up to £3000 a week) and a block of flats in the shape of a Norman castle. In the nineteenth century Thorpeness was a small fishing village rumoured to be involved with smuggling.

But in the first third of the twentieth century G. Stuart Ogilvie (1858-1932) turned it into a holiday village where people could live as if "in Merrie England". Ogilvie was a Scot, a lawyer, a would-be playwright and a friend of J. M. Barrie. He made his big money investing in Russian railways. His village is not quite like anything else: a place of timber-framed houses and 1928 almshouses, of duck ponds and boating lakes, but also of tennis courts and golf courses. William Morris and Robert Blatchford meet Betjemanesque sporty suburbia - an alternative place to set The Prisoner or Hot Fuzz or an episode of Midsomer Murders. There is some evidence that people are slightly ashamed of Thorpeness: it doesn't feature at all on the County Council's website map of the county and it has been voted "weirdest place in England". But I think it is a fine, if extreme, example of the English ability to let fantasy mould reality.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career in 2004 to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton.

Is Stefan Collini our most ecological critic? It would be hard to think of anyone else who has taken so much to heart in their academic lives the urgency of the need to recycle. Common Reading, like English Pasts and (to a lesser degree) Public Moralists, is a collection of previously-published essays loosely grouped around, not so much a theme as a set of recurrent preoccupations. Of the twenty four chapters in Common Reading, twenty one have already been published (nine as reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and nine as reviews in the London Review of Books). Only three are new.

As with Collini's most recent book, the witty and acute Absent Intellectuals [see my review, Why are English intellectuals so obsessed with the absence of English intellectuals? ], the general subject of these essays is British intellectual life in the twentieth century. The range of figures and subjects covered is impressive, from Cyril Connolly to Perry Anderson, from autodidacticism to contemporary Higher Education.

And yet, as was also to some extent the case with Absent Intellectuals, and as is perhaps inevitable given the piecemeal composition of these articles, Collini mounts no large arguments. This is both a strength and a limitation. Insofar as Absent Intellectuals did nail its colours to the mast of a large argument, it was a large argument about the misleadingness of large arguments (in this case, the widespread contention that the British were a peculiarly un-intellectual nation, and that their characteristic strengths entailed a suspicion of - normally French - intellectualism).