More soon on this, I hope. For now I just wanted to stress that this show entirely overcomes the very reasonable prejudices that one really ought to have about it. You know how it ends. You know it’s littered with really goofy life-coach cliches. You know you’re supposed to cry. This production makes you forget the lurking resentment you feel at being jerked-around.

Howard Goodall’s songs are both lush and subtle. Stephen Clark’s lyrics are sharply witty. They are beautifully sung by people with lovely, sound voices. For such a conversation piece, there is some exhilarating stage business (the stuff in the kitchen scene is a subdued riot). From the moment you walk in, you feel that this is going to be a high-end Minerva show: intimate and energetic. It’s occasionally full-on, but there’s no shrillness.

Emma Williams is outstanding as Jenny Cavilleri, the girl who dies. It’s not a showy performance but she is every inch the vital, stroppy, loving, intelligent young woman. What sticks in the mind was her toughness throughout.

I don’t remember the film, though I must have seen it, and I never read the novel. Anyway, this version rightly concentrates on the suffering of the two fathers. As Jenny herself says, Oliver (the husband and widower) will bounce back. It is one of her excellent unsentimental moments.

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We open as a grand Recchi family dinner is being prepared in a Fascist-style, 30s villa of great Milanese severity. Instantly, the seriousness, the portentousness, of Milan – its northern-ness, its spiritual heritage, its being an honorary member of the Hanseatic league – was brushing with its being one of the fashion Valhallas. With some of  the Fendi family as muses if not more, the movie ought to have got much of this stuff right, but for all that I was enraptured I was not wholly convinced. It was striking how the servants were so formal, as though in a restaurant, except for the housekeeper whose familial role was beautifully etched throughout.

I half hope the top echelon of Milenese business society is of this sort, in its seriousness and elegance, and even its connectedness. The lesbian daughter was splendidly done: punky, wry in dissidence. It’s a pity that the movie’s main message was about the necessity to escape from bourgeois constraints as though these were nowadays of the sort more common to an Edith Wharton story.   

This was a foody movie, but in a family setting, so rather more Babbette’s Feast or Joy Luck Club than Bella Martha or Big Night. I say that: the big love story really gets going when the chatelaine falls for the chef in his father’s restaurant.

Things do get strikingly potty in the open air love-making scene, which made me think of Elvira Madigan, an effort which I haven’t seen for several decades but which remains the byword of pretentiousness. The loving couple’s behaviour thereafter seemed to swing into melodrama rather than anything more closely observed or accurate or ordinarily convincing.

Never mind my whingeing: the look of the thing, Swinton’s central performance, and many of the conceits were ravishing.

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The commentary of course bigged-up the moral superiority of the denizens of the tip. They were black, poor, brave, hard-working, entrepreneurial and ex-colonials. (Kind of like those wonderful people of the Mumbai slum dump we watched a couple of months back.) What’s not to admire by us honky consumers? The show wouldn’t have been as interesting without one of these heroes being involved in a bit of grievous bodily harm, which had the double advantage of reminding us that this really isn’t Eden.

As much to the point, we watched one character (family man, wit) as he stepped up his recycling activity by burning the plastic coating off copper wires. Last I heard, that’s about the perfect way to generate lots of PCBs and dioxins. Willfully pumping those into the atmosphere is about the silliest thing one can do to it and if film-makers caught any Brit doing it, even if he was a gypsy or some other reserved minority, there’d be hell to pay. It was probably not terrifically good for the locals of Lagos, including the children whose future he was proudly safeguarding, according to him.

We also visited an informal Lagos slaughterhouse and butchery. Turned me up a bit, of course, but I do have a soft spot for abattoirs. I think it’s because I’m such a sqeamish wimp: I was pleased to have faced down my revulsion and sort of got into the horror of the thing. Besides, I feel it’s my duty to empathise with the people who get a living putting delicious things on my plate.

