In 1753 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Britain’s grand arbiter of art, wrote sniffily about a Swiss-born portraitist newly arrived in town; the work of Jean-Étienne Liotard, he said, was “just what ladies do when they paint for amusement”. This was not a judgement based entirely on observation. Reynolds was envious of Liotard’s success and that he could charge 25 guineas for a portrait in pastels. He disliked, too, the foreigner’s showmanship – his Turkish clothes, Moldovan cap and a beard so long that it touched his belt, which led Reynolds to intuit that there was “something of the Quack from his appearance”. He dismissed the whole publicity-seeking rigmarole as “the very essence of Imposture”.

There were, however, artistic reasons, too. Pastels, the medium that brought Liotard (1702-89) fame, were ideal for small-scale domestic pictures but lacked the gravitas necessary for the grand stuff Reynolds both practised and preached. Nor did Liotard flatter his sitters (“Truth prevailed in all his works,” said Horace Walpole, “grace in very few”) or fill his work with elevating classical allusions. That Liotard was in great demand by the Continent’s society and courts was another reason for disapproval. Both the man and his pictures were showy, lightweight and rather below the salt.

Yet Reynolds’s prejudice left him blind to Liotard’s strengths. His technique in pastels and chalk was exquisite; he worked across an extraordinary range – using enamel, pastels, oils, chalks, watercolour on ivory, etching and mezzotint; having lived for  four years in Constantinople, he was at the leading edge of the new fashion for orientalism; and his verisimilitude was perfectly in tune with the burgeoning age of sensibility. His pictures were also exceptionally beautiful.

In Britain, Reynolds won the argument, and although Liotard exhibited works at the Royal Academy in 1773 and 1774 during a second visit to Britain, he has never been seen here in quite the same exalted light as his contemporaries Chardin and Watteau, or even a shallower talent such as Maurice Quentin de La Tour. Reynolds’s power came from his position as the first president of the Royal Academy, so there is a nice synchronicity that the RA is belatedly making up for his disapproval with a show of 82 of Liotard’s pictures that will finally win him something of the renown he deserves.

Liotard, like Voltaire (whom, sans beard, he resembled), was one of the 18th century’s great cosmopolitans. Born in Geneva, he trained in Paris; having failed to win a place
at the academy there, he travelled to Italy, the Levant, Constantinople, London, Amsterdam and Vienna. He married a Dutch Huguenot and drew the portraits of members of the royal houses of Moldavia, the Holy Roman empire, France and Britain – both the ruling Hanoverians and the Stuart pretender Bonnie Prince Charlie. For good measure he painted Pope Clement XII, too.

That these august sitters wanted to be depicted in pastels rather than oils shows just how refined his technique had become. Pastels are essentially powdered pigments bound with gum; they can be used in broad sweeps, like chalk or crayon, or sharpened to give a fine line. If used on vellum or special, slightly textured paper, the result is a matt finish that perfectly mimics the texture of flesh. Pastel, however, is very difficult to correct or erase and although the colours are stable – hence the jewel-like hues on display here – it is prone to flaking. Once finished, Liotard’s portraits were immediately made safe under glass. Yet float glass could only be manufactured up to a certain size, which is one of the reasons the pictures are modest in scale.

Liotard used pastels not just for his portraits but also for the still lifes of fruit he started to draw in later life. Sometimes, as in the portrait circa 1761 of Suzanne Curchod (who was loved by Edward Gibbon, married the French finance minister Jacques Necker, and was mother to Madame de Staël), he combined the two. These, and his clever trompe l’oeil, show a delight in close observation that is evident in his treatment of the silks and furs worn by his sitters, especially the drawings of costumes and customs he made in Constantinople.

Liotard was an innovative artist, too. In an engaging and almost mocking self-portrait in oils of 1770 he shows himself exaggeratedly grinning (gap tooth and all) and gesticulating. It was a picture he took with him on his European travels to advertise his skills, although none of his subsequent sitters chose to be portrayed in like manner. For a black-and-red chalk drawing of 1762 showing the seven-year-old Marie Antoinette, he put a coloured wash on the reverse of the sheet to show through and intensify the colour of her dress and hint at the colour of her hair.

Artist and sitter died within four years of one another: Liotard at the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, Marie Antoinette in 1793, by which time Liotard’s style looked like the work of a different, more innocent age. Now, though, it appears both fresh and highly skilled and a testament to just how wrong Reynolds was.

Runs until 31 January 2016. For more details, visit: royalacademy.org.uk

Some people will feel Labour’s pledge to return the railways to public ownership is a long overdue return to traditional Labour policies. Others might be worried we are getting nostalgic for the past. Labour’s transport team has a simple message for everyone - this is about building a better railway by being able to provide better services across the country.   This includes in many marginal constituencies, where the problems faced by commuters are amongst the primary political issues raised.

Although this will inevitably be seen as a battle of public versus private, Britain’s privatised railways are already under considerable state control. Railways are, frankly, too important for any government to ever really walk away from, and cannot ever be run as a free market. The Department of Transport and its ministers have a major say in fares, rolling stock, stations, timetables and more. Any railway system requires subsidy, and at around £4bn a year (double the cost of what British Rail received once inflation is accounted for) the Government’s financial support for Britain’s railways is considerable. In addition, and unlike in the privatised utilities, nearly all investment in our rail network still comes from taxpayers and farepayers.

The one part of the railway network that was completely sold off, the infrastructure and stations, enjoyed a short life as “Railtrack” before it collapsed under the pressure of its own responsibilities. Its successor Network Rail is now in public hands.

So what does Labour want to change? We are proposing to end the costly and unnecessary franchise system, whereby private companies (ironically many of which are actually subsidiaries of foreign state-owned railways) bid for the right to run each major line and make profit from the public infrastructure behind it. No other country in the world runs its railway this way, and it is widely acknowledged that the franchising process has led to unnecessary instability and, crucially, much higher costs through increased fragmentation.  This has ultimately led to the significantly higher fares British rail users have to pay compared to their European counterparts.

But even more crucially, franchising has created an inflexible railway. Franchises have to correctly predict the level of demand many years into the future, and often get it wrong. The technical challenges of running franchise competitions was dramatically exposed in 2012 when the InterCity West Coast competition collapsed – costing taxpayers over £50 million and leading to job losses in the rail supply chain. The inflexibilities of the franchise system also led to the loss of modern trains from TransPennine Express, which led to some services being downgraded, and a further £20 million bill for the Exchequer. Franchising deprives us of the ability to respond quickly and efficiently to changing circumstances, which leads to overcrowding and an awful passenger experience.

In other areas of privatisation, private operators have been rewarded for taking risks and putting new investment in. But neither is true of the railways. Investment ultimately comes from either taxpayers (via Network Rail) or farepayers. As far as risks go, operators can simply walk away in the event of underperformance, as National Express infamously did in 2009 when it handed the East Coast franchise back to the DfT.  It was subsequently run profitably under public ownership.

So this isn’t a policy driven by misty-eyed nostalgia for British Rail, but simply a recognition that what we have at the moment isn’t working for passengers or taxpayers, and that we should be willing to look around the world for examples of best practice we could apply here at home.

Labour’s Transport team now intend to establish a taskforce to look in detail at how our railways should be run, including on how we ensure there is a strong voice for devolved city and regional government over rail services, and on what the best relationship should be between the infrastructure side of the railway and the train operating services. We will also work to make sure that the voices of passengers, staff and local communities are all properly represented in the oversight of the rail network.

Most of all however, we are simply determined to give the country a much better railway.

I have never been one to keep quiet about my Jamie Oliver love. Whether it's owning at least nine of his cook books (I see you, Naked Chef) or writing articles defending him, something about his pure, unbridled enthusiasm for culinary delights just gets to me. I attribute it largely to the fact that, in the world of 30 Minute Meals or Jamie and Jimmy's Friday Night Feast, I find a respite from the realities of the world. Jamie’s world is a world where everyone drinks pomegranate and lime water, lens flare abounds, and sadness and poverty don't exist.

Much to my profound sadness, I do not live in the high-res-macro-shot-tricolour-veg utopia of Jamie Oliver. I live in the world where tax credits are about to be cut, hitting both the poorest and mainly the poorest with children (the vast majority of tax credits claimed are child tax credits), and where NHS workers face an assault on their working hours. A world where, a white, privately-educated man told the prime minister of Jamaica, a nation we exploited, to just, you know, get over slavery.

Perhaps the depressing state of the UK shouldn’t have anything to do with Jamie Oliver and his culinary kingdom, but when government legislation is becoming increasingly vicious towards the poor, Jamie’s call for a sugar tax is both pernicious and misplaced. Here’s why: the sugar tax will just be a tax on the poor. It will be a tax that, in effect, makes very little difference to the lives of the middle classes. Although its main aim would be to disincentivise, it would most likely just penalise.

The argument against the sugar tax is not one against regulations or taxation as a whole; it is an argument against a tax that would be unfairly exacerbating the already heavy burden this government is placing on the poor. This tax would be one that either capitalises on the poverty that has forced people into poor diets in the first place, or restricts their already very limited freedom.

If our Lord and Saviour Jamie Oliver wants people to stop eating so much crap, he should campaign for better welfare. If he wants people to eat less sugar, he should fight for more breakfast clubs in schools so students don't go and buy a Galaxy at break because they're hungry. Campaign against the squeeze on the NHS and nurses' pay, so those families with working parents can afford your harissa chicken salads over another ready meal. Maybe the sugar tax would work, but if we’re living in a society where someone has to choose between having a Sprite and feeding their kid, I don’t think obesity is our biggest issue.

Jamie – I get it, you just want to help. I know you care about these things (lest we forget the moment when you burst into tears during a particularly gruelling episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution), but your efforts are misplaced. It would be wrong to presume that the malnutrition of Britain is simply a diet problem. This war against obesity is not a fizzy drinks issue: it’s a class issue. 

