The things one worries about are seldom the things that come to pass. It seems strange now to reflect that, as we prepared to launch Call Me Dave, Isabel Oakeshott and I would sometimes wonder whether our biography of David Cameron was going to get the attention we thought our two years’ graft merited.

So, we’re not complaining about the ­deluge of coverage. Like Kim Kardashian’s posterior, it almost broke the internet – although the anecdote that caused such a sensation was only a few paragraphs out of 200,000 words and was never presented as fact (rather as a curious tale that could be believed or otherwise). In relating this story there was never any intention to be nasty, or to judge the PM for taking part in such antics – if indeed he did. We all did a few daft things when we were young.

Not a hatchet job

One notion I would contest is that Call Me Dave was planned as a hatchet job. It is nearly 600 pages long, and we went to great lengths to speak to dozens of sources who were both sympathetic and close to the PM; some, inevitably, on condition of anonymity. They gave us a great deal of material that reflects well on him. We wanted to produce a thorough, balanced and impartial biography, and – colourful anecdotes notwithstanding – I think anyone who reads the whole book will agree that this is what we have done. As we make clear, Cameron has much of which to be proud.

Perils of the papers

The downside of having your book serialised in a newspaper is that you do not get to write the headlines. The Daily Mail gave us a great showing, but “Revenge” is not quite the word I would have chosen to sit above the first day’s coverage. Many in Westminster knew that my relationship with Cameron was not as close as it once was, and I wanted to clarify why this was the case: essentially, I believe I was offered a position that never materialised. I was upfront about that in the preface, but what follows that introduction is objective. After all, my co-author, who is a former political editor of the Sunday Times, has no beef with Dave.

So why did I write it? John Rentoul, an ­astute observer of these things, had an alternative theory about my motive: “It would seem that [Ashcroft] is obsessed with politics, is interested in finding things out and has a sense of mischief. He sounds like a journalist.” There is a world of difference between mischief and rancour. Those who know me know I enjoy the first but am too busy getting on with life for the second. I’d say Rentoul is just about spot-on.

Eton invitation

The first day of serialisation naturally brought a flood of messages, crafted in varying degrees of civility. Most polite of all, and most unexpected, was an invitation to speak to the political society at Eton College. Evidently I have not yet been blackballed from every corner of the establishment.

Yellow exodus?

A pleasing by-product of all the polling I have published over the past five years has been the chance to get to know people on all sides of politics. One such new pal is Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson.

He may prove to be right that Labour MPs unhappy with the Corbynite dispensation will nevertheless conclude that defecting to the Liberal Democrats would be “like leaving the Beatles to join a Bananarama tribute band”. But voters are not the same as MPs. Fewer than ever think they have much to lose by switching parties. As I found in my Project Red Dawn research, conducted before Corbyn’s election was confirmed, while Labour-Conservative switchers found the move tough, defectors to Ukip never looked back. And few Labour loyalists voted with any enthusiasm.

It may seem a distant prospect, but the idea of a Lib Dem revival built on centrist Labour voters who think their party has departed from reality – especially if the Tories start to behave as though they are taking the next election too much for granted – is not entirely fanciful. Not entirely.

Jezture politics

On my 2013 trip to Brighton to listen to Ed Miliband, I was surprised he did not do more to reassure voters about the economy, welfare and immigration. As I write this, the party is back at the seaside listening to its new anti-capitalist shadow chancellor set out his plans for higher taxes, and looking forward to hearing the leader the Sun has concisely christened “Mad Jezza”. Two years ago, I concluded that Ed Miliband thought he could win with the support he already had. The question now is whether the Corbynists don’t realise they are electorally doomed, or whether they don’t care. (At least, after 1997, the debate in the Conservative Party was over how to win again.)

Soon after the election the Labour MP Jon Cruddas came to see me to compare notes on how to learn the lessons of successive trouncings. He has now produced a superb analysis. But will anyone in the party who doesn’t already understand be prepared to listen? As Louis Armstrong sagely obser­ved, “There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.”

And for my next trick . . .

Readers will not have to wait long for my next book – in fact, it’s out this week. Pay Me Forty Quid and I’ll Tell You, written with Kevin Culwick, the director of Lord Ashcroft Polls, collects the findings of my general election focus groups to tell the story of the campaign as seen by real voters.

One lesson is that most people have better things to do than pay attention to politics. But the voters are the heroes of the book. They sometimes miss things or get the wrong end of the stick, but they know what’s going on and they know what they’re doing – as conference-goers of all colours would do well to remember.

“Call Me Dave” by Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott is out now (Biteback, £20)

Much has been written of late about the genre of folk horror, or what Robert Macfarlane recently dubbed “eerie England”: those depictions in modern culture of an ongoing fear of the rural. It’s no coincidence that this resurgence has coincided with the growth of a digital world that harbours anonymous foes lurking in dark, new territories. There is perhaps some comfort to be found in those old, mythological fears evoked by strange reckonings in rural backwaters; often unexplainable, yes, but at least recognisable.

The move from an agrarian to an urbanised society and a financial recession have played their part, too. The more interconnected we become, the more detached we are from the soil that spawned us – and the more portentous our indigenous myths seem. In essence, the appeal of folk horror is its challenge to modernity. YouTube offers a plethora of post-Wicker Man cinematic delights, while the influence of the genre is evident in The League of Gentlemen on television, the films of Ben Wheatley (Kill List, A Field in England) and the continued interest in writers such as Alan Garner and Robert Aickman, as well as in a wealth of contemporary music.

Andrew Michael Hurley’s debut novel taps in to all this to great effect. First published in 2014 by the Yorkshire Dales-based Tartarus Press, which deals in elegant editions of supernatural works from writers such as Arthur Machen and Edith Wharton, The Loney belongs to the same Victorian tradition of fireside storytelling. All the tropes of the genre are here: a decaying house, hostile locals, restrained Englishness and a malevolent sense of doom that pulses through the prose to quicken the heart rate and have readers licking their thumbs. Yet this is neither homage nor pastiche but rather an updating of an age-old narrative approach.

Set in the 1970s, the novel concerns the annual pilgrimage of a stuffy collective of London-based Catholics to the damp, nowhere coast of Lancashire, somewhere “between the Wyre and the Lune”, known as the Loney, where the tide perilously rushes across dangerous sands. The group is led by the likeable Father Bernard, who has replaced the recently deceased Father Wilfred, and is dominated by the devout and overbearing matriarch Mummer, the mother of the story’s teenage narrator, Tonto, and his mute brother, Hanny.

They head to the remote house of a former taxidermist. Cut to an outhouse full of stuffed animals in various states of disrepair. The portents and tropes continue: there are jars filled with urine and toe clippings to ward off witches, a climactic evocation of voodoo and a diabolical effigy swinging in the woods:

From inside a dark cowl, a sheep’s skull rubbed with boot polish lolled against the pull of the rope by which it had been strung to the bough, its snooker ball eyes knocking against the bone.

Like so much horror and suspense, at its heart The Loney pitches the urban against the rural and conventional religious belief against something darker and more ambiguous. It is a supernatural story about faith and, in the case of both the teenage narrator and the mildly sadistic Father Wilfred, the loss of it. For the latter, faith disappears in one fleeting, catastrophic moment on a grey English beach as he stands “watching the gulls flocking for the crustaceans left behind, and the clouds slowly knotting into new shapes, and the parasites warming in the carcass of some thing”. Life, he realises, is “all just machinery”.

Such is the strength of Hurley’s prose that even though not a great deal happens, the sense of foreboding is enough to pull you in. He summons a suffocating elemental tension, in which even the pages start to feel damp with swirling sea fret and the tide that rushes in across the sands is as much a threat as the scowling, church-desecrating locals. Here, perhaps, the characterisation resembles a little too closely those pitchfork-waving archetypes of 1970s folk-horror TV productions such as Robin Redbreast and Murrain. Hurley writes well, however, about the myriad rituals of Catholicism – evoking “the smells of benediction and snuffed candles” – and its foundation of fear and guilt. As in the best of Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh, it is the challenging of Catholicism’s core tenets by external forces that forms the biggest tension here.

Does The Loney disturb? Not especially. But it’s a tale of suspense that sucks you in and pulls you under. As yarns go, it rips.

The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray (360pp, £14.99)

“Beastings” by Benjamin Myers is published by Bluemoose Books

Jeremy Corbyn knows that he is a leader who does not have the support of many of his MPs. This was why, in his set-piece speech to the Labour party conference in Brighton, he made pointed reference to his “mandate” and the many tens of thousands of new party members whose wave of adulation carried him to victory. If he is to succeed, he will have to bypass his MPs and work through the members and activists as he seeks to create a “more caring” and “kinder” society. Mr Corbyn’s phrase for his approach, used again in his speech, is “bottom-up” politics.

The politics of Mr Corbyn and his most loyal ally, John McDonnell, now an improbable shadow chancellor, were forged during the Bennite wars of the early 1980s. For them the annual conference, not the parliamentary party, is the forum in which policy should be decided. First, they have to get their supporters represented on the conference floor and in the key decision-making bodies of the party, such as the National Executive Committee (NEC). This process has begun: Rebecca Long-Bailey, a supporter of Mr Corbyn, has replaced Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary and a noted moderate, on the NEC. Community, which backed Yvette Cooper in the leadership race, has been replaced by the more left-wing bakers’ union.

Mr Corbyn’s speech was long, at just under an hour, and respectfully received in the hall. It was, on the whole, repetitious, without structure, devoid of arresting phrases apart from when he quoted the novelists Maya Angelou and Ben Okri, and delivered haltingly. It used sections sent in by a writer who had offered the same passages to every Labour leader since Neil Kinnock.