These are my scenes, no question. I have a strong affinity with the whole business of recycling (except its being fashionable with Greenistas). This very week I spent happy hours as white van man with a date with a series of dumps in southern England. Gorgeous. I even liked the Pole (maybe the Ukrainian, whatever), who – as the site’s security man – made me open up the van to prove I wasn’t a tradesman. He was crisp, commanding, unyielding. I crushed a tiny batsqueak of anti-immigrant resentment. How long he’s been here? How long before it’s him asking me for my papers? It was a small nastiness which I quashed quite easily, really. And anyway, at least he mistook me for a tradie.

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It’s of a piece with the way extraordinarily brave and fit youngish men like Ben Fogle seem terrifically drippy about, for instance, being away from home during their amazing expeditions. They’re forever blubbing about this or that emotional hit they’re taking. In a recent Antarctic adventure Fogle’s team seemed to be the very antithesis of the Robert Falcon Scott generation to whom they were supposed to be paying homage.

That was the obvious thought during the Boat Race. Here are a group of young men who feel honoured and blessed to be taking part in a great sporting event and tradition. I don’t doubt they are fitter, more committed, cleverer, harder working and altogether more out there and up there than any other generation. So why the emotional incontinence?

Above all, where’s the recognition that all these adventures have ben undertaken for fun?

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First, I said that the data simply suggests that affluence and happiness correlate quite well, with rich societies and rich individuals within them pretty happy. Not very surprising really, granted that affluence is created by people in free, progressive societies with good education and all that.

The interviewer said sure, but the economists are making the point that affluence creates envy and status anxiety and undermines society. I said that there’s bound to be envy, but we should remember that affluent societies seem to be pretty cheerful right across the board, more or less from top to bottom. In my own lifetime, I said, I’d seen the country get to be rather nicer and more cheerful as time went by. In particular I don’t recognise much of the data or anecdotage or drift of the argument in The Spirit Level.

I should have said that the interesting thing about our modern society is that there seems to be less resentment than used to be the case. I don’t say the rich are admired, but one detects rather little resentment, and certainly less seething resentment than was the case when I was young (and socialism pure and simple was more fashionable).

What’s more, I am struck that a higher percentage of people have the kind of thing people like. I mean that more of us now have state of the art cars, TVs, computers, insulated houses, foreign holidays, fashionable clothes. You may envy the person in the Merc, but a fairly fresh Fiesta is a better place to do one’s envying from than a bike or a rust-bucket.

And another thing. For good or ill, modern people are rather less prone to think themselves inferior to others than used to be the case.  I think there’s much less inferiority complex around.

If we’d had time I’d have said that modern parents may be getting less good at saying no to their children, and in that sense kids’ materialism may be more painful for all parties than  used to be the case. But that reminds us that we need to manage affluence better – teach it better – rather than bemoan the affluence in itself.

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At prep school, my parents gave me Molesworth books and I loved them. They were, of course, ideal for a boy in the kind of school they satirised. I expect we were the books’ core market, and for all I know Searle’s appeal didn’t really extend beyond the middle class. Still, those were fluid times and I know that Rowland Emmett’s Festival of Britain fantasy machines – they were Searle-like in artistry – were popular across the board.

Anyway, my beef with the C4 item was a silly little remark from Nicholas Glass. He had been talking about Searle’s drawings from his Japanese prisoner of war camp and, later, from Eichmann’s Nuremburg trial. “But”, opined our arts savant, effortlessly conveying the width and strength of his own sensibility, “the British were more comfortable with the lighter stuff”. (I have busked for the last three or four words of that sentence, but have been true to the meaning.)

Mr Glass perhaps hadn’t considered that the generation who bought these books for their kids had been through the war and if they chose to delight in the brighter, lighter side of life it might be because they’d seen plenty of the dark side.

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Fishing In Utopia: Sweden and the future that disappeared
by Andrew Brown
Published by Granta

I devoured Andrew Brown’s new book in very few sittings. It is, for starters, beautifully written. Saying so will set some readers’ teeth on edge so it is important to say that this book achieves exactly the loveliness it seeks, and it is the reverse of orotund. It is as spare as a thriller. I remember Brown as an admirer of J D MacDonald and his Travis McGee novels, and he cites more crime writers than any others in this book. Only obliquely do we find out that he’s literary: he notes a friend who collects fishing reels the way Brown collects poetry. Brown was always intent on learning that one must “reduce all that you want to say to the little you have to say”, which is a little like the Wittgensteinian injunction to remain silent on a vast tempting arena of nonsense. Brown is something like a modern Carlyle: he is trying to reach beyond ordinary and especially sectarian religion and put his finger on other places where you might find the pulse of god or something like god. (It may be, suggests, in the seasons of a fish.) But there is no Coleridgean huffing and puffing. 