Videogames have always required pioneers to improve. These pioneers, more often than not, come from the legions of indie developers, who, like their predecessors way back in the early days of the medium, have to overcome fiscal and technical limitations with sheer creativity in order to create good games. Outside the indie sector, however, experimentation is just as important, though it is perhaps rarer. Every so often developers and publishers have to be willing not only to try something new, but to back up that experimentation with big wads of cash that they may never see again.

Sometimes these experiments are best forgotten, like that multiplayer thing with the giant monsters that was teeming with expensive DLC from day one, or that one that was like GTA except you played as a brooding douchecanoe with a smartphone that caused explosions. Such games probably deserve a place in history as cautionary tales, but that history is for another day. Here we’re honouring a magnificent seven experimental games that tried to do something great, but for whatever reason didn’t quite succeed.

1. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

The first of these is something of a classic, but also something of a disaster. Bloodlines combined great characters and mature storytelling with a limited open world setting and a brilliant array of replay options thanks to the different types of vampire you could play as. The writing that underpins the story and characterisation is still some of the best you’ll ever find in any game and while it looks a little square and blurry by modern standards it is still perfectly playable.

The problem for Bloodlines was that it wasn’t playable at launch, not even close. At launch it was a mess of bugs that struggled to run on the best available hardware of the time. Indeed it didn’t work properly for years and perhaps never would have done at all without the frankly heroic work of a modding community who have preserved and improved the game to a level far beyond that which its developers ever managed.

Bloodlines was such a costly failure that it doomed its developers to closure, leaving it without further official patches or any hope of a legitimate follow up. It seems oddly appropriate that it has achieved much greater influence only after it was pronounced dead.

2. LA Noire

This odd duck of a game attempted to create something of a new genre, an open world detective game with the emphasis on interviewing suspects. Traditionally detective games have tended to basically be puzzle games, but LA Noire set its stall out to be more than this, a game where you could read the faces of the suspects to identify liars and where you could get your hands dirty both investigating crime scenes and bringing down armed suspects.

In theory LA Noire was shooting for the moon, in practice, it didn’t make it to orbit before it crashed and burned, taking its developer with it.

The first problem was that LA Noire never seemed sure how it was going to be a game. You would search for evidence, you’d interview suspects, but the progression in the game was so dependent on your succeeding in these tasks that it refused to let you fail. This made the experience painfully linear given what it was meant to be trying to do. Secondly the combat felt arbitrary and an uncomfortable fit, the car chases and shootouts at complete odds with the tone of the rest of the game and not helped either by their somewhat poor implementation. These flaws tend to be the kind that can be smoothed out over a series, but such seems unlikely for LA Noire.

LA Noire represented an attempt to create something legitimately new and exciting. While it lamentably failed to clear the bar it set for itself that bar remains. We can, thanks to LA Noire, imagine what a good action detective game might look like, in simple terms, ‘Like LA Noire, only better’.

3. Planetside 2 

This represents a huge personal disappointment for me because it was a game I’d wanted to see for years. Planetside 2 was a game that fans of the original Planetside had been dreaming about since the first one climbed into a super-powered mech suit and jumped over a shark with its Core Combat expansion, but when said sequel finally emerged in 2012 the disappointment was palpable.

Planetside as a series has always tried to create huge scale first person shooter battles, the stuff of a Call of Duty cutscene writ large by hundreds of players at once. The first game never quite made it to huge scale, limited as it was to around five hundred players per server, but the sequel did a much better job, upping the numbers to nearly two thousand on any given map. It could have been revolutionary, perhaps it should have been, but alas it was not to be.

The problems that largely sank Planetside 2 came down to misjudging its audience. The original game was relatively slow paced, encouraging strategic thinking and teamwork. Planetside 2 however was a colossal Battlefield game that traded grand scale over the moment to moment polished experience of the established shooter franchises. The change in focus was a disaster. The fans who had loved the original game since way back when found themselves cut adrift with little connection to the new game, while the fans of traditional shooters didn’t stay too long. For all the efforts to streamline the game Planetside 2 was still complicated and opaque to many of its players.

All that said, seeing several hundred players shooting lumps out of each other, rolling in great columns of tanks, or swarming the skies with aircraft, was spectacular. On a good day, in the right fight, Planetside 2 was something unique.

Sooner or later somebody is bound to try once again to create a massed battle multiplayer game, and if they do we can only hope that the lessons from Planetside 2 will be learned, because now we’ve seen that such a game can be made, all we’re waiting for is somebody to make it right.

4. APB

Another online game that tried to break new ground but instead slammed into it like a hundred weight of green jelly was the critically panned multiplayer GTA-a-like APB. APB got a lot of things right, from its incredibly detailed character, clothing and vehicle customisation options, to the ruthlessly competitive nature of the missions that players partake in. The game cast you as criminals or sanctioned vigilantes on an open world map, criminals would start in on a mission and sooner or later, depending who was available, the Enforcers as they were called, would be dispatched to stop them. The missions would break down into a series of short phases, with the final one usually taking the form of a direct confrontation of some kind.

The pacing of the game was spectacularly well done and the missions were intensely competitive all the way through. The game also didn’t pull punches; if your team was good then it wouldn’t hesitate to throw larger groups at you.

Alas APB went wrong in more than enough ways to torpedo any game. The competitive nature of the game was brilliant if you were winning, but if you were losing it was painful. The multiple decisive moments in every mission, if they went against you, made the whole thing feel a lot more punishing than just getting beaten once. The untrammelled pain of defeat served to drive a lot of players out of the game, sufficient for the player population to enter a death spiral. As fun as the game could be it never came to terms with just how brutal it was.

Couple this ruthlessness to a really strange business model and a horde of other minor problems and the game was doomed. It wasn’t helped either by the fact that, while it looked and played like a very well presented indie game, APB was, and still is, one of the most expensive games ever produced. After launch it went under faster than a set of brick water wings, but the game now lives on as APB: Reloaded.

While it might have been a costly catastrophe for many of those directly involved with it the educational value from a game like APB cannot be overstated. In some ways it serves as the opposite of a proof of concept, a stern warning that, while people might think they want a competitive GTA style game, in practice they probably don’t.

5. Sleeping Dogs

This is another game with distinct overtones of GTA that somehow managed to mess things up.Sleeping Dogs took the GTA formula to Hong Kong, replacing over the top firepower with martial arts and GTAs misanthropic comedy plots for a classic undercover cop with divided loyalties thriller straight out of the Big Book of Classic Hong Kong Action Movie Storylines.

Sleeping Dogs when viewed piecemeal should be a great game. From the driving to the fighting to the characters everything is original, creative and well-engineered. Yet somehow it just doesn’t come together. The problem lies in the fact that when everything is assembled the tone of the game simply doesn’t fit with the action; the seriousness of the character drama at the heart of the story cannot withstand an action set piece where you batter people with a fish. I love a good character drama and I love being able to club dangerous underworld figures into unconsciousness with assorted species of sea life, but I’m not sure I want both on the same plate.

What this leaves us with is an unfortunate lesson in how storytelling in a videogame has to be handled. You can make an ambitious, original and innovative open world game, you can tell a tried and tested story within it, but you’ve still got to make them mesh.

6. Mirror's Edge 

The last two heroic failures aren’t necessarily failures by the usual run of things, but they certainly didn’t find their feet right away.

Mirror’s Edge was a profoundly experimental title when it came out. The perspective was recognisably first person and some elements like the story, structure and combat systems were familiar but the actual game itself was unique. The visual style and the movement mechanics were such that that the game could perhaps only really be accurately described as a racing game on foot. The visual styling, using red objects amid a largely white world to symbolise the route to the finish line gave the game a distinctive look that also provided the player with information while not forcing them to break the flow of the game by looking away from the action.

What Mirror’s Edge represented was one of those unicorns of game design, a game that knocks its design objectives out of the park first go, without needing a series, a sequel, or even a giant patch to get it right. It could have been better and certainly a lot of people were hungry for more, but it was pretty close to perfect from the off.

The problem however is that Mirror’s Edge was so radical a departure from both the platform games and the first person shooters that it resembled that it didn’t find a particularly large audience, nor did it find universal acclaim. Making a brilliant game is all well and good, but if it is not the brilliant game that a person buying that game expects or wants, they might not like it. Such was ever the problem with Mirror’s Edge, a fantastic game about something that people didn’t necessarily want to do.

7. Crysis

Crysis deserves a mention, just for its sheer single minded determination to have the best visuals in any game ever made. Crysis was a game so dedicated to looking pretty that it had no respect whatsoever for the hardware that it would be expected to run on. It wasn’t that Crysis was poorly optimised either, it was just trying to do so much that when it was released in 2007 the PC that could run it with all the settings cranked up simply didn’t exist.

Crysis didn’t just have detailed models and textures; it created a sense that its world was a tangible place. Objects could be picked up and thrown around, even the enemies. Walls could be knocked down, roofs could collapse and vegetation could be shredded by gunfire or flattened by vehicles. To this day no game has matched that quality in the environment that Crysis created. Coupled to a really slick interface and some nifty special abilities for your character like super-strength and invisibility the game was a huge amount of fun.

It wasn’t just the ludicrously optimistic system demands of Crysis that hurt the game at launch, though they certainly helped. The game possessed an absolute stinker of a story about North Koreans and a crap alien invasion while being populated with utterly pointless characters in ridiculous situations. For everything that the game did right in its beautiful, expansive maps and its great main character skillset it only rarely brought these toys out to play. The first casualty of the crap alien invasion was fun.

For all the millions of pounds sprayed into the abyss in the making of these games the contribution they and many others like them have made to the development of the medium is priceless. While the plaudits and profits always seem heaped atop the latest Next Big Thing or the Regular Safe Franchise, it is the games will to take risks that make the biggest impact in the long term.