Mr Corbyn attacked the loathed media, notably the “commentariat”, as well as hedge funds, Saudi Arabia and the Tories. He spoke repeatedly in praise of solidarity and diversity. There were restatements of his core beliefs and of his hatred for inequality but very little on education and home ownership. However, his aspiration to build 100,000 new council houses a year is necessary and admirable.

More troublingly for a party that was routed in Scotland and, excluding London, has only 11 out of 197 seats south of the metaphorical line that runs from the River Severn to the Wash, no attempt was made to address a sceptical wider electorate. He did not mention Labour’s general election defeat in May or even attempt to discuss the reasons for it. Yet Mr Corbyn’s great strength is his conviction. If he goes down in flames, he will do so on his own terms, in his own way.

The Labour leader was not helped by the absence of a large faction of Corbynistas in the conference hall. Most of the delegates representing their constituency parties were long-time members, rather than the new recruits who joined after the general election or paid £3 to vote as “supporters”.

All of this, as well as the desire of senior MPs (notably the new deputy leader, Tom Watson) to respect Mr Corbyn’s mandate, has given events in Brighton the feel of the early exchanges in a phoney war. The serious battles – on Trident renewal (Mr Corbyn has reaffirmed his unilateralism); opposition to welfare cuts and a benefits cap; the mandatory reselection of MPs – have been put on hold.

Indeed, the luminous late-summer sunshine in Brighton contributed to the sense of unreality. First, the defeat in the general election and then the arrival of an unexpected leader: MPs are grappling to understand the new world in which they find themselves.

Away from the main conference, at fringe meetings and in the bars and cafés of the seaside town, there was intrigue and conspiracy. The self-described “moderates” who have refused to serve in the shadow cabinet are already plotting. They are also embracing a new culture of open debate and of what one called “creative destruction”.

Mr Corbyn is convinced that he is the harbinger of a new politics and he has certainly acted as a catalyst for a kind of enthusiasm unseen in the Labour Party since perhaps the early 1960s. No one can doubt that Labour is on the brink of convulsive change. 

Sport means more when there’s a whiff of death in the air, when there is a very short distance between fun and horror, when someone – when you – could die for a thrill, for a laugh, for the joy of beating the other buggers. Guy Martin, a motorcyclist who takes part in the notorious TT races on the Isle of Man, talks about “that near-death thing”. In 1999, Polly Phillipps was one of five horse riders killed in separate incidents. Vere Phillipps, her husband, qualified as an eventer so that he could compete on his late wife’s horse – the one she was riding when she died – at the daunting Burghley event. “I’ll never get another chance to ride a horse Polly trained,” he said by way of explanation.

People who take part in risk sports – without exception, in my experience – reject any suggestion that they are half in love with easeful death and do so with bewilderment and dismay. No, they say: they are wholly in love with testing life.

Andy Bull takes on the intertwined stories of the four Americans who won the bobsleigh event at the Winter Olympics of 1932, which were held at Lake Placid in New York State. It may be another world in social terms and it may be another universe so far as sport and the Olympic Games are concerned but there is still that moment of stillness at the top of the run, that faint odour of mortality.

Each member of the team has a story worth savouring. Jay O’Brien was a rakehell and a gambler, one of those figures, incomprehensible to modern senses, who could get away with anything because of his charm and social connections. He took the adventurer’s place in the bob. Eddie Eagan was that rare thing, a man who lived rather than dreamed the American dream. He came from a poor background but could box the hell out of anyone. He also had a taste for books. He became a Rhodes scholar and an Olympic boxer; he is still the only athlete to have won a gold medal at both the summer and the winter Olympics. Clifford Grey was a semi-innocent bystander who got roped in when the American team needed another bod at the St Moritz Winter Olympics of 1928. He worked in films and musicals and is often confused – even in his sporting career – with the Englishman Clifford Grey, who wrote the lyrics for “If You Were the Only Girl (in the World)”.

The book’s hero is Billy Fiske, who was only 16 when he drove the American sled to victory in 1928 and 20 when he completed the double. We would recognise him as an athlete today, despite his privileged background. He had plenty of natural talent but also a taste for training and hard work. In the amateur years, he was a natural professional – and, it seems, a damn good guy. He joined the RAF in the Second World War and was killed in action. A man worth celebrating.

But this is an odd book. The reader feels like an intruder, butting in on a 400-page synopsis for a film. Did they say, at the editorial conference, “You know, Chariots of Fire meets Cool Runnings?” Bull writes in his acknowledgements that the subject wasn’t his idea but a reader might have guessed as much. We have competence instead of passion. A great deal of research has gone into this book and Bull spares us none of it. As a result, the four tales are not cleanly told and it is easy to lose your way among the legions of minor characters. This isn’t science: God doesn’t dwell in the details. God is narrative. But perhaps they’ll sort that out in the film.

The best bits are the sport. As always, the truth is in the action, even if it’s all briefer than you might have hoped (afterwards, there is a lengthy what-happened-next ­section and, again, the story gets muddied). Besides, you mistrust a writer who tells you  early on: “Every galaxy needs a star.” What, only one?

It’s the racing that stays with you. Bull quotes Steven Holcomb, the US bobsledder who won gold in 2010: “You go over that edge and you will crash. And if you hang back from it, you will lose.” Sport in a line.

Speed Kings by Andy Bull is published by Bantam Press (400pp, £17.99)

John McDonnell, Shadow chancellor

After his divisive appointment, the shadow chancellor shored up his position through a rapid charm offensive. Striking an emollient tone and framing himself as a dour "bank manager" (albeit one who still supports direct action), he avoided the incendiary remarks for which he is renowned. At last night's Campaign for Labour Party Democracy fringe, it was his speech, rather than Corbyn's, that MPs and activists cited as their highlight of the week. His vow to vote in favour of George Osborne's fiscal charter, despite his anti-austerity stance, did not result in the left-wing backlash that some anticipated. McDonnell has enough credibility among this wing of the party to get away with such realpolitik (as he all but admitted, his support is merely symbolic). Meanwhile, his economic advisory committee, including Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, Mariana Mazzucato, David Blanchflower, Simon Wren-Lewis and Ann Pettifor, and his announcement that former civil service head Bob Kerslake would lead a review into the Treasury impressed even sceptical wonks.

Tom Watson, Deputy leader

In the dying hours of the conference, Watson rose to give the finest speech of the week. In marked contrast to Jeremy Corbyn, Labour's new deputy leader delivered an impassioned tribute to the power of government and New Labour's achievements in office. His call for activists to "move on from our summer of introspection" showed just why even some of his old Blairite enemies regard him as the party's last, best hope. His serious, wide-ranging address, including lengthy sections on business and the digital revolution, showed why some speak of him as a potential replacement for Corbyn.

After securing his own significant mandate on 12 September, Watson had an assured first conference as deputy leader. Having started the job both politically and personally distant from Corbyn, he has quickly forged a bond with the new chief, accompanying him to 37 events. For now, his loyalty to the new leader is absolute. "Let’s be clear: because he’s the people’s choice, he’s the right choice," he said in his speech. But if Corbyn's leadership leads to an ever-more marginalised Labour, his opponents will look to Watson to do what is necessary.

Hilary Benn, Shadow foreign secretary

Having been outplayed by Jeremy Corbyn over EU membership in the days following his election, Benn has emerged strengthened from the conference. Corbyn's support for the In campaign and Nato membership is no longer in doubt and the shadow foreign secretary secured another important victory over Syria. The Labour leader has all but guaranteed that MPs will have a free vote on military action against Isis and Benn was able to advocate UN-backed air strikes in his speech (declaring elsewhere that "collective responsibility" had effectively ceased to exist). Corbyn's decision to accompany him to last night's Labour Friends of Israel reception was further evidence of his moderating influence. Benn was removed from Labour's NEC in favour of Corbyn supporter Rebecca Long-Bailey (though members say he was rarely present). But in the bars of Brighton, he was increasingly discussed as a potential leader should the incumbent depart before the general election.

Luke Akehurst, Labour First secretary

As conference once again becomes a defining battleground, the super-activist has emerged as a key player. Labour First, the moderate group he leads, was forced to hold its fringe meeting outside when hundreds assembled at The Mash Tun Pub. Tom Watson, Yvette Cooper, Rachel Reeves and, in a gesture of unity, Progress director Richard Angell were among those who addressed members. Akehurst's organisational acumen helped ensure the Trident motion was not selected for debate. Following Labour First's appeal to keep the divisive issue off the agenda, just 7.1 per cent of constituency delegates voted in favour of it. As the left's opponents plan their fightback, Akehurst's group will be one of the most important gathering points.

Lillian Greenwood, Shadow transport secretary

The new holder of the post, who replaced her former boss Michael Dugher (now shadow culture secretary), has made an assured start. The Nottingham South MP benefited from the degree of consensus in the party over rail renationalisation, allowing her to confirm the first major policy change under Corbyn. Labour is now committed to taking franchises into public ownership as they expire. She is one of the shadow cabinet members most favoured by Corbynites but showed her willingness to challenge her leader by ending any lingering uncertainty over Labour's support for HS2.

On the morning after his first address to conference as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn was pressed by Sarah Montague on the question of whether, as prime minister, he would ever use the nuclear button. “No” said Corbyn. “I am opposed to the use of nuclear weapons. I am opposed to the holding of nuclear weapons.”

This puts Labour’s leader at odds with his own party’s policy (the position in which Jeremy Corbyn has, historically, felt most comfortable). It also, of course, undermines the rationale for holding nuclear weapons, which is to deter others from using them on you, in case you use them back (which is why Corbyn’s own shadow defence secretary immediately deemed his answer unhelpful).