Brown is interested in exploring “the man I became in the woods” (p 76). But he is as interested in his passage from English hippy to Swedish worker, and the development of a writer who “in the busy banging solitude of the factory” taught himself to write English even as he increasingly thought in Swedish. (p48.)

Andrew Brown’s literary style reflects his mission. His themes  – Scandinavian wilderness and society, and Brown’s own interrupted gloominess – require that we see a generality of dark green and grey with the occasional dazzle of lapping water, a fish’s scales, or Brown’s sudden flights of ecstasy. I expect lots of writers have had the same problem. The thrillers of John Sandford, for instance, find a laconic way of taking you to the muted but brutal tones of Minnesota. But the obvious comparison is with Scandinavian and Russian painting, especially in the late 19th Century: grass, sedge, moss, forest and rock and sky and water deliver from apparent monotony a symphony whose beauty depends on fine calibration. One tunes the eye down. Loving such scenes makes one feel that other people, loving the Mediterranean of Matisse or Duffy say, are stuck with a vulgar lack of refinement.

And anyway, people living in muted scenes do adore the vivid. There is a party scene at the end of Fishing which is as blissfully Scandinavian as it is rare in these pages. It is like the P S Krøyer painting, Hip, hip, hurrah, in its happiness (though more rustic than the painting’s scene).

More often, Brown needs to summon bleakness and claustrophobia and he does it without self-indulgence. He doesn’t prevail on our good nature or guilt to keep us ploughing on. He commands our attention because almost every page of this saga is exhilarating. Another advantage is that the style isn’t elegiac. This isn’t an “identity, memory and loss” exploration: it isn’t a post modern essay in cultural studies. 

Andrew Brown has written several other books, and most recently they have been about scientific adventures and won or been short-listed for prestigious prizes. I found those hard to read, but not this one. Fishing, will stand, I am pretty sure, as a leader in the literary memoir class. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t grow to be compared with Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son or Quiller “Q” Couch’s Memories and Opinions. It is very good as nature writing, and will readily stand comparison with work by Richard Mabey (another really good writer I knew well once). It is very good as an account of a young man’s adventures in journalism, up there with Kevin Myers’ Watching The Door. I hope it doesn’t get lumped in with “Misery Memoirs” as though it was an account of the grudges which explain a suffering person. It is what I think is quite rare now: an account, though tangentially, of something like a spiritual journey. There’s some Thomas Merton in there. Like the American Cistercian who found Bob Dylan, Brown believes in solitude but probably couldn’t take too much of it. There’s quite a dash of Chris MacCandless, though that failed lone wanderer may also have been pursuing self-destruction and in any case left Jon Krakouer to write beautifully about him. This is not, however, the story of a man who wants to be alone in utter wildness. He is never very far from farmers or, at worse, miners. Mercifully, he is not a Hugh Brody, writing exquisitely and enviously about “first nations”. His is not a Ray Mears survivalism. A comparison with the ethic of a Doug Peacock or an Ed Abbey is closer, but even their sense that the wilderness heals and redeems is more dissident and misanthropic than Brown’s.

Andrew likes to be at the edge of Sweden’s northern civilisation, where it thins out and is tested, but where there’s likely to be a “Kurdish family running a pizza restaurant”. (p 214).

Brown doesn’t come across as a jolly character and much of the book is an explanation of how Sweden ailed him, though not as much as England did. Quite why he dislikes England and won’t name his old school and drops in some disobliging stuff about his parents, we aren’t told. In real life, Andrew is a very funny man. At least he was for much of the four years (from the paper’s start-up in 1986) we sat across a workstation at the Independent. Its other occupants were Maggie Brown (media editor) and Francis Wheen (diarist). I was the environment correspondent and Brown was the religious affairs correspondent. It’s not quite true, but there’s something in the idea that I was anti-environmentalist and he was anti-clerical. Andrew’s brief stretched to anything quirky and he was acknowledged as a gifted comic writer. Collectively, our corner was known as the Loony Desk and I think it was mostly because Andrew and I laughed and swore a lot. We were certainly unconventional journalists. We were a little out of control and prone to over-excitement. I thought Brown might be a bit depressive, but I don’t recall him ever being so out of sorts that he couldn’t share uproarious bad taste.