As far as I can see, the government has  two main arguments for its current proposals to cut tax credits. One, which is also popular among some on the left,  is that tax credits ‘subsidise low pay’, a formulation which is vague enough to mean a number of different things of varying degrees of wrongness --see Gavin Kelly on the “saloon bar economics” of this argument here and the Adam Smith Institute here. The other, which this article addresses, is simply that expenditure has grown from not very many billions of pounds to quite a lot of billions of pounds since tax credits were first introduced, as set out in the Chancellor’s June Budget speech:  “The original Tax Credit system cost £1.1 billion in its first year. This year, that cost has reached £30 billion.”

The numbers here are rubbish, as we’ll see, but the problem with the argument is less to do with the numbers than the logic. Public expenditure programmes can grow for any number of reasons, good or bad. Simply stating that expenditure is higher now than in the past is not even the beginning of a rationale for policy  change: if it were, we would be discussing cuts to the state pension (up £35bn since 1999/2000, when tax credits were first introduced) and the NHS (up £65bn). When politicians cite expenditure growth as a rationale for cuts, the obvious question is: what led to the rise in spending? In the current debate, that question rarely seems to be raised.

Let’s get the Chancellor’s numbers out of the way before looking at the drivers of tax credit spending. The figure cited for “the first year” of tax credits is not even in real terms- it is the nominal amount without adjusting for inflation.  Worse is the fact that the figure relates only to the first six months of tax credits, as they were introduced halfway through the 1999/2000 financial year. Tim Blackwell provides an excellent account here which further shows that as people were still being moved on to tax credits over that six month period the figure cannot even be taken as giving an accurate picture of  six months expenditure under the new system, let alone of a full year.

But it gets worse. Tax credits were introduced as a (more generous) replacement for existing benefits. Over time they successively absorbed Family Credit, Disability Working Allowance and, from 2003/4, the child elements in Income Support and Jobseeker’s Allowance. Clearly the pre-existing benefits absorbed into the tax credit system need to be taken into account in looking at expenditure trends. Now the DWP produces a publication, Benefit expenditure and caseload tables, which does precisely this, giving a reasonably consistent time series for tax credits and the benefits it replaced back to 1979/80 (see chart).  This shows real terms expenditure of some £8bn on tax credits and equivalent benefits in 1999/00 and £10.5bn in the next year- which as we have seen was the first full year of tax credits. £10.5bn is what tax credits and the benefits they have replaced cost in the first full year of tax credits. £10.5bn is  not £1.1bn.

With that out of the way, let’s consider the drivers of growth using DWP’s consistent time series rather than the apples and pear comparisons used by the chancellor. As the chart shows, rather than being continuous, growth in tax credit and equivalent expenditure took place in three distinct episodes: in 2000/01, the first full year of tax credits; in 2003/4 when the system as we know it today was introduced, and in 2008/9-2009/10 when the recession hit.

In the first two of these episodes, the driver of increased spending was policy choice by governments led by Tony Blair: first to introduce tax credits, then to overhaul the system and make entitlements more generous. The 2003/4 increase in spending was very sizeable- so much so that the tax credit system we have today (for the time being) arguably really dates from 2003/4 rather than 1999/00.  Compared with the previous system, the new tax credits involved additional expenditure of over £9bn in the first year (including on benefits which were still in the course of being transferred to tax credits). This is by far the biggest change in spending on tax credits since their introduction, and it was a deliberate choice, mainly motivated (at least on the Labour government’s account) by the objective of reducing child poverty while maintaining work incentives.

This brings out the absurdity of simply citing expenditure growth as a justification for cuts.  You can’t reasonably criticise a policy decision to increase spending just on the grounds that spending actually increased: you have to challenge the rationale for the original decision- on the basis that you disagree with the objective, or that the policy was not the most effective way of pursuing it.

The last big rise in spending was with the onset of the 2008/9 recession. No surprise there: what is striking is not so much the increase as the fact that it has hardly been reversed, despite cuts and freezes to tax credits since 2010. The main explanation is falls in real wages, with real hourly earnings as of 2014 back to 2003/4 levels across most of the earnings distribution. 

(For a fuller analysis, see Steve Machin’s authoritative account here.)

This incidentally shows the vacuity of the government’s argument that the cuts will simply bring tax credit spending back to its level in 2007/8. Reducing spending now to 2007/8 levels means a much less generous system than existed then, because the system currently has to deal with higher levels of demand.

So there is no mystery about the rise in tax credit expenditure:  it was driven by overt distributional choices by Labour governments (the main factor) coupled with falls in real wages since 2007/8. The government’s approach mirrors the factors driving growth. The introduction of the National Living Wage can be seen as tackling the wage issue. But as the IFS have argued, it cannot, as a matter of simple arithmetic, completely offset the cuts to tax credits. Thus, ultimately, the government is making distributional choices, which run in the opposite direction to those made by Labour. It is those distributional choices, rather than trends in spending or lazy allegations about subsidising low pay, which should be at the centre of debate. 

The West End play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will be a sequel, following on from the epilogue to the seventh book, which sees Harry, Ron and Hermione’s own children heading to Hogwarts.

The eponymous cursed child is revealed to be Albus Severus Potter, Harry and Ginny’s son. The original epilogue centres around Albus, or Al, as he nervously leaves for school for the first time on the Hogwarts Express. The full synopsis released by the play's creative team on Pottermore explains:

"It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn’t much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children.

"While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places."

This suggests that the play will continue some of the concerns of the epilogue, which describes an anxious Albus. Worried he will be sorted in to Slytherin, the Hogwarts house notorious for producing wizards with dark tendencies, he turns to his father for advice: 

“What if I’m in Slytherin?”

The whisper was for his father alone, and Harry knew that only the moment of departure could have forced Albus to reveal how great and sincere that fear was.

Harry crouched down so that Albus’;s face was slightly above his own. Alone of Harry’s three children, Albus had inherited Lily’s eyes.

“Albus Severus,” Harry said quietly, so that nobody but Ginny could hear, and she was tactful enough to pretend to be waving to rose, who was now on the train, “you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew.”

“But just say--”

“--then Slytherin House will have gained an excellent student, won’t it? It doesn’t matter to us, Al. But if it matters to you, you’ll be able to choose Gryffindor over Slytherin. The Sorting Hat takes your choice into account.”

“Really?”

“It did for me,” said Harry.

He had never told any of his children that before, and he saw the wonder in Albus’s face when he said it.

By choosing to focus on Albus and the potential for “darkness” that may lie inside him, it seems the play will explore some of the series’ most overarching themes of inheritance, free will versus fate, the possibility to choose a life of good or evil, and the power of familial love.

A reporter for the Daily Mail adds, “When I asked if there would be any flashbacks to Harry’s own parents, Friedman said, more bluntly: ‘It’s for theatregoers and fans, and we’re not going to say any more about the story.’”

The poster, which was unveiled for the first time today, describes the play as “the eighth story” set “nineteen years later”.

Back in June, fans speculated that the new play would pick up where the epilogue left off. At the time the new play was announced, Rowling noted that Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone was released 18 years ago to the day, and that the new play would be released next year: 19 years later. “19 Years Later”, of course, is also the name of the final Harry Potter chapter.

The new play is partly written by Jack Thorne, who has a history of writing sensitively about teenagers and young adults in difficult or lonely situations. He told the Telegraph last year: “I tended to be the nerdy kid stood at the back, watching other people having fun. You just plug into what that felt like.” He acknowledged that “loneliness and isolation” are themes he returns to again and again: “There tends to be a weird lonely boy, or girl, at the centre of the story somewhere.”

The play, which will premiere at London’s West End Palace Theatre next summer, will be shown in two halves: theatregoers can either watch in two consecutive evenings, or on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays in the space of a full day. Ticketing information has also been realeased. Ticket prices range from £10 to £65 for each half. Full information is available here.

Until now, Facebook was pretty good about keeping your posts private. Even posts set to "public" were viewable only if someone found your profile –  and it's also relatively easy to make your own profile pretty much unsearchable on the site.

But all that is about to change.

Facebook has announced that it is rolling out a new, beefed-up search function, which will let you search all of its public content in one go. Search "New Statesman" or "Eastenders", and the site will soon mine all posts with "public" privacy settings to throw up any relevant posts. Whether this affects you has a lot to do with your privacy settings, as anyone with a draconian hold on their profile will have already set most posts to "private". But the change also affects posts from the past, when you may not have been so careful.

Facebook actually allowed you to search other users' posts before in a more limited way, and this feature's subsequent removal implied an increased concern for users' privacy. The return to the concept suggests that the site is keen to be treated as a news source, perhaps to compete more effectively with Twitter. Facebook already offers a "Trending" box, and a demo for the new search function suggests searching an event (the new evidence for water on Mars, for example) in order to see what people are posting about it. 

Of course, while "Martian" or "Rugby World Cup" could throw up your incisive commentary on current affairs, it could also bring up embarassing conversations you had with your mates, or a rant about a teacher courtesy of 14-year-old you. 

How to make your past posts private

Facebook lets you backdate all your posts in one go using its "limit past posts" option. This means that every post in the history of your Facebook account will be visible only to your Facebook friends, whether that be via the search function or on your profile.

First, go to the padlock icon in the top right hand corner of the screen and click "see more settings": 

Then click "limit past posts": 

And click "limit old posts" again:

If you don't feel the need for a total wipeout you can also change the privacy settings on individual posts. To check what might come up in the new Search, visit your own profile while you're not signed in – this should give you a good idea of which of your posts are private. 

I wish Jeremy Corbyn well, I really do. I sincerely hope he shunts important issues – renationalisation, fairness, tax justice – onto the political mainline where they belong. I was even thinking of getting involved with his revitalised Labour Party. But then he appointed Seumas Milne to direct the party’s strategy and communications.

Milne is by all accounts lovely. As comment editor from 2001 until 2007, he oversaw a comment section that was vibrant to a fault. It’s not him, or his newspaper that’s the problem (full disclosure: I write for the Guardian from time to time myself, and am a paid-up “supporter”); it’s what he thinks.