In a sense, none of this matters, since Corbyn is never going to be in a position to take such a decision, partly because of unserious answers like this. There is a respectable case that Trident shouldn’t be renewed – it’s just that he didn’t make it, and wouldn’t know where to begin. This exemplifies a problem that extends beyond the issue of national security, and beyond Corbyn: the way in which false dichotomies of perfect versus good shut down serious thought.

Corbyn told Humphreys: “I am opposed to the use of nuclear weapons. I am opposed to the holding of nuclear weapons. I want to see a nuclear-free world. I believe it is possible.” Like many of Corbyn’s statements, much of this is impossible to disagree with. Even the most hawkish American neo-cons do not pretend that using nuclear weapons is a good idea – it’s more that they argue that holding them, and signalling your willingness to use them, is the best way to stop any being used.

And who wouldn’t want to see a nuclear-free world? President Obama shares Corbyn’s aspiration, though not the belief that it will come about if America, or its allies, unilaterally disarm. But the unpleasant truth is that there will never be a nuclear-free world, for the simple reason that knowledge, once acquired, cannot be unlearnt. Even if all the nuclear powers got together and agreed to dispose of their nuclear arsenals, they would still be nuclear powers, just latent ones, with the expertise and facility to quickly re-arm. The game theorist and arms control specialist Thomas Schelling has questioned whether a nuclear-free world is even desirable:

“In summary, a “world without nuclear weapons” would be a world in which the United States, Russia, Israel, China and half a dozen or a dozen other countries would have hair-trigger mobilization plans to rebuild nuclear weapons and mobilize or commandeer delivery systems, and would have prepared targets to pre-empt other nations’ nuclear facilities, all in a high-alert status, with practice drills and secure emergency communications. Every crisis would be a nuclear crisis, any war could become a nuclear war. The urge to pre-empt would dominate; whoever gets the first few weapons will coerce or pre-empt. It would be a nervous world.”

The nuclear question – perhaps the most serious question of our age - does not yield easily to idealism. To grapple with it, you have to put to one side your wish for a world in which nuclear weapons don’t exist, and think hard about the one in which they do.

In a paper from 1969, the American economist Harold Demsetz distinguished between two approaches to public policy: the “nirvana” approach, and the “comparative institution” approach. The former presents the choice as between an ideal norm and the imperfect existing arrangement; the latter as between alternative, real world arrangements, imperfect and less imperfect.

This is colloquially known as the “nirvana fallacy”: the tendency to assume that there is a perfect solution to a problem. A politician who uses the nirvana fallacy gains an easy rhetorical advantage. He can paint inspiring pictures of his perfect world, and attack the existing state of affairs for not living up to it. He can accuse anyone who doesn’t accept its plausibility as cynical, lacking in vision, or principle.

But this advantage comes at a cost, because the nirvana fallacy makes you stupid. It stops you from doing the hard, gritty thinking about how to improve the world we have, since, faced with a series of complex, imperfect options, you overleap them to reach the sunlit uplands of an ideal scenario. Soon, you forget how to think about the real world at all.

The left is particularly susceptible to this problem. Should we intervene in Syria? No, because we want a peaceful Middle East. Fine. That saves you the onerous work of confronting the truth that Syria is on fire, that hundreds of thousands have died there, and that many of the survivors are now pouring into Europe, and what the hell are we going to do about it?

Should we be making hard choices about public spending? No, because we want a high-growth economy in which only the rich pay more tax. Should we reform the way in which the NHS allocates resources, or schools are run? No, because we want a country in which everyone, regardless of background, receives the best healthcare and education, for free. Thank you for the applause, comrades.

Ideals are necessary, but so are plans, and the most admirable idealists are also cold-eyed realists. Abraham Lincoln didn’t think it was enough, as some of the abolitionists of the north did, merely to shame the slavery-supporting politicians of the south. He trimmed and hedged and compromised his way towards abolition. Martin Luther King was not the airy figure of myth, but a highly astute politician and campaigner who out-thought and out-manoeuvred his opponents. He had a dream, but he wasn’t content to live inside it.

Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect Jeremy Corbyn to disavow the nirvana fallacy; after all, he owes his current position to it. Many of those who voted for him find it almost impossible to grasp that the choice is not between an imperfect Labour government, and an ideal one, but between an imperfect Labour government, and a Tory one. They revile the Blair government, but don’t stop to think what the country would be like today if the Tories had won in 1997, and kept winning.

I want to see a Labour Party which gets beyond nirvana fallacies, and engages with the world as it is. I believe it is possible.

The first Paul Crane knew of having his benefits cut off was when his landlord called up to ask where the rent was.

It was the start of a harrowing time. After ten years of receiving support for debilitating pains – caused when gamma knife radiosurgery to repair a haemorrhage on his brain stem caused radiation damage to surrounding tissue – he had suddenly been declared "fit to work".

Paul’s life has never been the same since the operation, which repaired the haemorrhage but left parts of his brain and spinal cord permanently damaged. Every day he is haunted by stimuli – light, noise, crowded places – anything that sets off his "excitable nerves" will leave him in agony with migraines, cause numbness and dizziness, or leave part of his face sagging. Even sneezing or tiredness can cause a traumatic flare up.

He says: “Tiredness causes pain and pain causes tiredness. I don’t socialise much, I’ve let people down too many times. I go fishing, which is my only relaxation but even that sometimes is too much”.

Over a decade of suffering and being prescribed a cornucopia of drugs – none of which have fully worked – Paul has learnt to live with the pain. But a new regime at the Department for Work and Pensions, which he says was “like the difference between black and white”, has been hard on him. This was when the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) replaced the Incapacity Benefit, and new work capability assessments (WCA) were brought in to test whether or not claimants were "fit to work".

“It was as if they were trying to fail me,” he says, “like the system was designed to make me fail. I realised how lucky I had been before. The ESA people looked at me as if to say, ‘Oh God another scumbag’”.

When the news that he had been refused ESA hit him, Paul says he found himself in “a very dark pit”, confused and afraid of what would happen next.

“How could they come to this conclusion? I answered as truthfully as I could and they failed me. I’d just spent two weeks either in bed or on the sofa.”

It’s a painfully common story. Disability rights campaign groups such as the WOWPetition and Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) have been pressing the DWP to take notice of the plight of people like Paul, and are fighting for a comprehensive impact assessment of how changes to the benefits system and wider government spending cuts affect people with disabilities.

In August, after months of pressure, the DWP released the official figures for mortalities following "fit to work" verdicts between December 2011 and February 2014, revealing that 2,380 died in that period.

And even more damning, the Avon & Bristol Law Centre (ABLC) revealed that, of a hundred WCA appeal cases taken on by volunteer law students, 95 had been successful.

Andy King, welfare benefits caseworker at the ABLC, says that the cases shocked him and the students as more details emerged: “We found people for whom working would have been a serious risk to their health. We found people being assessed who had some of the most serious conditions; just the process is extremely stressful and focuses on their inadequacies, which is destructive to their confidence and self-respect.

“We did very detailed case preparation because these are complex cases; if these people didn’t have the law students working for them, lots of them wouldn’t be able to do it”.

Labour’s shadow justice minister Andy Slaughter says that to have more appeals decisions overturned than upheld is unusual, but a 95 per cent success rate is “in a different league”.

He says: “In any other area of law, if you were getting 19 out of 20 of your decisions overturned, you would want to go back and look at your whole decision-making process again. I think the DWP needs to seriously look at this.”

A DWP spokesman says: 

“Eligibility for Employment and Support Allowance is based on an assessment of an individual’s disability or health condition and their ability to work – taking into account all of the evidence provided. 

“Everyone has the right to appeal a fit for work decision and people often present fresh evidence that wasn’t available at the start of the claim. In fact, only 14 per cent of all fit for work decisions are overturned.”

The 14 per cent figure quoted is of all work capability assessments decisions, but the figure for decisions which are taken to appeal is much higher – 58 per cent in the most recent available quarterly figure.

Recently, a coroner’s report cited a WCA decision as the trigger for a man’s suicide. It was the first time an official report had made that link, and a major breakthrough for campaigners.

It was a telling revelation, not least because it highlighted the fact that vulnerable people and sufferers of mental health problems are being exposed to the system. King says that, of the cases ABLC took on, more than a third of claimants had already been diagnosed with some form of mental illness before their initial assessment.

He says: “Generally, [appeals] tribunals are more thorough than capability assessments, and that often reveals details such as mental health problems that were not picked up in the assessment. A very large proportion of the claimants had mental health problems and a good number of them had suffered serious sexual and emotional abuse as children; these are people who have already been confirmed by their doctor as being the most vulnerable people in society”

Not only are there serious concerns that people with disabilities and mental health problems are being unfairly treated in parity with other jobseekers, but Slaughter says that the assessments heap huge masses of extra pressure on those sufferers.

“Going through the process is one of the most stressful things you can do,” he says, “and often the people are already in a stressful position. It must be hugely stressful with the process as complex as it is; of course they are going to struggle.”

It’s a precarious time for people with disabilities and mental illness, especially with funding for mental health being cut in real terms by more than 8 per cent, the lack of legal aid support for people wrongly declared "fit to work", and a programme of wider social care austerity that WOWPetition campaigner Michelle Maher – who is herself disabled – says adds up to a total of 19 different cuts for the most severely disabled people.

She says: “When you see that brown envelope from the DWP you have a heart attack; even for someone like me who doesn’t have mental health problems your heart stops. It takes hours to open because you’re so frightened of what’s going to happen to you”.

An overhaul of the benefit assessment programme by Iain Duncan Smith, revealed in early September, is being treated with scepticism by campaigners, not least because only a couple of weeks before he had set out his ambition of getting another 1million disability benefits claimants back into work.