Much of what Andrew wrote in the paper in those days passed straight over the heads of many of those who commissioned and edited his work. People used to ask me what on earth he was on about and I would say that it hardly mattered: it was great stuff. The Independent in those days believed in talent and originality and accepted eccentricity in exchange. In Fishing, Andrew says, as I often have, that working at the paper was about as good fun as it was reasonable to hope to be paid for.

I admired Andrew a good deal. I thought he was very clever. What’s more, I thought he was determined that he should apply his intelligence to understanding and explaining religious and philosophical matters however difficult. In Fishing In Utopia he is quite dismissive of run-of-the-mill journalism, and he’s right to be. Most media work is trite and commonplace, its tools crude and its curiosity minimal. It pleases us because it massages our expectations. Brown tells us one of his own mistakes, which happened because he retailed the story of a brave mother standing up against the Swedish social services. It was supposed to be a story about how the caring state becomes Kafka-esque. It was the right-wing equivalent of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Fallacy that the dissident is always right and The Establishment wrong. To be fair to him, the mother – whom Brown comes to see as arrogant and delusional – fooled a judge who fooled him. The lesson is a little like the one Nick Davies talks about in his book on journalism, in which he tells how he was fooled in the Helen Murrell case.

Doubtless the self-taught Brown learned a lot from that episode, and he tells us that he later recanted, also in the pages of the Spectator, proving that there’s a piece in every disaster. Such episodes – as he rightly suggest – matter because they tell us that we should always expect that there’s another side to every story and we can’t expect to be anywhere near the truth until a proposition has survived challenge by the kind of people we loathe.

I didn’t follow Brown’s work at the Independent, at least not closely. I thought he was a bit too interested and even partisan in the queeny politics of the Church of England. Often I couldn’t follow his arguments and thought his prose needed beating up by a good editor. But I was always pretty sure that Andrew, however chewy his writing might be, was always aiming for the true and important.

Brown and I got on and became something like friends. We shared a trajectory though his was more extreme than mine. Fishing shows that Andrew was a drop-out from public school (his grander than the one I left likewise a little early).  Instead of university, he adopted a working class way of life, as I did. But he exiled himself not merely from his class (as I did not really) but also from his country (as I certainly did not). He went with his Swedish girlfriend to be absorbed into her way of life at home; they married and had a child, Andrew’s adored Felix. Fishing is in part an account of an experimental exile. He says: “I had always felt fake as an Englishman, and now in some deep way I was”.

Journalists, like novelists, some academics, and even poets, are predators, not to say parasites. Half the time they are harvesting their own lives and almost all the time they are scavenging the wider world. They are too busy filling their poacher’s pockets to have the commitment or engagement that nice people have. The better the writer, the more brutal, selfish and exploitative this process often is. There’s no help for it. But I don’t think Andrew Brown went to Sweden like a travel writer might go round the Horn or up the Amazon, or even as an anthropologist might go to Hackney or the BBC. He was a genuine pilgrim or volunteer looking for something or other and it couldn’t be found at home. It happens that, like Andrew, in my twenties I realised that as long as I wasn’t following a profession I might as well earn peanuts doing good, and like him, I went to work for the Cheshire Homes foundation in order to achieve it. We didn’t overlap and left for slightly different reasons, but each lived with and eventually married our first wives whom we met on duty there and who took us worlds away from where we’d started.

He writes that he decided that if he couldn’t do good, he ought at least try to be good. And so he became an amateur intellectual who wielded a nail gun in a small palette factory in southern Sweden and wrote bits and pieces on torn-up nail boxes. These passages are reminiscent of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s much harder working days in the Gulag. Bit by bit, he becomes a fisherman and aspires to fly-casting as well as writing.