I specialise in the ex-USSR, where I lived for six years. I’ve written two books about Russia, as well as articles and radio documentaries. I’ve travelled to all but four of the countries of the old Warsaw Pact. I know it pretty well, in short. And yet, when I read what Milne writes about it, I slip into a parallel universe.

Take Ukraine. Ukrainians overthrew President Viktor Yanukovich last year, after snipers killed dozens of protesters. When they broke into his palace, they found treasures upon treasures – icons, carved ivory, Picasso ceramics, ancient books – piled up in the garage. He’d had nowhere to put them.

It was pure people power: the street reclaiming democracy from a thuggish kleptocrat. There was plenty for the leftist Milne to cheer here, right? Wrong. And then Ukraine’s larger neighbour took advantage of the revolutionary government’s weakness to annex its southern province. That’s something for Milne to disapprove of, right? Wrong again.

“The crisis in Ukraine is a product of the disastrous Versailles-style break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s,” he told his readers on March 5. “The US and its allies have since relentlessly expanded NATO up to Russia's borders… it is hardly surprising that Russia has acted to stop the more strategically sensitive and neuralgic Ukraine falling decisively into the western camp.”

 “Putin’s absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive,” he wrote, a couple of months later.

Now, you can quibble with the facts. The destruction of the USSR was not some Versailles-style treaty imposed from outside. Russia, Ukraine and Belarus did it themselves, despite opposition from Washington. You can point out that NATO (thanks to Norway) had had a border with Russia for four decades by the early 1990s. And you can suggest that annexing part of a neighbouring country is not a “defensive” step by any conceivable definition.

But really, that’s not important. What’s important is something that’s missing altogether -- the recognition that this wasn’t anything to do with NATO or Vladimir Putin at all. This was an uprising by Ukrainians keen to improve their lives. If Milne wanted to criticise the West, there was plenty of material: Yanukovich’s palace, the one with a Picasso vase in the garage, was owned via a UK shell company, for starters. But Milne appears to have had no interest in the hopes, aspirations or dreams of individual Ukrainians, or in actual instances of Westerners enabling Yanukovich’s beastliness. This, you see, was all about us, and all about NATO.

Eastern Europeans think their countries voted as democracies to join NATO, as is their sovereign right, but that doesn’t wash with Seumas. He thinks this is an aggressive expansion, seemingly against the wishes of the countries involved. “NATO’s hawks have got the bit between their teeth.”

For Milne, geopolitics is more important than people. Whatever crisis strikes the world, the West’s to blame. Why did a group of psychopaths attack a magazine and a supermarket in Paris? “Without the war waged by western powers, including France, to bring to heel and reoccupy the Arab and Muslim world, last week’s attacks clearly couldn’t have taken place”.

Why did Anders Breivik slaughter 77 people? “What is most striking is how closely he mirrors the ideas and fixations of transatlantic conservatives.”

Why did two maniacs in London decapitate an off-duty soldier? “They are the predicted consequence of an avalanche of violence unleashed by the US, Britain and others.”

Milne’s geopolitics spared us having to read how the children of Beslan or the theatregoers of Moscow only had themselves to blame, but office workers in New York had no such luck. “Recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent.”

And this rampant victim blaming is not an approach confined to current affairs. His geopolitical preferences extend into history too, where he fiercely opposes any suggestion that Stalin’s Soviet Union was as bad as Hitler’s Germany. He has been caricatured as a Stalinist as a result, something that appears to irritate some of his once-and-future Guardian colleagues (he is on leave from the paper). I got into a Twitter debate with Zoe Williams yesterday, in which she pointed out: “he's written reams about the crimes of Stalin”.

He has indeed, but he has written about them in the manner of a Brit acknowledging the Amritsar massacre, before pointing out how much worse off India would be without trains. A particularly telling Milne moment came in 2006, when the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly voted to condemn “the massive human rights violations committed by totalitarian communist regimes”. In the article he wrote in response, Milne admitted the USSR executed 799,455 people, then moved on.

“For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality,” he insisted.

Now, you can quibble with the facts. Focussing only on the USSR’s executions ignores the millions it starved to death in Ukraine, or in the mass deportations from the Caucasus and Crimea, the way it used rape as a weapon, or that fact it invaded without provocation half a dozen countries. You can also question those “huge advances” considering the fact that life expectancy in the USSR peaked in 1962, then declined steadily as chronic alcoholism took hold. But more important for me was the fact that this sentence reminded me of something I’d read before.

In Politics and the English Language, Orwell conjured up a “comfortable English professor” who wants to defend totalitarianism, but can’t bring himself to admit killing people gets results. “While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore… the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement,” Orwell’s fictional professor writes.

Almost exactly 60 years had passed between Orwell’s essay and Milne’s humbug but, in the world of supposed leftists who think politics is more important than people, not much appears to have changed.

I wanted to believe in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, I really did. But, with the elevation of this man, that chance has gone.

Ahead of the Oldham West and Royton by-election, triggered by the death of long-serving MP and former minister Michael Meacher, discussion is beginning in Labour circles about who the party's candidate could be. Jon Lansman, a former adviser to Meacher and a director of the Corbyn-aligned group Momentum, has pledged not to run after the Sun reported that left-wingers wanted him to stand. He tweeted:"I rule it out 100% & no-one apart from you has been tasteless enough to suggest it to me at this point." 

Lansman, a veteran of the Bennite struggles of the 1980s, is a feared figure among Labour MPs owing to his suppport for mandatory reselection. "When there are selections of an MP, I would like to see MPs who reflect the values of members of the party," he said recently. "The fact is that Liz Kendall got 4 per cent of the votes in the leadership contest." In response, one Corbynite MP told me: "Jon Lansman needs to wind his neck in and get back in his box. He's doing a lot of damage." 

Jim McMahon is the potential candidate most often mentioned by Labour sources. He is the leader of both Oldham council and of the party's local government group. In 2014, he was named council leader of the year and received an OBE in the Queen's 2015 birthday honours. But some expect him to instead seek to become Mayor of Greater Manchester when the inaugural election is held in 2017. 

Local councillor and former Oldham mayor Abdul Jabbar and fellow councillor Riaz Ahmad are other potential candidates having previously sought selection for the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election in 2010. A shortlist of six candidates will be drawn up by Labour's NEC followed by a vote of the Oldham constituency party. Labour is currently 1/7 to hold the seat, which Meacher won with a majority of 14,738 in 2015, followed by Ukip on 4/1. 

As the party reconfigures itself after Jeremy Corbyn’s resounding victory, new factions have emerged – and previously powerful forces in the party have faded away. Here is your guide to the main contenders jockeying for position alongside Momentum:

Labour First

Labour First, founded in 1988, is a pre-Blairite pressure group seen as the voice of the party’s traditional right. Headed by campaigner and councillor Luke Akehurst, this faction supported ABC (Anyone But Corbyn) in the leadership election, while Akehurst himself backed Yvette Cooper. In the deputy race, it emphasised its ties to Tom Watson. The group made headlines during the leadership contest by urging fellow centrist group Progress to promote the other non-Corbyn candidates as well as its first choice, Liz Kendall. The groups have since held events together espousing moderate Labour values. Labour First says it “exists to ensure that the voices of moderate party members are heard while the party is kept safe from the organised hard left”.

Labour for the Common Good

A new moderate pressure group, Labour for the Common Good is wryly referred to in Westminster as “the Resistance”. It was established when Jeremy Corbyn began pulling ahead in the Labour leadership contest by the modernisers Chuka Umunna (pictured) and Tristram Hunt – former frontbenchers who both ducked out of the contest. It aims to bring together the soft left, old right, Brownites and Blairites to counter the Corbynite wing; it is open to MPs from “the right to the soft left of the party”. The group stresses “an urgent need for moderates in our party” to mobilise and regain Labour’s political and intellectual edge. The businessman John Mills, Labour’s biggest individual donor – who stopped funding the party after Corbyn’s victory – has said he is ready to “funnel” cash into Labour for the Common Good.

Progress

Founded in 1996, Progress is the original Blairite pressure group. Dedicated to New Labour values, and supported by Labourites associated with that era – its chair is John Woodcock MP, former aide to John Hutton and Gordon Brown – it has never been further out of step with the party’s leadership, and its influence is waning. Three years ago, under Ed Miliband, it landed at the heart of a debate about Labour’s soul, when a report from Labour’s National Executive questioned “the organisational nature of Progress, and whether or not this form of organisation is acceptable inside the Labour Party”. Politicians from the Blair years, like former Home Secretary David Blunkett, might now warn about Momentum being a “party within a party”, but Progress has attracted the same criticism in the past. In 2012, the veteran Labour leftwinger, the late Michael Meacher MP, compared what he saw as the group’s undemocratic nature to that of Militant Tendency. Progress supported the “neo-Blairite” candidate Liz Kendall for Labour leader. David Sainsbury, the Labour peer and supermarket billionaire, is a major Progress donor.

Compass

The soft-left think tank/pressure group hybrid Compass started out as a letter to the Guardian in 2003. Numerous prominent leftwing think tanks warned that Tony Blair’s administration had “lost its way”, and announced their decision to form a new group within the party, led by Labour commentator and writer Neal Lawson. The moderniser Chuka Umunna rose through Labour’s ranks via the Compass flank, and the group should have come into its own when he and Ed Miliband were at the top of the party. Instead, it lost power and members during a row in 2011 when it opened up membership to people from other political parties. Compass called this decision a “huge cultural and political step”, but it has stopped it having any voice in internal Labour elections.

The National Executive Committee

The Labour party’s ruling body is not as all-powerful as it was before first Neil Kinnock and then Tony Blair clipped its wings, but it still remains a hugely important part of the party’s constitution, overseeing administration and disputes. The leader, deputy leader and leader of the party’s MEPs always sit on the NEC, while trade union delegates elect a further 12 members at the party’s annual conference, with MPs and councillors electing two representatives to sit on the body. Six members of the 33-strong committee are chosen by members every two years, with the 2016 elections expected to further bolster Corbyn’s narrow majority on the NEC.