And King says that even if the system is changed, there is a strong case for law centres around the country to step in, and for going back over previous assessment verdicts and applying the same rigour retrospectively: “We are only representing 10-20 per cent of people in the Bristol area alone; there’s a huge number of people who don’t get guidance, and legal aid cuts have made it harder for people to get representation”.

For Paul, the trauma of being cut off is over, though his daily battle continues. He was awarded £700 in missed benefits payments – for the six weeks he was without support. But he’s very aware it was for the grace of the ABLC students stepping in when he was at his low point.

“They gave me the strength to carry on,” he says. “The stress was that bad – without the law centre I honestly think I might have ended up homeless or committing suicide”.

Channel 4 will tonight air a documentary about a subject which remains a big problem in this country - forced marriages. ‘Forced Marriage Cops’ shows the significant progress being made by the police in identifying victims and therefore preventing further abuse and murders. The very fact that the programme is going ahead shows the great strides that have been made in raising awareness of the issue. Yet, while progress is being made, there is still much more to be done in providing support for victims.

In 2013, the government’s Forced Marriage Unit gave support or advice related to a possible forced marriage to more than 1,300 people. Last year, Karma Nirvana – a national charity that supports all those affected by ‘honour’ abuse – received over 8,268 calls to their helpline, the majority of which were from victims themselves. Yet, given the nature of this vastly underreported crime, the numbers of individuals at risk are likely to be far higher.

Forced marriage is part of a wider pattern of ‘honour’ abuse, whereby victims often suffer years of emotional, physical, sexual and/or financial abuse at the hands of those closest to them – their family members. This makes forced marriage and ‘honour’ abuse unique, in that the perpetrators are almost always those who make up their support network. Choosing to leave the abuse behind means choosing to leave everything else behind too.

There have been too many occasions when victims have found the strength to leave everything – their community, friends and family – only to be met with nothing. As part of my latest report, Britain’s Forgotten Women: Speaking to Survivors of ‘Honour’-Based Abuse, survivors opened up about their experiences of forced marriage and ‘honour’ abuse. One common theme that came across was the lack of support after they had left home and the subsequent feelings of isolation which, in some cases, drove them to return home or attempt suicide.

Take Saliha, who left home because of the daily emotional abuse from family members. Her blindness had been used by them as an additional way of controlling her every movement. When she finally gathered the strength to leave, the police took her to a refuge. Here, she was put in a room with no access to a phone or internet access. No one came to ask how she was coping. She quickly became suicidal and was taken to hospital. Only then did a social worker come to visit. Saliha now identifies her time in the refuge as when she felt most isolated and alone – feelings that drove her to return home to her abusers.

In order to fill this gap in support, police officers and social workers need to have a basic knowledge and understanding of ‘honour’ based abuse and forced marriage in order to gain the confidence and ability to assess risk appropriately and support victims accordingly. They should have the confidence in identifying ‘honour’-based abuse and forced marriage when carrying out a risk assessment or determining whether a child is eligible for foster care. While there is currently statutory guidance for agencies such as police, education and social services, basic training is still optional rather than mandatory. As a result, victims are still being let down by services that are supposed to protect them.

Individuals leaving their families behind need a new support system. Foster placement should be considered a first option for young people affected by forced marriages and honour abuse. Social workers need to understand the risk involved of not placing a young person in foster care and must prioritise their safety over cultural considerations.

Survivors need engagement, encouragement and to have their voices heard. There is the need to develop a survivor network, support groups and helpline specifically for those that have left home and some of whom have been disowned by their family. The development of a confidential survivor data base should also provide regular newsletters and opportunities for survivor engagement.

All too often, victims become survivors in spite of the system rather than because of it. For many, leaving an ‘honour system’ is not the end of someone’s isolation and vulnerability. It is the beginning. The victims deserve the support they need to rebuild their lives free from fear. 

At the 1981 Labour conference in Brighton, Neil Kinnock found himself assailed by a young Tony Benn supporter in the lavatory of the Grand Hotel. The future leader was targeted for his refusal to endorse Benn’s failed deputy leadership bid. “I beat the shit out of him,” Kinnock later recounted. Those who surveyed the scene described seeing “blood and vomit all over the floor”.

Before Labour assembled in the same town for its 2015 conference, MPs spoke darkly of their fear of a return to such barbarousness. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has pitted the party’s “Tories” and “Trots” against each other. Yet the week passed without rhetorical or physical fisticuffs. After the election of a leader opposed by more than 90 per cent of MPs, Labour managed a passable impression of unity.

The scale of Corbyn’s victory explains this placidity. The defeated candidates acknowledge that a period of reflection is necessary before they can credibly challenge his leadership. To behave as if failure were inevitable (though most MPs believe it is) would only widen the chasm between them and the membership. While still bewildered by Corbyn’s election, many savoured the novelty of a conference that was free of “lines to take” and of collective responsibility. “It’s ‘a thousand flowers bloom’. We can say what the f*** we like,” a senior MP told me.

In other respects, the conference was familiar. The delegates had been selected and the fringe meetings arranged in the pre-Corbyn era. The titles and venues of the left’s events reflected its past marginalisation. Chairs apologised for overflowing rooms, quipping that they didn’t expect to be “running the party”. The conference was a bridge between the old world and the new. As they crossed the frontier, all sides armed themselves for the battles to come. 

After failing to secure a conference debate on Trident, the left, operating through the Bennite Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, has vowed to raise its game next time. It will be countered by Labour First and Progress, the organs of the party’s self-described moderates. After Corbyn’s pledge to enshrine conference as Labour’s pre-eminent decision-making body, delegate selections will become a defining battleground. The leader’s supporters cite his mandate as justification for his “democratisation” of the party. MPs cite their own rival mandate from the British electorate. As the shadow minister Conor McGinn told me, “I’m not elected to be their delegate. I’m elected to be their representative and then elected to be an MP for all my constituents.”

Away from the fringe and the hall, the party’s ruling National Executive Committee was tilted to the left. The shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, was removed in favour of a Corbyn supporter, Rebecca Long-Bailey, and the moderate trade union Community was defeated by the militant bakers’ union. On such seemingly obscure results could the Labour leader’s fate depend. Based on current guidelines, party officials say, Corbyn would not automatically make the ballot if challenged by a rival candidate. Rather, he would again require the endorsement of at least 35 MPs. Crucially, it is the NEC that determines party procedure in these circumstances.

After Corbyn’s shambolic opening week as leader, both his supporters and his opponents asked whether he would fall through sheer amateurishness. But after appointing a full front-bench team, in defiance of earlier predictions, and filling the main posts in his office, his position was stabilised. As the conference progressed, the number of MPs predicting that he would endure for a full term steadily rose.

Yet for Corbyn, greater security has come at a price. He has already made concessions on the EU (pledging to campaign for UK membership), Nato (no longer advocating withdrawal), Syria (allowing shadow cabinet members to support military action) and energy (abandoning his promise to nationalise the big six companies). The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, avoided any mention of the divisive issues of “people’s quantitative easing” and the “Robin Hood tax” in his speech and vowed to vote in favour of George Osborne’s fiscal charter. “It has felt like a series of defeats,” one Corbyn ally confessed to me. Only in the case of Trident did the leader wield his mandate and advance a minority position – unilateral disarmament – in his conference address but what could be a trigger for shadow cabinet resignations may ultimately be resolved through a free vote for frontbenchers.

A popular theory in Labour circles is that Corbyn will voluntarily resign after two years, having achieved some internal reforms, and endorse a successor. Lisa Nandy, the shadow energy and climate change secretary, is the name most often mentioned, though she is from the soft left, rather than the leader’s harder wing. Those close to Corbyn, however, say that he is “enjoying” the job and is not planning an early departure. This did not prevent speculation in the bars of Brighton about the identity of the next leader. Dan Jarvis, Tom Watson, Yvette Cooper and Chuka Umunna were the names most commonly cited. Corbyn’s opponents acknowledge that their task next time will be to unite around one candidate and to back him or her unreservedly.

Next May, the Labour leader will face his first electoral tests in London, Scotland, Wales and England. Some MPs have earmarked this date as the first possible moment to strike. Others warn that this strategy could founder if Corbyn exceeds the low expectations. MPs’ greatest fear is that the issue of reselection will rise as they are blamed by the left for any reversals. McDonnell’s appeal to former shadow cabinet members to “come back and help us succeed” was interpreted by many as a threat.

After one of the most severe schisms in its history, Labour emerged from Brighton surprisingly unscathed. But underlying the calm was the fear that, by next year, there will be blood.

A slim debut novel about a bereaved Ted Hughes scholar visited by Hughes’s poetic creation Crow has been shortlisted for the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize for “fiction at its most novel”. Grief is the Thing with Feathers, described by Eimear McBride as “a beautifully rendered and deeply moving meditation on bereavement, love and life in its aftermath”, is the first book by Max Porter, an editor at Granta who previously worked as a bookseller. (Erica Wagner's review for the New Statesman is here.)

It is joined on the list by five other novels (listed below), including Tom McCarthy's Satin Island, also shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, and the forthcoming Beatlebone by the IMPAC-winning Irish writer Kevin Barry. In marked contrast to previous years (both previous prizes were won by women), this year’s shortlist is all-male.