In one passage Andrew says that he knew that he wanted to be a writer long before he had anything to say about himself or anything else. I know the feeling. He got going at paid scribbling younger than I did. He deployed his knowledge of Sweden, and it wasn’t a bad Other to convey to the pages of The Spectator. He implies – and he’s right – that intellectual journalism doesn’t require talking to anyone, though he seems soon to have got into the habit of travelling and interviewing. I would have given my eye teeth to have been a figure – as Andrew was from the start – at the Spectator. And yet his being a contributor there highlights one of the Brownian mysteries.  In Fishing, Andrew’s descriptions of Swedish conformity and socialism in the 1970s seem at first be those of a Tory, or a right-winger. But this is very deceptive. By the middle of the book, we are aware that Andrew is ambivalent about the nearly-Thatcherite revolution in Sweden. If this had been a more political book, one would have had passages which help one see what his secular creed might be. 

Arthur Ransome, the children’s writer who had been an exile and journalist in revolutionary Russia, was arrested when he returned. Suspected of being a spy and questioned by a reactionary head of the secret service, Ransome was asked what his politics were. According to his biographer, Roland Chambers, he replied: “Fishing”. It was of a piece with other responses which reassured his interrogators. Brown’s fishing matters hugely to him and this book, but doesn’t reveal him to be a simple, predictable fellow. 

At the Independent his public school drawl was the last word in superiority. He seemed at home with the new wave of Tory “young fogies” who were then much talked-about. But he was too louche to really be such a type and I thought I detected a certain edge to Brown’s response to the arrival of Andrew Gimson, then a celebrated and fogey-ish Spectator-ite, when the latter was employed at the Independent as someone whom the “grown-ups” (the editors and executives) seemed to venerate but who had – after a few striking pieces – no obvious purpose. Maybe Andrew’s nose was out of joint.

The point is, I have never known what Andrew’s politics are, and Fishing doesn’t help me. I know that he loathes George W Bush’s adventure in Iraq because he told me that. I am pretty sure he hates racism. I know he came to despise Swedish socialism, rather as a Havel or a Stoppard or Scruton might hate the more obviously oppressive regime in the Czechoslovakia. It is possible that he dislikes the individualistic materialism which he may like most intellectuals believe has infected Western life. I think he loves the USA, but I suspect it is the America of the Grateful Dead which I know he loves and of the “Dead-head” dissidence which I can imagine as comfortable to him.

From scraps of argument, one gets the impression that Andrew Brown believes, as do his friends, that old Sweden at least had values, and that almost everything in society flows from that. He writes: “the Puritanism and melancholy might not be enjoyable, but if pressed we would all have agreed that they were the country’s guarantee of worth”. (p 107.) It feels to me as though he mourns the absence of guarantee but won’t pay for it either.

This sort of untidiness troubles me. If he didn’t like the Sweden he first went to, shouldn’t he be kinder about the newer Sweden his generation (not Brown himself of course) created and his son’s generation are rubbing along with? But this is silly of me. In the first place, the Swedes might be making as big a mistake with their current version of Swedishness as they did with the old one. Why should life be an improvement? It is me – and certainly not necessarily Brown – who is lumbered with the view that Thatcherism and all the rest are a natural and on the whole desirable unfolding of modernity.

In the second place, this is a memoir not an Anatomy of Sweden, or a treatise on The Condition of Sweden. All the same, there are passages where he seems interested in disinterested analysis. For instance, at one point he suggests that the biggest shock to Swedes is their realisation that they are not all that superior to the rest of the world. There is one passage – and I am pretty sure it is incoherent – where he philosophises on a similar theme. I suppose these aren’t bad parts of the book, but they are its weakest.

More to the point, Brown hasn’t really set himself up as a political, historical, anthropological, sociological – or any sort of logical – commentator. He doesn’t have to be consistent, or thorough, or reasonable. He doesn’t have to be comprehensive, either about himself or Sweden. This is the joy of memoir-writing and memoir reading.

A memoir has to be about a person and his or her time and place. But it can be about a fragment of the writer and their relations with fragments of the wider world. Fishing is about how Brown the exile writer responded to Sweden as he and it changed, the latter rather more obviously than the former. This is a book about a sensibility and Sweden and fishing are the prisms through which Brown is refracted for us.