The National Policy Forum

The National Policy Forum meets two to three weekends a year to set policy, in a role previously reserved for the NEC and annual conference. The 186-strong body is made up of representatives from the parliamentary parties in Europe, Westminster and the devolved legislatures, as well as local government, affiliated trade unions and individual party members. Members of the NPF are elected every two years, with the next election in 2017. The results in 2015 saw the right’s control eroded but not destroyed.

Left Futures

“The best that’s Left in Labour,” is how the leftwing blog Left Futures describes itself. Although it is billed as an “independent online network”, it is mainly a repository for sincere comment pieces about Labour from those on the party’s left. It was set up around five years ago, and joined Twitter in May 2010. Its editor is the veteran leftwing campaigner Jon Lansman – his dedication to the Labour left stretches back to working on Tony Benn’s 1981 deputy leadership campaign. He worked for Meacher.

Momentum

Praised as a “grassroots network” by its members and decried as the renaissance of 1980s Labour Trotskyites, Militant Tendency, by its detractors, Momentum is a new campaign group associated with Jeremy Corbyn. The group – organised by Lansman (see above) – calls itself the “successor entity” to Corbyn’s triumphant fight to be Labour leader. Its mission is to transform Labour into a “more democratic party”. Labour moderates warn against creating a “party within a party”, and fear the organisation will trigger purges of moderate MPs. Read Stephen Bush’s report on Momentum here.

Labour Together

The latest Labour group to be formed (at the time of publishing), Labour Together is a collection of high-profile Labour politicians from different political wings of the party aiming to bring New Labour and Blue Labour together. Members include former policy review head Jon Cruddas, former shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna, shadow energy secretary Lisa Nandy, former shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt, peer Maurice Glasman and Croydon North MP Steve Reed. Unlike Labour for the Common Good (which is a PLP body), Labour Together has the intention of operating outside Westminster and becoming a general party movement. It's seen by some as an anti-Corbynite reaction to Momentum.
 

A number of Labour MPs are openly attacking their party’s new leadership on social media – particularly taking issue with its aggressive online supporters, whose abusive behaviour has been condemned by Corbyn himself. They include:

Mike Gapes

The usually amiable Ilford South MP, has been in all-out war with his Corbynista detractors on Twitter. After one long exchange where they called on him to resign from the party, he ended up typing: “I AM LABOUR.  I AM LABOUR. Get it?” Another tweet claimed: “There is now no collective shadow cabinet responsibility in our party. No clarity on economic policy and no credible leadership.”

John Mann

The Bassetlaw MP has accused some activists of sending him anti-semitic abuse, including 40 emails and tweets during the leadership campaign that referred to him with epithets such as “Zionist stooge” and “utter filth”. “I have very serious concerns about Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters,” he said in August.

Simon Danczuk

The outspoken Rochdale MP, known for his attacks on Ed Miliband, has transferred his frustration seamlessly to Corbyn. Often writing in the Mail on Sunday, he most recently described Corbyn’s reign as a “farce”, comparing it to a “Carry On” film. His unfettered attacks on Corbyn have led to a “Deselect Danczuk” campaign on Twitter, which hasn’t quelled his activities one bit.

Jamie Reed

In the most pointed Twitter move of the Labour leadership contest, the then shadow health minister resigned from the frontbench during Corbyn’s victory speech. The MP for Copeland tweeted his resignation letter, which warned: “No amount of well-meaning protest will protect the NHS, drive up standards, recruit more medical professionals or improve the accessibility of world-class healthcare to the British people. Only an elected Labour government will do this.”

> Now read our report on Momentum, and how it’s affecting Labour.

“Who’s running the show over there?” That was the question – or the complaint – that MPs and staffers voiced with increasing frustration during the first frenzied weeks of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

It felt like déjà vu all over again: just as Ed Miliband’s slick campaign quickly gave way to chaos and disunity – with, in the words of one aide, “everyone trying to be their favourite West Wing character” – Corbyn’s operation suffered a hideous start.  Why?

“We didn’t expect to win,” admitted campaign aide Jon Lansman, on Left Futures, the increasingly influential Corbynite website of which he is the editor. Most campaign staff had been on secondment from supportive trade unions, while others were on unpaid leave. Trade union officials were “greeted like conquering heroes” on their return to work on the Monday after special conference (in the words of one), but watched in horror as the good work of the summer threatened to collapse.

Whispers began to start that the wrong people had made the transition from the campaign to the leader’s office. Insiders began to joke about a “Sino-Soviet split” at the heart of Project Corbyn, mirroring the split between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China in 1960.

That analogy is more than a colourful one-liner: the brightest advocate of the flavour of anti-austerity championed by John McDonnell – that under-investment in infrastructure and skills is the biggest weakness of the economy, not lack of demand – is John Ross, currently a senior fellow at the Renmin University in Beijing, but formerly an economic adviser to Ken Livingstone during his stint as Mayor of London.

The Livingstone connection runs right through Corbyn’s China tendency. His campaign manager and chief of staff is Simon Fletcher, a former Ken staffer. Fletcher, like John Ross, unnerves Labour MPs from the party’s right due to his former membership of Socialist Action, a Trotskyite group. “No one ever leaves Socialist Action,” one veteran observes, “And now they’re right at the heart of the party.”

But in hiring a team to surround Corbyn, Fletcher has looked not so much for ideological allies but for competence. Not everyone there is a dyed-in-the-wool left-winger: For example Neale Coleman, another former Livingstone staffer, replaces Torsten Henricson Bell as head of policy. Coleman is a pragmatist who stayed in his post at City Hall when Boris Johnson took over, and he is highly rated there. James Mills, who handled press during the campaign and now serves as chief spinner to McDonnell, worked on Ed Balls’s leadership campaign in 2010. He is very much from the centre of the party, but enjoys the trust of Fletcher. So does Kevin Slocombe, appointed interim director of communications until Seumas Milne, formerly of the Guardian, could take post. Slocombe is expected to leave the leader's office soon to work on the mayoral race there. 

The Fletcher Factor, however, does explain why the Liverpudlian activist Carmel Nolan, notionally head of communications during the campaign, did not make the transition to the leader’s office. Although she was well liked by journalists, she was regarded as ineffective by campaign aides.

On the other side of the Sino-Soviet split lies the “Russian tendency”, which includes many of Corbyn’s institutional supporters. Their ambivalence to his leadership suggests that the left-wing pull of the trade unions is often overstated.

With the exceptions of the TSSA and the CWU, most of the party’s affiliated unions supported Corbyn only grudgingly, with their leaders forced to endorse the Islington MP not because of a conversion to Corbynism but to keep pace with their own activists. “The right-wing press calls them barons,” says one senior aide to Corbyn, “But the reality is these are democratic politicians with their own electorates – electorates which love Jeremy.”

Len McCluskey, perhaps Britain’s best-known trade unionist, is a typical example. Privately, McCluskey attempted to force through an endorsement for Andy Burnham, but he was overruled by his executive committee. Although McCluskey publicly threw his weight behind Corbyn, the two men remain at a distance, and the Unite leader’s influence is much weaker at the top of the party than it has been in recent years.

Yet for all its relative weakness, it is this “Russia tendency”, rather than the people around the leader’s office, which has party moderates spooked. That is largely down to the creation of a new group called Momentum, which is billed as the “continuation” of Corbyn’s campaign. It has been founded by Left Futures editor Jon Lansman, a supporter of Tony Benn in the 1970s and 1980s and a long-term advocate of mandatory reselection for MPs.

The right’s old warriors believe that Momentum is a successor to Militant Tendency, the Trotskyite group which infiltrated the Labour party in the 1970s and 1980s, successfully taking over Liverpool Council and selecting several MPs. Accordingly, one wag has dubbed the new group “the Momentant Tendency”.

Momentum, for its part, describes itself as an outward facing organisation similar to Movement for Change, the do-gooding community group founded by David Miliband. That did a lot of good work at a grassroots level, such as organising street clean-ups, but largely stayed out of internal party disputes. Momentum says its mission is similarly benign. “We’re not organising to undermine the Labour party, but to help the Labour party win,” says one spokesman. Its first campaign, Democracy SOS, is aimed at signing up more voters, to ameliorate the effects of the new registration procedures (which penalise students in particular) and constituency boundary changes.

But moderate MPs and activists are still worried. They point out that the new group was launched without informing either the Shadow Cabinet or the deputy leader, Tom Watson, in advance, and that Gloria de Piero had already been asked to carry out a voter registration drive.

The first thing to note is that Momentum is not (yet) flush with money. Like its three rivals, the Corbyn campaign ended the leadership race in arrears. Momentum’s organisers, far from starting life with a healthy bank balance, don’t yet know if there will be anything left over once the campaign account is settled to hire staff, although they hope that a combination of union assistance and member donations will allow them to hire a small team sooner rather than later.

It is information, rather than money, that is Momentum’s ace in the hole. While its organisers are cagey about the exact figures, it is likely that they have a bigger pool of members to talk to than any external organisation in the party’s history, thanks to the data collected during the leadership race. Former NUS president Kat Fletcher, who was in charge of marshalling volunteers, attracted the admiration of her allies and opponents alike for the size and scope of the phonebanks she managed. “She had phonebanks of more than 500 people running at the same time,” says one organiser. “Better Together didn’t manage that. Yes Scotland didn’t manage that.”

Why does that matter? To put it simply, in internal party elections: the hand that controls the mailing list rules the world. If you cannot talk to members, you cannot win their votes.