The Goldsmiths Prize was founded by Goldsmiths University with the New Statesman in 2013 to to reward fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel for”. The first prize was won by Eimear McBride for her novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which had taken a decade to find a publisher. McBride went on to win the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and has a second novel coming out with Faber and Faber next year. Ali Smith, who won the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize for How to be Both, recently told the Bookseller that the award had “changed the industry”: 

The change it’s made is that publishers, who never take risks in anything, are taking risks on works which are much more experimental than they would’ve two years ago. That to me, is like a miracle. And that’s the Goldsmiths Prize. The prize has already its two years running changed the industry. That’s what it took, for Goldsmiths to launch a prize which was novel about the novel and understood the novel form.

The judges for the 2015 prize are Eimear McBride; Jon McGregor, the award-winning author of If Nobody Speaks of Unremarkable Things; Leo Robson, the New Statesman’s lead fiction reviewer; and Josh Cohen, Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths and author of The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark, who is chairing the panel.

The winner of the £10,000 award will be announced at a ceremony on 11 November 2015 at Foyles Bookshop in Charing Cross Road, London. 

The Goldsmiths Prize 2015 shortlist

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry
In the second novel from the Irish author of the IMPAC-winning City of Bohane, John Lennon wants to visit his island off the west coast of Ireland – but events conspire against him. The judges described it as “stylistically adventurous and utterly inimitable”.

Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard
Beard’s sixth novel leads the reader on a hunt for the body of Jesus, telescoping time so that smartphones and shepherds collide. “This novel,” the judges said, “takes a circular saw to received ideas about belief, fate, will and storytelling.”

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy
The author of Remainder and the Booker-shortlisted C returns with a novel that comprises the uneasy reflections of U, a corporate anthropologist. It “draws humour from the driest material” and “manages to be beautiful”, too.

The Field of the Cloth of Gold by Magnus Mills
The eighth novel from the author of The Restraint of Beasts is a fable, written with “brutally deadpan humour” and set in a camp in a great field. Mills “appears to be no less than a prophet of our own history”.

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
This slim debut is set in a quiet flat in London, where two little boys are left motherless, and their Ted Hughes scholar father bereft. Then Hughes’s creation, Crow, arrives. It is “that rarest of birds, the truly poetic novel”.

Lurid and Cute by Adam Thirlwell
Thirlwell has twice been named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. His third novel, featuring a dead body and a spree of armed robberies, is “a brilliantly sustained stylistic tour de force” and “horrifyingly funny”.

What a strange country we live in. At last, we have a genuine clash of political opposites, thanks to an opposition leader who believes in rail nationalisation, an end to austerity, the cancellation of Trident, rent controls, the higher taxation of the rich and quantitative easing to fund new schools, hospitals and council houses. Yet newspapers are obsessed with which private organ the Prime Minister may have inserted into which orifice of which animal during his student days decades ago. When they are not probing this matter, they send their fearless investigators to find out whether Jeremy Corbyn “romped” naked in a Cotswolds field in the 1970s with a woman who now serves in his shadow cabinet.

The upshot is that our politicians seem weirder than ever. Most of us associate pigs with bacon and sausages but Corbyn, a vegetarian, won’t eat them, while David Cameron has allegedly molested a dead one. Most of us go to the Cotswolds to enjoy the beautiful countryside and pretty villages but Labour politicians take their clothes off, while the Tories snort cocaine. What those hard-working families we keep hearing about make of all this is anyone’s guess.

Purchasing power

The tales of Cameron’s involvement in “louche” drug-taking circles that indulge in “bizarre rituals and sexual excess” – and of his ability to scratch a pig’s back “so effectively that the creature sighs” and to castrate a ram with a pair of pliers – come from a ­biography written by the former Tory party treasurer Lord Ashcroft with Isabel Oakeshott, a former political editor of the Sunday Times. According to the Daily Mail, which is serialising the book, the revelations have “got the world talking” and in Eritrea the people no doubt speak of little else.

The most scandalous revelation, however, has gone almost unremarked upon. Lord Ashcroft apparently believed – and had reason to believe – that in return for his donations to the Tories, he would get a senior government post.

Before the 2010 election, Ashcroft claims, Cameron promised him that he would play a “not . . . insignificant” role in a Tory-led government. (According to one account, not from Ashcroft, he may have expected to be foreign secretary.) He was eventually offered a position as a junior whip but, “after ploughing some £8m into the party, I regarded this as a declinable offer”. Cash for honours is one thing. This would have been cash for power. Strangely, the Mail, usually stern in its denunciation of such dubious practices, sees nothing wrong here, reporting that Ashcroft “had good reason to feel aggrieved” at Cameron’s “act of treachery”.

The spy who loved Jeremy

Set against stories of Tory excess and entitlement, Corbyn, despite his possible lapse in the Cotswolds, increasingly seems a breath of fresh air. Labour predictably continues to lag in the polls, yet he seems to have stirred something in the country that extends to surprising quarters. From the heart of rural England, a friend reports on a lunch party hosted by a former British diplomat and ­attended by a former senior member of the secret services. They were, my friend says, “overwhelmingly Corbynistas”. Hide your credit cards, he advises.

Top of the props

Years ago, when the English rugby union team was meeting one of the lesser rugby nations, a woman asked how everyone could be so sure that we would win. Wasn’t a “shock” result possible? Certainly not, I replied. Rugby union was a highly technical game in which a team of superior power and skill inevitably won. Unlike football, I elaborated, a lucky 1-0 win for the underdog was impossible, as rugby matches were never decided by a single scoring event.

I would have repeated that explanation if questioned about Japan’s chances of beating South Africa in the World Cup. South Africa, Australia and New Zealand rarely lose to any team except each other and, sometimes, England, France, Wales or Ireland. Japan’s victory – in a match of 14 scoring events – is the rough equivalent of San Marino beating Brazil at football. It completely undermines the conventional rugby wisdom that bigger teams always come out on top. The Japanese, with an average height of 5ft 11in, are the joint smallest team in the tournament and the average weight of their forwards, at 17st 4lb, is 9lb less than that of their South African opponents. We lefties should rejoice. The mighty have been brought low.

Unhappy endings

The Daily Mail’s TV critic, reviewing the BBC’s adaptation of The Go-Between, writes that “in the novel, the climax of the love story is coarse and melodramatic” and demands “a subtler ending”. Ye gods! L P Hartley’s masterpiece has survived unbowdlerised for more than 60 years. Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter, in their 1971 film, stayed faithful to its beautifully constructed plot, as did Pete Travis, the director of the BBC version. Now it apparently fails to meet the Mail’s standards of gentility. Will the Mail next demand a rewrite, after more than 2,000 years, of Virgil’s Aeneid– in which Dido and Aeneas also make love in a thunderstorm?

Don’t blame Essex

Some readers have questioned my claim to be living quietly and unfashionably in Loughton, Essex. One asks how Loughton can be unfashionable when it is less than 40 minutes away on the Tube from Oxford Circus and includes conservation areas. This is a fair point and I could add that, according to one distinguished historian who lives locally, Loughton in the late 19th century had the cachet that Hampstead later acquired.

But I have never accused Loughton of being unfashionable. I am the guilty party, having been sacked as the Independent on Sunday editor because, I was told, someone more “fashionable and metropolitan” was required. I accepted I was neither of those things. Even in Islington, or Notting Hill, I would live quietly and unfashionably. 

The shipowner Robert Stoker won Manchester Rusholme in the 1918 election but died less than a year later. John Henry Thorpe, the father of the future Liberal leader Jeremy, held the constituency for the Tories at the resulting by-election.

Roger Bevan Crewdson came last, standing for the National Party – a right-wing split from the Tories that dissolved in 1921. The next year, Crewdson stood as a Unionist in North Norfolk, having his pamphlet When Britons Will Be Slaves: the Peril of Nationalisation published by local printers. He later became editor of the journal National Opinion. A captain in the Royal Artillery in the First World War, he died in an air raid in 1941.

Let’s sing the praises of the Greeks. Not the ancient Greeks. That’s an open-door argument: look what they did for democracy, philosophy, literature, and so on. No, I mean modern Greeks, the ones who live in Greece today.

I’ve been out here since February with my wife and baby son, Nika. Even in this year of severe economic and political crises – the latter eased slightly by the victory of the ruling party, Syriza, in a snap election on 20 September – the warmth and generosity of the welcome we have had, particularly Nika, has been extraordinary.

Forget the idea that Italians love bambini. They may say they do but, in comparison, they’re not all that interested. The Greeks genuinely love children, infants above all. Everywhere we go, I feel as if I’m the minder of a miniature celebrity. They want to touch him, talk to him, give him gifts. It is possible that some magical power throbs through my one-year-old’s fontanelle. But the more likely explanation is that the Greeks are just really into babies.

It goes deeper. They believe in the principle of philoxenia, which means “the love of strangers”. Its ancient equivalent was called simply xenia and it was particularly embraced by the inhabitants of Corfu, which is where we have been mooching about.

According to Homer, Corfu was where Odysseus received the warmest welcome on his journey home from Troy, a masterclass in how to treat strangers: first, you give them food, drink, a bath and fresh clothes. Only later do you ask who they are and where they are heading. Then you speed them on, weighed down with gifts.

This giving and receiving of gifts was central to xenia. In an essay in 1925, the French socio-anthropologist Marcel Mauss argued that, wherever you are, whatever the situation, there is no such thing as a free gift. The recipient is agreeing to a “gift debt”, which must be repaid at some point in the future. Mauss may have had a point when he wrote that, in ancient Greece, gift-giving wove a complex network of social dependencies. At the same time, surely, a gift could also just be a gift. And it still can be.

Go into a Corfiot restaurant today and your meal will invariably be rounded off with a pudding or a liqueur, on the house. Often, you’re sent away with a bottle of wine, or some local speciality. “Presumably this is in the hope that you’ll return to the restaurant?” I asked my Greek friend Yorgos. “No,” he corrected me. “It’s only for the pleasure of giving.”