I think we see a man who has demons he can’t or won’t name. He is determined that there is a way for him to live and it involves writing well, providing for his family and escaping to the peopled primordial at least sometimes. Now he doesn’t live in Sweden, he accesses its wildernesses by traversing territory which is littered with messages and memories. He visits old haunts and friends and charts their changes. A synthesis evolves out of these journeys. It amounts to this. Sweden’s wilderness – its northerness – spawned a society which had values. These were good and bad, but they were an anchor as well as a cage. Now what? Sweden has embarked on Western normality. Brown remains interested and concerned, not least because one of his children remains Swedish. But he seems much more relaxed. He has been a narodnik and a drop out. He has a fastidious, hippy dislike of vulgarity and consumerism. But whatever else, the north will remain pretty ghastly (as most of us might think) and wonderful (as Brown and some others find it).

I am fairly sure Brown is giving us an account of a man more at ease with himself, even if he’s still cross and hungry. We see it in his fishing. We realise, as the pages fly by, that Brown is keen on sex but not on dancing. We absorb an impression that the rhythms, motions, and exertions of casting a fly, of endless practice, take this man to a good place. This is a riff he comes back to. It is done in a sly and enigmatic way but I allowed myself to think that Andrew found greater satisfaction and ease in casting a fly and everything else as time went by.    

He began by relishing the escape offered by small trips and the gradual accumulation of equipment and the acquisition of skill in making and casting flies. As a poor man, he rather liked the sheer nutritional value of his hunting. As he became better established as a Swedish working man he began to diverge from the norm of the Swedish fishermen he had gradually come to enjoy socialising with. He was embarrassed by vast pointless catches. As he gets better equipment he notices that what really matters is that he gets better at fishing irrespective of his gear, or even his proficiency. “….[N]ow that I care less, I fish better”. (p260)  In one crucial passage towards the end, he says that he says: “I found myself reluctant to kill anything I would not eat, or to catch what I knew I would not kill”. (p258) This is the evolution of many civilised hunters and it litters accounts of sportsmen in colonial Africa as much as shooters in England. It is also, as it were, “Zen and the Art of Fly Fishing”, but it is rescued from cliché by being free of much emphasis or explanation. 

I allow myself to think that Andrew Brown’s story in Fishing In Utopia is a progression by an upset, incoherent exile into something like a composed, expressive tourist. Andrew Brown wouldn’t allow himself – and probably doesn’t feel – anything quite so neat or sentimental. Still, there is something like a narrative arc here and it contributes to one’s racing through the book.  I refuse to discount that Andrew Brown has had an epiphany.

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Wind back to the New Year of 1997, and marvel at how familiar things seem. Blair then and Cameron now are youngish and family men. They come from good public schools and Oxford University. They have reframed their parties. They face exhausted governing parties. They are indefinably but definitely modern (not least in being religious).  Their successes are personal and they are in some sense transformational individuals.

Bland is the new brand
The biggest similarity between them is that they are uncertain as to whether or how to be or at least seem authentic. They are uncertain what of their country’s, their own or their parties’ histories can be played into the electoral theatre. So whilst they are both determinedly open and attractive, they seem bland and opaque.

David Cameron is presumably, like Blair, a deft and tough politician, and he has certainly done wonders in rebranding his party. But he is squandering some big opportunities as he follows much of the Blair recipe. David Cameron has not noticed – or not dared respond to – the modern hunger for authenticity, and for the resonances of tradition. Only amongst a chattering elite is our sterling warts-and-all history feared rather than admired. Cameron would win points for boldness in declaring pride in these things.  

We look back on Blair’s premiership and see that it was only as he transmuted into a war-leader that we seemed to see the bedrock of his person. Now, we are bound to wonder if there will be as large a gap between perception and reality in Cameron as we found to have been the case for most of Blair’s years in power.

Blair loved Mrs T, Cameron is frightened of her
There are important differences between their politics. Blair knew success would come in emulating and even celebrating large bits of Conservative attitude and policy, including the person and ethos of Mrs Thatcher. Cameron knows – or thinks he knows – that success depends on distancing himself from the Conservative, and especially from the Thatcher, record.