One insider from the Corbyn campaign, the veteran of numerous battles between the party’s left and right, admits that “we’ve been planning this for a long time”. Although mandatory reselection remains the end goal for many on the left, the internal priority will likely be organising around what one euphemistically terms “natural wastage”. Six Labour MPs died in office in the last parliament, while more resigned to stand as crime commissioners or local mayors. Filling vacant seats is a good way of reshaping the parliamentary Labour party to better reflect the grassroots. The Conservatives’ changes to boundaries will also force a round of selection battles. Momentum’s organisers concede that local branches, too, will “most likely decide to organise around electing delegates and selections”.

Momentum is unlikely to be the only group attempting to harness data harvested during the leadership election.  Labour First, an old organisation of the Labour right established in 1988, will retain campaign data from both Yvette Cooper and Tom Watson, and will hope to leverage it to win Conference votes and elections to the party’s National Policy Forum. From there, they hope to preserve moderate shibboleths like the party’s support for Trident, and to secure parliamentary selections for centrist MPs. 

These factions are cheered by one salient fact. Although Labour’s present state sometimes resembles the early 1980s – the party’s right discredited by a period in office that left activists discontented, and by successive election defeats – there is a crucial difference: size. In the 1970s, Trotskyite groups took over local parties that were moribund, with so few members that 20 committed activists could easily take control of the party’s structures.

The 2015 Labour party couldn’t be further from its Seventies husk. Enthusiasm for Corbynism may not yet extend to marginal voters but it is deep and genuine. Most local parties have doubled in size – and Corbyn’s victory has transformed the culture and the character of the party in the country overnight. Sadiq Khan, once regarded as a figure from the party’ s left, faced a barracking from new, pro-Corbyn members, for his critical remarks about the Labour leader in the Financial Times and Mail on Sunday. In some parts of the country, there are undoubtedly organised leftwing factions attempting to infiltrate Labour – but they are hugely outnumbered by new members with a much broader range of opinions.

“We’ve been to more new member events that I can count,” says one Shadow Cabinet staffer, “And they’re not Trots. They’re just people – often young people, or people who left [under Tony Blair] – who are excited by Jeremy, who like that he isn’t your average politician.”

That combination of size and enthusiasm means that Momentum is far more likely to be a patchwork rather than a cohesive organisation. In some parts of the country it will be a blunt instrument for retaliation by the party’s left – the Colchester branch has already caused a Twitterstorm by endorsing calls for 21 MPs who abstained on George Osborne’s fiscal charter to be deselected. In others, it will be a significantly more ecumenical force: two constituency chairs found, much to their surprise, that it was the local heads of Momentum who were arguing most forcefully for an ideologically heterodox Parliamentary Labout Party. In another, two activists are at loggerheads after both attempted to launch “their” local branch of Momentum.

That all of these activists – from the purists to the pluralists to the simply disorganised – are united in their support for Corbyn means that Labour’s internal balance will move left, not because of pressure from the leader's office, but simply as a natural result of the new membership asserting itself through the party's existing structures. Local councillors from the party’s right, who face automatic reselection as a matter of course, expect to be replaced by candidates from the left. Although incumbency is a powerful asset on the party’s ruling national executive committee (NEC), fixers from the right are pessimistic about their ability to hold on to any of their seats next year. That means the body which governs the party's administration and structures ought to have a strong pro-Corbyn majority this time next year..

And as for the party’s National Policy Forum, the sovereign body as far as setting policy – and writing the manifesto – is concerned, the left has enjoyed increasing forward strides in recent years that will likely accelerate. As one NPF member noted, “people aren’t going to get re-elected by this membership saying ‘I’ll back the welfare cap’ or ‘I support Trident’, are they?”

Many of those advances will doubtless provoke anguished mutterings by the left’s internal opponents, with the hand of Momentum seen as crucial even when it is absent, just as the Blairite group Progress was believed to have an influence well in excess of its real power.

In reality, the significant changes in Labour will not be brought about by machinations from either side of “the Sino-Soviet split” in Corbyn’s team, but because the left’s opponents (in this metaphor, the West) remain discredited, defeated and lacking in real leadership. And, just as the People’s Republic and the USSR were able to see off the West for 30 years, the smart money must now be on the ability of Corbyn and the Left to remain in control of the party for the foreseeable future.

> Now read up on Labour’s warring factions and what they’re fighting over.

Since the Canadian election on Monday, one of the most misleading claims in the international media is that Canada has suddenly “lurched to the left.” In a context where the Stephen Harper government has consistently moved the country to the right over the course of a decade, the only direction of travel for the opposition getting into power would be to move left… towards the centre.

The Liberal victory in Canada is not at all comparable to Jeremy Corbyn’s nomination as Labour leader in the UK or Bernie Sanders’ popularity in the Democratic presidential primary. In the British and American cases, these are internal party elections, among party members who tend to be more left-wing than the average voter. In Canada, Trudeau is a centrist leader who brought together disaffected conservatives as well as progressives, building a broad coalition of support that cuts across geographical, class, and educational divides.

The Liberals’ core manifesto pledges merely return Canada to its natural state of progressive centrism. Environmentalism, protecting Aboriginal rights, and supporting immigrants and refugees are core aspects of the Canadian identity which have been mauled by the Conservative government. Harper tried to convince Canadians to fear their own neighbours, to believe that enemies are lurking everywhere. His attempts to divide the country into “old stock Canadians” and ‘dangerous others’ failed miserably and sounded absolutely absurd to Canadian ears.

There is nothing radical about the Liberals’ economic policies either. They plan to cut income taxes for middle income earners and raise them for those earning over $200,000 – to levels that are still lower than in the UK.

The Liberals plan to scrap the regressive income splitting introduced by the Harper government last year – a policy whereby a high-income earner (typically a man) is able to transfer part of his income to a lower-earning spouse for tax purposes. The policy currently benefits 13 per cent of families – high income earners with stay at home spouses. It reinforces men’s dominant role in relationships and discourages women from working. Introducing income splitting was a “lurch to the right”; getting rid of it is merely a return to progressivism.

Among the Liberals’ other so-called left-wing policies are the reintroduction of the long-form census (meaning a return to evidence-based policy-making), the amendment of the anti-terror Bill C-51, which has been deemed unconstitutional by lawyers and experts around the world as an infringement on civil liberties, and the improvement of the Access to Information Act so that all government data is open by default.

While the party does not preclude the option of running a small deficit until 2019/2020 to invest in infrastructure, innovation and clean technologies, they are able to win support because the whole of their economic platform is credible and realistic. Some on the left are claiming that the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) lost because it promised a balanced budget, coded as “austerity”. This is only half of the sentence – they promised to balance the books while also promising the sun and the moon in spending and investments. A fantasy budget. The NDP dropped in the polls when all of the manifestos came out.

In an article for The Atlantic, David Frum argues that it is populist anger about inequality, similar to that expressed by Corbyn and Sanders, which is driving Canadians “to the left”. While this is of some concern, he misreads the root of Canadians’ antagonism.

Stephen Harper has utterly transformed Canada’s democratic nature. Most commentators abroad have only caught wind recently, but anger has been brewing for years in Canada. The Conservatives committed electoral fraud in 2011. Members of Team Harper have been caught misleading parliament. Civil servants and scientists have been prevented from speaking to the media. The government has outright lied to the public, has concealed evidence of crime, has been complicit in Senate scandals, has spied on opponents, has bullied and smeared members of its own party. Stephen Harper has prorogued parliament more than other Prime Minister in Canadian history. The government has targeted progressive think tanks through extensive audits. It has eliminated the independent elections monitor (the individual is now someone directly responsible to the prime minister), forbidden campaigns to encourage voter turnout, and increased the influence of money in politics. Even John Ibbitson, one of Harper’s biographers, concludes: “No prime minister in history and no political party have been loathed as intensely as Stephen Harper and the Conservative party.”

It suddenly becomes clear why 32 pledges to strengthen democracy, including electoral and Senate reform, were a core part of the Liberal manifesto. To say that voters chose Trudeau because of anger over inequality would be to miss the point. Canadians wanted a change of policies, but also of tone. The Liberals won offering Canadians a positive, inclusive, pluralistic counter-narrative to Harper’s portrayal of the country.

Canadians chose a politics of hope over a politics fear. The proposed moderate agenda merely brings the country back to the centre after a decade of right-wing rule.

This week was the first time that many heard the name Karl Andree, a British grandfather in Saudi Arabia who has been sentenced to 350 lashes for the ‘crime’ of making wine. Journalists and politicians have been rightfully appalled by his treatment, but unfortunately all too common from a government whose brutality and repression has become widespread and systematic.

Over recent months, the close relationship between the UK and the Saudi regime has come under greater scrutiny. This follows the punishment of blogger Raif Badawi, who was sentenced to ten years in prison and 350 lashes, and Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who was sentenced to death by crucifixion for taking part in protests.

It is perhaps no coincidence that it was the same day newspapers led with Andree’s punishment that Michael Gove announced the government was cancelling a £5.9 million deal that would have seen the Ministry of Justice providing prison services to the Saudi authorities.

This is the first time in years that any UK government has been forced to publically stand up to an increasingly repressive Saudi dictatorship that over recent months has doubled beheadings, reaffirmed its anti-LGBT laws and even made atheism a criminal offence. Gove’s announcement was a striking contrast from only two weeks ago when it emerged that the UK had taken part in ‘vote swapping’ to ensure the Saudis were represented on the UN Human Rights Council.

Unfortunately the UK connection with Saudi Arabia extends way beyond prisons. The historically uncritical relationship is underpinned by mutually back-slapping state visits and a close military relationship which has seen Saudi Arabia becoming one of the UKs closest allies in the Middle East and by far the biggest buyer of British weapons. There is no indication that any of these things will change.

Over the last five years the Coalition government licensed almost £4 billion worth of arms to the regime; including fighter jets, armoured vehicles and small arms. Unfortunately, despite Gove’s intervention the current government is unlikely to change this, with the Defence Minister, Michael Fallon, having recently announced that the Ministry of Defence will be stepping up its role in promoting arms exports.