Again and again, over the past six months, we have been recipients of unexpected gifts. Often, it’s produce: a bowl of black cherries or bag of delicate-shelled eggs. Or some fresh fish (surprisingly expensive on this island). One time, it was an outfit for Nika.

Where do they come from, these Greek traits, this baby love, this gift-giving, this philoxenia? About the last, I can only speculate. Greece is an isolated, fractured country of peninsulas and 6,000 islands, separated from visitors by sea. In the north, access is obstructed by mountains. Indeed, the whole country is craggy: “good for goats”, to use the Homeric phrase. In a landscape where it wasn’t easy to get around, the arrival of a traveller was cause for applause. The geography gave rise to a maritime nation, at ease in the world, one whose splintered shape in its corner of Europe oddly mirrors that of another maritime nation in the opposite corner: ours. In Britain, we are pretty tolerant of strangers, consequent on our history as a nation of sailors, travellers and, once, like the Greeks, colonists. But we can’t match Greeks for warmth.

There has been some sneering about the reluctance of southern Europeans to pay their taxes. Most of us northerners willingly pay ours: a commendable virtue, if not, perhaps, a lovable one. It’s a good thing we do, because the money buys the scaffolding of the welfare state, patching the façade of a society in which individuals can no longer rely on material support from their extended family. That is not the case in Greece and other Mediterranean tax-truant nations, which are famed for the strength of familial bonds.

Am I getting carried away? Perhaps. It’s just that I’m ensconced in our apartment among the amber-glowing backstreets of Corfu Town, sucking on the stone of the last black cherry. My wife will shortly prepare some donated fish, or an omelette made from those fragile eggs. Nika prances in his brand-new togs. Have I been seduced by some carefully orchestrated campaign of philoxenia? Was Marcel Mauss right, after all?

Thomas W Hodgkinson is the co-author of the forthcoming book “How to Sound Cultured” (Icon)

Five things we learned from Corbyn’s conference speech

While the reaction to Jeremy Corbyn’s speech on Twitter was very positive – of the c.41,000 tweets about it, unusually for a political leader there were more virtual cheers than boos to the tune of three to one.  But what about the views of voters in the flesh? Ipsos MORI conducted two discussion groups with voters from Croydon Central – a key target for Labour – on the day Corbyn addressed conference to find out.

1.He’s one of us

A common refrain from participants was how Corbyn appeared to be “genuine” and someone that they could relate to. This was evident from both his image – participants noted his appearance was certainly less slick than his predecessors – but also his background. This experience lent him a credibility that they felt had been lacking from Westminster for some time:

"He’s one of us. To get to where he is he had to go through a lot. It’s like a new manager coming into work when they started in the post room – better that than a graduate trainee”.

His use of humour at the start of his speech was also disarming, and meant participants warmed to him; he appeared relaxed and unguarded which, in turn, enhanced his authenticity.

"I liked the way he acknowledged his coverage in the tabloids about the asteroid. You wouldn’t get Cameron making jokes about him being a pig shagger."

2.And it sounds like he is up for a fight

As much as he came across as being genuine, he was also described as passionate – both in terms of what he talked about, and how he talked about it. For instance, mentioning his treatment in the media from the outset indicated to participants that he would not court the press in the way that other leaders were thought to have done.

"He’s believable, he’s passionate – it’s the way he was talking about it. He wants to see change”.

It was his delivery, however, that really convinced participants that he believed what he was saying; that he spoke so forcefully suggested to them that he was talking about issues that were important to him and that he believed in, and this was appealing to them.

"He’s saying it with a lot of conviction – he believes that, you don’t just think it was for show”.

3.But the things Corbyn is passionate about don’t match up with key voter concerns

At least Miliband intended to talk about the deficit at the 2014 conference. This time, participants sensed the omission was because Corbyn only wanted to talk the things that mattered to him – not them. For example, his talk of human rights and a social Europe seemed unrelated to the issues they felt were facing the country.  

"The first thing he wants to talk about is a 17 year old boy in Saudi Arabia – I don’t know who he is! I have never heard of him. Why is this important to me?”

"A social Europe? What is that? Is that the EU? A lot of this went over my head. If they want people to vote, then they need to make it clear what they are talking about." 

Rather, they wanted to hear about things like the economy and immigration – and not in the context of the refugee crisis. And, on a day when our Issues Index shows the highest ever level of concern about immigration – mentioned by 56 per cent of all adults, up six percentage points from August and way ahead of the next most important issue, the NHS (36 per cent) – that they wanted these worries to be reflected is not surprising.

“What about immigration? This is an issue that’s happening now – we see it every day in the news – it matters!”

4.Where’s the detail – and where’s the money?

Judging by the views of the participants, it will be a long time before voters see the Labour party as competent stewards of the economy or believe that the country has any money to spend. A constant question among participants, therefore, related to how Corbyn planned to realise his policy aims – ones which they recognised would require significant investment. While some urged patience, suggesting that only a couple of weeks into the job he may not necessarily have fully costed plans available, for many the clock is ticking; they want detail, and they want it soon.

“He painted a nice rosy picture without giving too much detail of how it is going to be done. It almost sounds like he has this magic wand and council houses are going to pop up, and tuition fees are going to be paid, and everyone will have care when they’re elderly”.

5.And can Corbyn’s new politics deliver change?

Participants appreciated that Corbyn is offering something different – both in terms of his policies and how he would like politics to be conducted – and welcomed the more open and discursive approach to leadership he promised.

“These are his values, what he stands for – listening to people, letting everyone have their own opinion and debating it”.

However, they questioned whether this approach would help to deliver change; for some, his call for a kinder politics seemed almost too nice rather than forcefully holding the government to account on its record.

When he was saying stand up against injustice then he sounded like a leader…but then when he said he wanted a kinder politics he sounded all cosy”

And, building on this, many questioned whether he had the stamina to do the job in hand. Participants were surprised by how old he was – and though for some age was a proxy for experience, for others it raised concern about the demands the role would have on him.

“He has got good ideas but he looks so tired all the time…I just look at him and switch off. He just looks stressed and worn out”

********

So, while participants took a lot of positives from Corbyn’s first speech to conference the problem remains that what he said was not enough to win back former voters – just the kind of people he will need to return to the fold if the party is to stand a chance of success in 2020. That there was no narrative arc to his speech also was an issue – rather than presenting a vision they could get behind, participants felt he just presented a long list of issues he wanted to address and they didn’t see how he could tackle them all.

“He mentioned everything….he can’t make a difference to everything. He should’ve just picked a few issues”

So, for now, the jury is still out – and voters will need to hear a lot more on both the issues they’re interested in, and how Corbyn’s plans are to be realised in the coming months if he is to gain their trust and, crucially, their votes.

******************************************************************************

Ipsos MORI conducted two discussion groups on 30^th September 2015. All participants lived around Croydon – a key target seat for Labour. In the first group, participants were aged between 30 and 50 and were from social grade BC1C2. All had voted for Labour previously, except for in 2015. In the second group, participants were aged between 20 – 30 and were from social grade BC1C2. They comprised a mix of those who did and did not vote in 2015 – but of those that had, none had voted for Labour. 

I am sitting in the Hovel, waiting, waiting. I’m always waiting for something, like everyone else, but today I am not waiting for food or a phone call from a lover or Godot: I am waiting for my daughter to return from an appointment with her tattooist.

This is another one of those milestones that the modern father has no experience of from the generation above him. Usually. I know a few people my age who have tattoos, but they are either sexy women or middle-class men who now, on the whole, regret it. Regret seems to be built, as far as I can see, into the whole tattoo experience, and my favourite “tattoo fail”, as the internet puts it, is the aggressively Gothic script permanently inked into one young idiot’s forearm: “NO REGERTS”.

I once accompanied my friend T——, in the early stages of our friendship, to a nipple-bolting place in Camden Town where she was getting some kind of frightful decoration for her daughter, and she told me how a bolt through a woman’s tongue was, apparently, a great enhancer of the oral sexual experience for men. I went off on what I thought was a comic rant, along the lines of “Yes, I’ve always thought to myself at such times: ‘You know what’s missing from this experience, what would make it significantly better? A bloody great lump of metal through the woman’s tongue”, etc. T——, I noticed, was not laughing as much I’d hoped she would, and when I turned to look at her she was poking a pertly bestudded tongue defiantly in my direction. Which certainly stopped me from going on.

But apart from that, I have always thought the idea of handing over hard cash in order to disfigure yourself one of the more ridiculous ways in which you can lose your money. Doing it for free isn’t much better, and when Richey Edwards from Manic Street Preachers carved the words “4 REAL” into his arm in front of an NME journalist, I didn’t think, “How authentic,” I thought: “Very serious mental health issues.” (This sympathy didn’t stop me, during a boring Modern Review editorial meeting to discuss what we were Going To Say about the Manics, from writing the words “4 REAL” on my arm with a magic marker, thus giving Charlotte Raven the giggles.)

And now my daughter, as I write, is entering the ranks of the everlastingly inked. I vividly recall the time, some months ago, when she announced her intentions. She knows me fairly well, to the point where she can anticipate my thought processes and reactions faster than I can, and she suspected that there was always going to be a bit of consumer resistance at my end. Some of this is for form’s sake. The parent who says, “Hey! Tats! That’s sick!” (for older readers, this means “spiffing”) and takes their young one to the glans-perforating emporium before someone called Mowgli or Spider gets cracking on the bodywork is not the kind of parent I would want to be. So I put on my mother’s “there are various ways of achieving distinction” face and make a few elegantly pointed remarks.