Only a month ago the Saudi military was represented in London at Defence & Security Equipment International 2015, one of the largest arms fairs in the world, where they were invited to rub shoulders with senior civil servants, government ministers and military personnel. At the same time as thousands like Karl Andree were suffering in prisons their captors were being glad-handed and welcomed to London to shop for weapons.

The support is nothing new and can be characterised as institutional rather than party political, with past Labour government having invested just as much time and political capital in promoting arms sales to the Saudis. In 2008 Tony Blair was criticised after intervening to cancel a Serious Fraud Office investigation of a multibillion-pound arms deal between Saudi Arabia and BAE Systems.

One of the reasons for this is because of the level of integration between the UK and Saudi defence programmes. Around 240 UK Ministry of Defence civil servants and military personnel work in the UK and Saudi Arabia to support the contracts through the Ministry of Defence Saudi Armed Forces Programme (MODSAP) and the Saudi Arabia National Guard Communications Project (SANGCOM).

The human cost of Saudi aggression extends beyond its own borders, with UK-sold arms having been used by Saudi forces in Bahrain and UK fighter jets and bombs being used in the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe that is being unleashed on the people of Yemen. UK cooperation has been key to the campaign, with bombs earmarked for the RAF having been transferred to Saudi forces.

The cancellation of the prison contract is definitely a welcome move, but it must only be the start. There is a real hypocrisy at the heart of UK foreign policy and it is embodied by the approach successive governments have taken towards Saudi Arabia.

Western arms sales and fawning support from government ministers haven't just provided military support for the dictatorship; they have also sent a statement of political support for the repression it has presided over.

They also send a message to those like Karl Andree, Raif Badawi and Ali Mohammed al-Nimr that their rights to human rights and democracy are a lower priority than steady oil supplies and arms company profits. How many more like them will be tortured and brutalised before the UK finally says that enough is enough?

Everyone loves lists, especially the ones ranking powerful or influential individuals. The Independent is working on its latest Rainbow list, TIME magazine's annual list always gets attention (remember when you won in 2006? I mean me. I mean us!) and even websites like the Verge have started to dabble in this craze.

This week, I attended the Asian Media and Marketing Group's (AMG) annual leadership awards ceremony, which included the unveiling of the 101 most influential and powerful British Asians in the UK. It was a repeat of last year, with Business Secretary Sajid Javid being crowned number one again.

The influence and importance of the ceremony has grown over the years, with David Cameron making headlines by stating his wish to see a future British Asian PM when he was the event's chief guest last year. That honour went to Michael Gove this time round. I can't help but mention the part during his speech where he mixed up Sadiq Khan's name with Sajid Javid's, saying Khan was now "around the cabinet table". The faux pas was made even more uncomfortable when he moved on to talk about the real Sadiq Khan, and his selection as Labour's mayoral candidate for London.

Despite the ceremonial fumbles, and the fact that we would all love to live in a society where such specialised events weren't necessary, there is a crucial need for lists that recognise minorities in this way.

This was reinforced by Cameron in his recent party conference speech, saying black and minority ethnic (BME) individuals have a more arduous challenge when applying for jobs simply because of their ethnic-sounding first and second names. The fact a Conservative PM chose to say this in a conference speech does show the progress and signals that a serious fuss is being made in this uphill battle for equality.

However, what's alarming about such power lists is that they aren't always accurate reflections of the groups that they purport to represent. For example, this Asian power list is not representative of the Asian community at large. Just take the example of Sajid Javid. Labour was once again more successful in winning BME votes at the last election, yet out of the eight politicians in the top 20, six were Conservatives. It's quite clear "power lists" are mere reflections of those in top positions, even if the power they wield isn't necessarily benefitting the communities they come from. It's pretty ironic, for example, that Javid, the son of a bus driver, is seeking to push through anti-union laws when the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers Union (RMT) is one of the most politically active in the UK.

Another challenge we face as a society is not to neglect other groups also confronting discrimination on a daily basis. The struggle of BME women is an example. Just 23 out of 101 British Asians on the list are women, and of the seven in the top 20, three were coupled with their husbands.  

This short-sightedness was compounded by the speech given by AMG's managing editor Kalpesh Solanki. After a series of stereotypical dad jokes about wives being attracted to money, he concluded that his organisation's power list shows that, "men have power". I immediately sat up in my seat, thinking he was going to focus on this issue further and more seriously, but instead he allowed his remarks to ferment.

The media industry as a whole will never rid the world of lists. Another one released this week was the Financial Times' list of powerful LGBT executives, in cooperation with OUTstanding, a networking group. Whereas the AMG list has its own set of problems, this one reflected the unfortunate pale, male and stale world of business, furthering the need to add colour and gender balance in all of society's upper echelons. But these lists can only reflect Britain properly once government, business and voices in the media represent minority groups better. Maybe they're a sad indictment of the amount of work we still have to do.

Sport has been much in the UK’s news lately, albeit with a “what happened to the Europeans in the rugby?” theme. Gibraltar, meanwhile, has secured the rights to host the 2019 Island Games, but as the BBC reports, fans of a few sports are going to be disappointed as there will be no football, cycling or volleyball.  The Isle of Man Today reports that a separate football tournament might happen as a result.

Who will be running the Rock by then is somewhat up in the air as the Government has dissolved itself and called a general election for the 26^th November, as the Gibraltar Chronicle and just about everybody else confirms. There will be a lot of conflict inevitably but some common ground as the Brexit issue continues to come to the fore.

Something to be welcomed by Gibraltarians of all political hues is the territory’s acceptance by an anti-money-laundering organisation, according to International Adviser. There has in the past been a certain cynicism about the country’s regulatory regimes and a lot of work has been going on to ensure those thoughts, if indeed they were ever justified (and that’s by no means certain), should be thoroughly discredited so this external validation will help.

Another boost to the economy will be the announcement of more British Airways flights to the Rock, reported by Vox. It may only be a small increment but the government has been keen to improve communications at all levels for some time now.

This week, we chat Corbyn's China problem and William Boyd talks about a new John le Carré biography. (Helen Lewis, Stephen Bush, George Eaton, Tom Gatti, William Boyd).

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W G Grace was one of the most famous men of the 19th century. He was certainly the century’s best-known sportsman. In the world of cricket, probably only Don Bradman has such a legend. Grace died 100 years ago on 23 October, hence this “centenary” biography by Richard Tomlinson, and Charlie Connelly’s novel, which although heavily fact-based creates a touching picture of the last 17 years of “The Champion’s” life. Many cricket books are cliché-riddled, self-serving drivel. These two are not.

In truth, Tomlinson adds little to what we know already. His main research tool, and a valuable one, has been the British Library’s digitised newspaper library. He has looked far and wide in it, as the local press detailed every movement of the great man when he turned up in provincial towns to take on county sides. If you have read Robert Low’s excellent biography, reissued in 2010, you probably won’t need to read this. If you haven’t, then Amazing Grace is scrupulously researched and well written.

Grace was born in Gloucestershire in 1848, the son of a doctor. Like his brothers E M and Fred, W G was obsessed with cricket from an early age. Huge in physical stature by the age of 16 – though not yet the grossly overweight and lumbering figure he would become by early middle age – he was soon playing for Gloucestershire and any other side that would have him. In many ways an alarmingly modern figure, Grace had a second obsession in addition to cricket: money. Cricket at that point was a class-ridden game, and he was determined to play as an amateur – a “gentleman” – rather than a professional, or “player”. However, he needed money to live because, unlike many of the amateurs, he had no private income. As his fame as a batsman increased (by the late 1860s he was unquestionably the finest in England), impresarios offered him large sums of money to play for their sides in matches all over the country. When he could get away with it, he took it: and the more popular he became, the more he got away with it, making a mockery of the social divisions within the game.

Tomlinson stresses that Grace did not play the game to make money; he played it because he loved it almost to the point of addiction. Rather like Mr Jorrocks, the fictional huntsman of mid-Victorian England who felt any time was wasted that was not spent hunting, Grace felt life was pointless if he was not playing cricket. Partly for that reason, he did not play his last first-class match until 1908, when he was nearly 60; and still he carried on turning out for his local club, Eltham, in south London, until a year before his death, his playing days terminated not by age (though he was hardly able to move by then, and needed a runner) but by the outbreak of the First World War. Connelly deals sensitively with this finale in his novel, and it is an episode reflective entirely of the book’s charm.

Connelly takes few liberties with his subject. Most of what occurs in the novel is based closely on fact. The Victorians were not the type to wallow in their emotions, and for Grace any attempt to dwell on such matters in his writings, or interviews, would have been anathema – as his ghostwriter, in an amusing episode in the novel, finds when trying to milk him of memories of his 100th century. Connelly fills in the missing emotions (or the missing man) in an unsensational fashion that keeps us believing in his subject.

Grace’s greatness lay in the fact that, in the era when he was most active – roughly from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s – the wickets on which matches were played were generally abominable. Batsmen, who had primitive padding and protection by today’s standards, were often injured, sometimes killed. Grace made batting on these wickets look easy. He was the first player in the history of the game to make 100 first-class centuries. He had many failures and lean spells: but in 1895, in what is known as the Golden Age of cricket, and just as people were writing him off at the age of 46, he had a miraculous season in which he scored 2,346 runs, including nine centuries (one of which was his 100th), at an average of 51, and became the first man to make 1,000 runs in May. The Daily Telegraph, supported by the MCC and Gloucestershire, raised the awesome total of £9,703 for him that year as a “testimonial”, another fact that stood
at odds with his amateur status.

MCC (as Tomlinson points out at length) took a long time to elect him to membership in the 1860s partly because, as the son of a provincial doctor, he lacked the social clout to join, but also because of the reports of his taking money. Yet it had long accepted the double standard. More than any other man alive, Grace had popularised cricket as a spectator sport. MCC, then as now, was a business first and a club second, and he had been brilliant for turnover. He played for expenses that were usually in excess of what any professional was paid. Occasionally the press had the bad manners to point this out: MCC turned a blind eye, anxious to maintain the game’s popularity and its snobberies at the same time.