The Girl, though, has got there before me: she breaks me off midway through my routine (“And so this will be your ‘character’? How pleasing to know you have one”, and so on) and says, “Yes, yes, you said this when I got a belly stud, so before you go on, let me show you a picture of what I want.”

And she takes out her phone, and pulls up a picture of a Spitfire, poised in graceful flight, photographed from above and to starboard, the curves feminine and full of power . . . and my objections evaporate as if they had never been. She recalls the days, a decade ago, when the kids and I would play Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator WWII, and I would discourse on the evils of fascism, the heroism of the RAF (Lezards involved in the Second World War were in the RAF, one rising to wing commander) – and the origins of the aircraft’s name, which was a term for a girl who not only took no nonsense, but answered back in the most outspoken manner. One of the plane’s designers had a daughter who he said answered to such a description.

“Oh,” I say. “Well, yes. Hm.”

The Girl has outmanoeuvred me yet again, but then as I told my children that my main job as a father was to make sure that they turned out smarter than me, I can’t grumble. Now, a needle is going into her arm at £100 per hour. Ow. Her tattooist’s name is Mowgli; which is considerably more reassuring than Spider. 

Stephen Spender’s is a life well documented, as much by his own hand – in a memoir and novels that qualify as thinly veiled slices of life – as through his surviving correspondence with his close friends Christopher Isherwood and W H Auden. Spender even wrote his journals with one eye on their eventual publication, rarely revealing anything sensitive. The joy of this character portrait, lovingly sculpted by his son, Matthew, is that it sidelines almost everything we know about Stephen, relegating the towering reputation of Spender the man of letters to the margins of its concerns, to deliver an unblinking account of Spender as a husband, father and lover (of a succession of beguiling young men).

Would Stephen have appreciated such a book? It is hard to say. At a cocktail party in New York in 1975, he leaned over to Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy’s White House aide, and said: “My children are going to curse me with their total recall . . . They remember everything! I can just see Matthew now, in front of some court, saying to the judge, ‘Oh, yes, Your Honour, I remember exactly the moment when Dad signed his contract with the CIA. I was under the table at the time – aged two!’” Spender (Matthew recorded at the time) thought he was being “hilarious”, his usual guileless self. Everyone else wanted to hide.

There is a double irony here, in that Spender fils does have splendid recall, not just for events but for atmosphere, hidden play and subtext, which, added to his unswerving honesty (it’s as if he’s swallowed a truth serum), makes for a richly layered read. Also, the question that preoccupies Matthew most keenly, as his father’s apologist, is whether or not Stephen was aware of his paymaster’s identity at any time during his decades-long tenure as literary editor of Encounter magazine – a slick front for the CIA’s anti-communist cultural agitprop in Europe during the cold war.

Matthew explains that government archives relating to his father’s activities in the 1950s and 1960s will soon be made public and that he wrote this book to pre-empt any revelations. Yet one senses that there is much more at stake here, something primal, Oedipal, even. For Matthew, the Encounter scandal is not simply a “Did he or didn’t he know?” affair. It turns on artistic and personal integrity – that of Stephen, Matthew, indeed, anyone who seeks to build a creative life in the arts. The difference between father and son is that one believed the pursuit of art need not be compromised by a careerist investment in the workings of power, while the other passionately believes that art and politics ought never to mingle.

Reading this book, you begin to understand why this difference in commitment was inevitable. The house on Loudoun Road in St John’s Wood, north London, where Matthew grew up, was the mise en scène for a difficult experiment in living which demanded that various incommensurables be reconciled. Foremost was that Stephen’s homosexuality had to coexist alongside his sincerely crafted marriage. There was also a clash between Stephen’s conviction in his essential “innocence” and his passion for worldly influence.

Matthew’s mother, Natasha Litvin, is as compelling a character in this story as Stephen. She was driven (she was a concert pianist) and yet hidebound (she lived by stringent rules of self-sacrifice, fantasising about her inner life in near-monastic terms); passionate (Raymond Chandler was besotted with her) and yet emotionally neglected by her husband, whose physical and emotional core sang out only to other men. Chandler persisted in offering Natasha what he believed Stephen never could, telling her, “There can be no love without desire.” It’s a phrase that nags at Matthew for obvious reasons, even if he eventually sides with Chandler – and not his mother, whose desperate need to maintain appearances at all costs, coupled with her love of family, enabled her to withstand the long emotional drought of her marriage to Stephen.

Matthew is a disarmingly likeable narrator. Things warm up appreciably when, after a hundred-odd pages of straight biography, he makes his appearance as a smarty-pants child getting his poems critiqued by Auden, and then as a brooding teen sneaking off school to make drawings of London’s rooftops and streets. The reader responds to his self-awareness and self-exposure as he wrestles with his parents’ wildly different credos and agonises over his father’s lack of nous – his ignorance of political machinations, his blindness to other people’s needs. Matthew, a sculptor, is refreshingly (or painfully) candid about his parents’ coolness towards his wife, Maro, who seduced him at the age of 16 and to whom he has been wedded ever since, resolutely not succumbing (as his father did) to passing infatuations.

Again and again, we return to Encounter, to Stephen’s knowledge or ignorance, to his fatal attraction to the world, on whose account, both father and son agree, Stephen sacrificed his output as a poet. The CIA scandal is the grit in the mollusc’s shell that, however much the author works over it, refuses to be turned into a pearl. This book, one senses, is a hard-won achievement for Matthew. But it is an unmitigated success. In getting to know Stephen the man, I am far more inclined to return to his poems.

A House in St John's Wood: In Search of My Parents by Matthew Spender is published by William Collins (438pp, £25)

Marina Benjamin’s latest memoir, “The Mirror and the Clock”, will be published by Scribe next spring

In 1961, my aunt was diagnosed with “schizophrenia in obsessional personality” and sectioned at the Hill End psychiatric hospital in St Albans, Hertfordshire – a Victorian-era institution that combined insulin-coma shock therapy with straitjackets and other forms of patient coercion. At the time, she was a student at the Royal College of Art under Professor Carel Weight, the “Alfred Hitchcock of British painting”, whose expressionist paintings transfigured the streets of London into fear-ridden landscapes of suburban apocalypse. Weight was not alone in regarding his student’s psychiatric treatment as “barbarous”. Her life was a void place, rattling with pills and pervaded by a sense of powerlessness.

Franco Basaglia, the Italian psychiatrist whose pioneering reforms led to the closure in the late 1970s and early 1980s of Italy’s manicomi (“madhouses”), apparently met my aunt in Florence, where she lived briefly before her breakdown. Shortly afterwards, in 1961, Basaglia took over an institution in Gorizia, near the Yugoslav border, and transformed it into a “therapeutic community”, where patients were fed, clothed, washed and accorded human dignity. In Italy, this was nothing short of a revolution. Power was handed over, in part, to the patients, who were no longer tied up, beaten or tortured but were encouraged to contemplate their return to “liberty”.

As John Foot makes clear in his fascinating account of the life and times of Basaglia, Italy’s “anti-institutional” movement did not deny the existence of mental illness. Instead, it aimed to make the asylum a place fit for human habitation. Prior to Basaglia’s interventions, asylums in Italy had imposed a system of punishment and control, in which the watchword was “custody” rather than “cure”. In such places, mental illness was worse than draining for the patients; it was killing.

For all his originality, Basaglia borrowed from R D Laing, Michel Foucault and other left-leaning thinkers and therapists at work in the idealistic 1960s. His Gorizian project aimed to replace the arrogant and condescending attitude (as it was often rightly perceived to be) of the old-school psychiatrist with an ever-attentive therapeutic concern. Teamwork was of the essence. The patient’s freedom was not allowed to be dependent on the doctor’s will alone.

Born in 1924 in Venice to wealthy parents, Basaglia was typical of the Italian insurrection of 1968, which was largely fought by children of the bourgeoisie. Having been jailed in Venice in 1944 for anti-fascist activity, he had a strong civic conscience and respected the right to disagree. Across Vietnam-war-era Italy, students were organising faculty sit-ins protesting against napalm attacks. At the Sorbonne in Paris, they did the same but the idea of revolution in Italy was intensified because of the nature of the ruling Christian Democrat power: corrupt, hidebound and, in Basaglia’s view, repressive.

From the start, the Basaglian revolution was as much political as medical, Foot argues. Rashly, Basaglia was moved to equate the “asylum system” to Nazi concentration camps. Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man, with its images of Dante-like horror and human abasement, was a major influence on the Basaglian experiment. But Levi was aggrieved by attempts to co-opt his book for the “anti-psychiatric” cause. (“You can be very badly off in the psychiatric hospital,” he said, “but there’s no oven, there’s an exit and your family can come to visit.”) Ultimately, the gauchiste image of the asylum as a punitive and alienating Nazi camp was effective only in terms of its “propagandist power” for Basaglia’s cause.

The times were changing and ­Basaglia caught the spirit of excitement in the air in 1968: the Black Panthers; the Beatles’ “White Album” and Stockhausen’s Hymnen in the record shops. That year, L’istituzione negata (“The Institution Denied”), a now classic collection of writings on “democratic psychiatry” that Basaglia edited, became a bestseller and a staple of every cultivated Italian home. A decade later, in 1978, a national reform bill known as the “Basaglia law” allowed for the gra­dual closure and dismantling of every asylum in Italy.

Over time, a network of community health clinics replaced the discredited mental health system and it became no longer acceptable to electrocute people, or to tie them to beds. While John Foot’s book is not without clichés (“seeds of change”, “drop in the ocean”, and so on), it is a superb primer on the history of democratic psychiatry in Italy and its triumph over the straitjacket of Bedlam. 