Grace is depicted in both books, fact and fiction, as a multidimensional man. A cheat – he would claim catches that had hit the ground and refuse to walk when all knew he had hit the ball – he intimidated umpires. He was intensely competitive and a bad loser. Connelly illustrates this well in an episode where a teenage girl bowls him out. Taking a team of professionals to Australia in the early 1870s, he travels first class while they go steerage, and he is, of course, paid far more than them. He eventually qualifies as a doctor but his salaried post for a Poor Law union in Bristol is one from which he is largely absent. Yet he is kind to children, tipping them half-crowns and ruffling their hair; he is devoted to his wife and children, and devastated when his adored daughter dies of typhoid and then his son, who struggles to emulate him but has infinitely more talent in other ways, dies a few years later.

Both books, in different ways, describe a man who would have been great in any age and whose fundamental decency outweighed his failings. Unlike so many cricketers since, he deserves his legend.

Amazing Grace: the Man Who Was W G by Richard Tomlinson is published by Little, Brown (413pp, £25)

Gilbert: the Last Years of W G Grace by Charlie Connelly is published by Bloomsbury (190pp, £10.99)

In 2011, Ed Miliband hired Arnie Graf, a pioneer of community organising and a mentor of the young Barack Obama, to overhaul Labour's campaigning. Graf's engagement with the party did not end well. A Labour insider leaked details of his business visa to the press in January 2014 (Douglas Alexander has denied claims that he was the culprit) and his employment status was never resolved, leading to his enforced absence from the UK and the general election campaign. 

At University College, Oxford, last night, where he delivered the Attlee Memorial Lecture, Graf quipped: "I want to thank Ed Miliband for having given me the opportunity - it didn't last as long as I thought it would, I had to be escorted out of the country. 'I'm glad you're back, I'm glad they let you come back', even though I'm an illegal immigrant, so I appreciate it." 

At the event, sponsered by the Southern Policy Centre, and attended by former Miliband aides Marc Stears, Stewart Wood and Tim Livesey, Graf later revealed that the former Labour leader had recently taken a five-day London Citizens training course at which he "learned a whole different way of thinking about politics". He added that Miliband "sincerely apologised for not doing it earlier" and that while he "liked the advice" he received from 2011-13 "he didn't often folllow it". The former Labour leader's renewed engagement with community organising suggests he may turn his attention to this area as he seeks to carve out a post-election identity. 

Asked about Jeremy Corbyn's election, Graf said: "I don't see Corbyn, I just don't get it ... I think it's not about, in many ways, Corbyn, I think it was the party's fault because they didn't leave people with much of an alternative. The people that were running, in my estimation ... they kind of represented the same old, same old ... To his [Corbyn's] credit, he hasn't changed, much like Bernie Sanders, although Bernie's much to the right of Corbyn." He added: "My worry about Corbynmania ... is he going to wear a poppy, is he going to bow to the Queen - is that really what he wants to be talking about? He's not going to sing the national anthem ... It feels a little bit to me like the '60s in the United States of student politics."

Graf also complained about the "condescending" attitude adopted by Labour figures to Ukip voters. "Either they were all [treated as] terrible racists or they were just bad people. Or they just didn't understand that the Labour Party was the party for them - what is wrong with them? They should have asked what was wrong with them." 

Is that the end – will we never see their likes again? Rest in pieces, British managers. You are never likely to manage another top club in your own top league. Clip-clop, clip-clop, here he comes. In English his surname means something – the sound of horses’ hooves in a corny Radio 4 Saturday drama – but in Germany, apparently, Klopp does not mean anything, apart from being a fairly common surname and the name of a castle.

With the arrival of Jürgen Klopp at Liverpool, taking over from Brendan Rodgers – the man once considered the best of the krop, I mean crop, of present-day British managers – the managers of all our top clubs are foreign. Man City, Man United and Arsenal, along with Chelsea (who are bound to get a grip soon), plus Everton, Spurs, Southampton and Leicester (who’ll probably finish in the top half) have all got foreign gaffers. Even West Ham, currently lurking in fourth spot, are managed by the ever-amusing, ever-smart former eccentric Slaven Bilic of Croatia.

If you want to find an English manager in England’s top league – and there are six still clinging on – you have to look at the bottom half of the table: Newcastle, Sunderland, Villa, Bournemouth, Swansea, or raise your eyes slightly higher to Palace, who are doing good under Alan Pardew.

But do you think he’ll get the Chelsea job if Mourinho gets the sack? José won’t go, of course. He has told us he won’t, and I believe every fib he utters, though he deserves a really good slap for the disgraceful way he treated Eva Carneiro, the Chelsea doctor. All non-Chelsea fans are loving his present predicament, not least because it’s a moral judgement on his behaviour.

But would Pardew go to Chelsea, or Garry Monk of Swansea – two excellent, English-raised managers? No chance. Top jobs are for top managers. Which, alas, excludes all Brits.

Klopp is a welcome addition to our game. He is very tall, a bit like a muscular version of the comedian Stephen Merchant, except for his teeth. Klopp’s teeth are enormous, like Ken Dodd’s rejects. They barely fit his mouth, which explains why he smiles so much. His English is excellent – yet earlier in his career, as a player and manager, he never played abroad. Shows how good the German education system must be.

He did a wonderful job with Borussia Dortmund, winning the Bundesliga twice, putting Bayern Munich in their place; but then last spring, before the season was over, he announced that he was leaving Dortmund and football to take a sabbatical. In recent years, I can think of only Pep Guardiola of Barça taking voluntary leave while still at the top. Usually the bodies of managers end up dumped overnight in the car park, still screaming: it’s not fair, the owner loves me dearly, he said so, the refs are all wankers, the fans are idiots, quick, where’s my lawyer.

Does it mean Klopp was stressed, with emotional or mental weaknesses? Behind the scenes, was there something happening we never knew about? Or is he a grown-up, sensible, mature human being? Unlikely. All managers are mad.

I always think one of the reasons we have so few top English-born managers or players is that they are so insular, they’ve not served abroad, experienced other cultures. They don’t know how football works in Europe, or the language, or the contacts. One of the many advantages foreign managers have when they come over here is that they know and can attract talent from Europe, perhaps players they managed earlier, even if they’re past their prime, such as Bastian Schweinsteiger at Man United.

But Klopp ruins this theory: his career was insular. And if it were true, Steve McClaren should have come back from Europe a better manager; and Dave Moyes, when he does return to our shores from Spain, will immediately get a top job. Har har.

Klopp, for the next few months, is football’s new messiah, an exotic figure who has Liverpool fans and TV cameras salivating. Shankly, arriving at Liverpool, was a relative unknown. So was Fergie at Man United. When Wenger got his job, even Arsenal fans said Arsène who? God knows, being a messiah can be a burden . . . 

I had a memorably bad meal last week. A real stinker. (I won’t name the offending establishment – suffice it to say that the number of Porsches outside suggested to me that New Statesman readers were probably not its target clientele.) As I was waiting for my coat, the manager asked me what I’d thought of the meal. The kitchen, he said, was eager for feedback.

There was an awkward pause. I couldn’t lie; after all, I’d already told the waitress who sweetly enquired about my half-eaten pasta that it was a little overcooked for my tastes, though I spared her the remark that I’d had better at 40,000 feet. But her boss looked so very hopeful, standing there in his almost empty restaurant, that I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the truth, either. So I dodged the question, grabbed my jacket and all but ran out of the door. His forlorn farewell suggested I hadn’t fooled anyone.

Back home, working my way through a packet of biscuits before bed, I guiltily pondered what I should have done instead. In such situations I try hard to channel an American friend, who never shies away from an opportunity for constructive criticism. If the coffee isn’t to her taste, or the staff get an order wrong, she gives them the benefit of her (considerable) opinions. Politely, but firmly.

In theory, honesty is the best policy for all concerned: letting the restaurant know your dissatisfaction not only helps the staff improve things in the future, it also allows them to make it up to you immediately. How can they hope to put things right if you don’t tell them anything is wrong?

The problem is, many of the people my friend is complaining to are British (or at least have adopted the British mindset) and they react accordingly. Instead of thanking her for her feedback, they regard it as a personal attack, which often leads to what I believe is technically known as an escalation of the situation, from which no one comes away happy.

It’s a national handicap: a survey a couple of years ago claimed that 38 per cent of us would never complain at a restaurant, however bad our experience. Perhaps we’ve been put off by the horror stories – as a friend in the business observes, “Why would you be rude to someone who’s in charge of your dinner?” – but do it right, and it’s unlikely that anyone is going to use your hamburger as a handkerchief.

Complain immediately if something is wrong; indicating the two chips left on your plate as evidence of a heavy hand with the salt is unlikely to elicit much in the way of sympathy from your hard-pressed server. Stay calm, rather than going straight in at full-throttle rage; they’ve only forgotten your saag bhaji, and there’s still a good chance everyone will come out of this alive. And don’t be unreasonable in your demands: slow service merits a free drink, not an entire meal and a cake with a sparkler.

Perhaps most importantly, know what you’re talking about: objecting that there are bones in your whitebait, or that your hiyashi chuka ramen is cold, will make you look like an idiot. Contrary to popular opinion, the customer is not always right.

If you’re not getting anywhere with the staff, don’t make a scene, however tempting it is – walk away with your dignity intact and contact the manager in writing. You may be surprised how much more reasonable people become when they aren’t in the heat of service.

However, none of this eminently sensible advice helps when somewhere is simply terrible; where the problems are so many and various that your heart bleeds for the staff. Perhaps sometimes a smile and a tip is the best policy. After all, you don’t ever have to go back. They do. Revenge really is a dish best served cold.

Next week: Nina Caplan on drink