The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care by John Foot is published by Verso (404pp, £20)

It’s hard to know whether calls for “urgent debates” actually work. Nonetheless, here’s another: the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council, the Association of Medical Research Charities, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council all want us to start discussing whether it might be OK to edit the human genome.

What is there to talk about? People are already doing it. The human genome is not a single recipe – there are about seven billion edits in existence at the moment. These are actively chosen edits, too: every time a couple conceive a child, the adults involved have made deliberate choices that will create what they think is a pretty good set of genes. They weigh up looks, financial security and intelligence and often discuss the pros and cons of a potential mate with family and friends before deciding that this is probably the best option available for creating a new genome. The vast majority of babies are precisely the “designer babies” that genetic doom-mongers are so afraid of.

It is astonishingly difficult to come up with a plausible reason why we should not use genetic technologies to edit the human genome. It might prove to be a useful therapy – against cancer, for instance – and the technology has the potential vastly to reduce the degree of suffering that future generations of human beings will have to endure.

The hard truth is that our edits sometimes create slightly faulty DNA. Your partner might have a genetically induced tendency to have dangerously high cholesterol levels, for instance, or be the unwitting carrier of a gene that creates a life-threatening blood disorder. In this tragic scenario, in which the resulting genome contains alterations that introduce the possibility of disease into the child’s future, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to make a last-minute edit that improved the chances of good health? When you have already put so much effort into choosing good DNA, why not go the last mile and get the unintended errors put right?

Yes, some maverick might implant a poorly edited embryo in an unsuspecting woman. But there will always be medical mavericks who exploit desperation to carry out unethical procedures. Desperate people in the developing world are selling their kidneys to unscrupulous doctors but we do not wish that the technology and techniques of organ transplantation had been stopped in their tracks. We cannot let the fear of abuse stop us exploring the kinds of advances that can save lives and reduce the impact of genetically borne disease.

Even properly supervised, ethically pursued research will go wrong and could result in tragedy for a handful of families. It’s the price of progress. We suffered similar disappointments and setbacks with heart transplants, IVF and gene therapy, to name but three life-enhancing medical innovations. It’s impossible to achieve such remarkable breakthroughs without some casualties. And, yes, future generations will have modifications to their genome that they didn’t ask for. Just like everyone else always has had.

Let’s be clear: at the moment, we are talking only about seeing what we can learn to do with DNA in isolated cells and possibly unimplanted embryos that are less than two weeks old. It is, in essence, a matter of small bags of chemicals, not the seeds of our destruction. Should we learn to edit (maybe “curate” would be more acceptable) the human genome? Let’s talk about it – but of course we should. 

When I was a child, every train ride was an adventure, not so much for where I was going, as for what I saw along the way. As the journey progressed, the scenery shifted from the rocky Fife hills grazed by sheep, through damp fields of dreamy cattle and on into wide acres of barley or sugar beet; the stone walls of farm buildings passed through a range of colours, from barley-brown to pale gold, becoming sooty grey only as we approached Edinburgh or Dundee. In the dry, stony ground closest to home, a single bird might flicker across a patch of gorse, while the land near the firth was populated by flocks of waders, all busily exploring their preferred feeding zones from the salty fringe at the water’s edge to the blanched grass further upshore.

Even the smells changed as the train moved onward, the scent of broom giving way to natural fertiliser (my mother thought the use of words such as “manure” too vulgar) and then, if we passed close to a farmyard, the mixed malt and grain and molasses smells of feed for the cattle. (Yesterday’s livestock never had it so good, with diets comprising 12 or more different food types; today, they are lucky to see anything much beyond silage and supplements.)

That all of this was connected – that the underlying geology determined soil types, that soil types decided what could be grown in a place, that some land flooded naturally most years and so was best left to its own devices – did not occur to me right away. I just soaked it in. Then, one day, a small epiphany happened and my nine-year-old mind leapt to the understanding that there was a natural order and, alongside it, an order we imposed, with greater or less success, in pursuit of food, profit, or well-being. In the long term, that human order would perish, because that is the way of things, but its shorter-term success depended on how well it dovetailed with the terrain, the wind and the water table.

For no reason I could think of, that realisation gave me immense pleasure – I think until then I’d assumed human beings were masters of the land who could do whatever they pleased there. Of course, significant damage could be done and the fields could be ill-used, but they lived by a much longer calendar than we did and they would return, or find new forms, sooner or later.

Today, trains are much faster than they were in my childhood, and the East Midland or Northumbrian landscapes I traverse on occasional visits to London have lost much of their diversity. Yet glimpses of that natural order can still be gained, between the urban sprawl and the new “business parks”. A fox moves through the silky grass at the edge of a country cemetery. Snow blanks out the tidy gardens of cardboard suburbs, leaving new spaces for the imagination to dwell upon. A flock of migrating geese passes over as the train skirts an estuary in the middle of a long autumn afternoon. Huge clouds gather behind a power plant, or a self-storage unit. In some places, there are still people who farm as if they meant it and an old, sweet, truly terrestrial scent gusts through a window.

It’s not the best way to see the land, travelling at this speed – it never was: walking has always been the appropriate pace for contemplation – but it can still be a pleasure. A property called “Willow Farm” may still have some real willows growing along some vein of underground damp; there is still gratification to be had from gazing out over flood waters.

The natural order can still be discovered by an enquiring observer. I am always surprised when a fellow passenger slumps into the seat next to me, plugs himself into a headset and starts rambling on about his day, presumably to some distant interlocutor as venial as himself. “Look up,” I want to say. “Turn that thing off. There’s a world outside.”

Next week: Felicity Cloake on food

How would Vicky, the greatest cartoonist in the history of the New Statesman, have drawn Jeremy Corbyn? My guess is as a Jacobin in the French Revolution – and there’s a good reason for this. The fear within Labour of revolution from the left is as old as the party. At times, it has been paranoid, such as when Michael Foot, Richard Crossman, Jennie Lee and others founded the Keep Left group in 1947. It was paranoid then, although four years later, when Keep Left became the Bevanites, the leftists split the party and the result contributed to Labour’s ensuing 13 years in opposition.

The resonance of the Keep Left revolt to the Corbynistas today echoes through a New Statesman book called Let Cowards Flinch, published in 1947. It is a satire in verse that compares the Keep Left rebels with the Jacobins who seized power in the French Revolution in 1793. It was written by Olga Miller under the pseudonym Sagittarius but its historic value lies as much in Vicky’s cartoons.

The leaders of the Labour Party are given personas from the French Revolution. Clement Attlee is Jean-Paul Marat, Ernest Bevin is Georges Danton (“scowling and satanic,/Subverter of all social discipline,/Malignant mouthpiece of the mob tyrannic”), Aneurin Bevan is Robespierre, Stafford Cripps is Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and Hugh Dalton is Talleyrand (“oozing sanctimonious zeal,/Sapper and miner of the Bank Bastille”). Vicky draws it all in black and white, except the flag, which is deepest red – in reference to the song “The Red Flag”, whose lyrics inspired the title Let Cowards Flinch.

By 1947, Sagittarius tells us, “the ship of state is partially grounded”. Labour and capital are marching together; socialism is stalled; foreign policy is subservient to the needs of the US. “No storm,” the frontbenchers cry, “can shake the realm,/Cripps at the prow and Attlee at the helm”:

But even as they speak and wait the cheer

(Sure sign of Parliamentary popularity),

A hideous clamour bursting on the ear

Bespeaks a rift in Party solidarity;

Forked lightning sparks and crackles in the rear,

And in a sudden flash of blinding clarity

They recognise the enemy within —

The unrepentant British Jacobin.

“Though cowards flinch,” the Labour rebels whoop,

“The people’s scarlet flag we will keep flying,

“Still marching with the comrade workers’ troop,

“Appeasement and reaction still defying!”

The Front Bench turns to face the factious group,

Finding the situation more than trying,

And strives in vain to snuff those fiery particles,

The genuine revolutionary articles.

The Keep Left subversives are then introduced, the Corbynistas of their day. The Jacobins call for the full socialist ticket; otherwise, they should all “go down with blazing guns and colours flying”. They force the Labour Party to answer awkward questions:

Has Labour lost, or won, the war of class?

Can they restrain the frantic squatters’ surges

By simply writing “Keep off the grass?” . . .

Has Labour strangled private enterprise

When kings of industry are sitting pretty?

Can there be Socialistic compromise

With forces of reaction in the City?

Does Labour seek to make a sweeping clearance,

Or bolster up a system in decay?

While Labour is consumed with doubt and division, the opposition is delighted:

Conservatives collect their scattered wits,

And Liberals, long drowned beneath the tide,

Beholding Labour’s multitudinous splits,

Are naturally highly gratified;

Such violent ungovernable fits

Portend collective Party suicide

They know, according to the classic pattern,

All revolutions eat their brood, like Saturn.

The relevance of Let Cowards Flinch to politics today comes from Corbyn’s old-style democratic socialism. Labour readers who see a line of clear descent (as well as dissent) from the postwar party of nearly 70 years ago can take comfort – or not – from the conclusion:

They little know of England who suppose

Her everlasting fabric can be shaken

With paroxysmal and prurient throes

By which less balanced States are overtaken;

Instinctively the true Briton knows

All ideologies to be mistaken,

And celebrates in his rough island story

The triumph of the improvisatore.

So Labour’s evolutionary plan

Will in the course of ages be perfectible,

Although the era of the common man

May not for centuries become detectable –

Meanwhile all Socialists in office can

Prove Socialism thoroughly respectable,

And, in due time, make even revolution,

Like Peers and Pools, a British institution.

After all, the Pools have gone but the Privy Council remains, even for a Rt Hon republican.

Hugh Purcell’s biography of John Freeman, “A Very Private Celebrity”, is published by Robson Press