Matthew Engel (a mild but sharp commentator) wrote in the Financial Times, “Britain usually turns to Labour with enthusiasm and the Conservatives with relief”. The difference flows in part from an asymmetry in the problems Labour and Conservative face. Labour has always been the party which put good intentions in front of efficacy. The Tories get elected because their being tough, practical and moderate promises to mend the damage done by Labour’s ardour. Still, educated floating voters don’t ever quite forgive themselves for voting Conservative. Indeed, in 1992, polls didn’t forecast John Major’s re-election, presumably because many people didn’t ‘fess up to their intention to vote for him.

Keynes, Beveridge, Macmillan, Major, Baldwin, Disraeli: what’s next?
David Cameron is properly ambitious he must want his country to come out of the closet as real, full-time Tories. He seems – correctly – to believe that if only the Conservatives got their own thinking and policy into the right place, the party could be much more generally and consistently appreciated. He needs Conservatism to be seen to have a handle on virtue.

Previous Tory success has flowed from Conservatives accepting that goodness was identified with socialism and corporatism. Baldwin, Macmillan, Heath and Major all campaigned and governed as though Labour’s thinking were givens. Beveridge and Keynes were all a politician needed to quote, and neither had to be properly understood. Thatcher, of course, dissented and changed national attitudes – economic and social – rightwards in a way which was permanent but electorally toxic.

Blair riffed these richly complex Tory themes with genius. His Third Way amounted to a reconciliation of Macmillan and Thatcher. The market could deliver huge benefits – including in delivery of social policy – but the state had a large role.

Cameron’s mantra “There is society it just isn’t the same as the state” aimed to bounce Thatcher’s, “There’s no such thing as society”. But it also outflanked Macmillan’s Middle Way from the 1930s and Blair’s Third Way from the 1990s. Mr Cameron perhaps really does believe that Philip Blond’s breathless Red Toryism is a brilliant formulation of these ideas. But as we saw in Mr Cameron’s “Big Society” speech in November, it has the difficulty that it pretends that there is a great sea of communitarianism, activism and localism just longing to pour tough love into the social gaps left by a retreating state. As Daniel Johnson has pointed out in Standpoint, George W Bush tried that approach to Compassionate Conservatism and it was at best a mixed blessing.

A new reforming Toryism, true to tradition
To be true Conservatives, but in a modern context, the Tories need to demonstrate that compassion can be balanced with a state which does as little as possible, but cleverly. They want the state to retreat but in a way which is non-threatening to a country which is wedded to the idea not merely of social safety nets but also universal provision of welfare. I think the solution will lie in, first, detaching the state from the ownership of the infrastructure of welfare (the schools, pension funds and so on) whilst later, and second, shifting toward a state which funds individuals (and increasingly, only poor individuals) to access the services they need. That can be done in a quite gradual way, and builds on work done by Thatcher, Major, Blair and even Brown. 

David Cameron could build a vision of a multi-generational Conservative approach which sees a thread uniting the country from at least the Great Depression of the 30s, but before that too, in which people of goodwill of every wing of all the main parties have laboured to reconcile enterprise, economics and compassion. He could articulate what the general public do generally believe. This is that the Tories are right to point out that the old left has ideas and policies which damage society, not least by failing economically and creating welfare dependency. The Tories have always posited – and can now – that they are working on a better approach.

David Cameron should be much more ambitious about stating just how limited the state’s role should eventually be, but much less misty-eyed about how much volunteer idealism can replace it or how quickly changes can be made. He could stress that the state cannot retreat until and unless workable structures (private firms, professional Third Sector bodies, public trusts and all the rest) are proven to work.

Gradualism would be at the heart of this approach. That would sit well with another theme which is available to David Cameron and which he seems very reluctant to deploy. He could play to the belief that the Conservatives have, historically, been good at government. Sure, Mrs Thatcher rather dented that, as she denigrated both her ministers and their ministries (pace her delight in Yes, Minister and the good jokes about Cabinet vegetables in Spitting Image). Cameron could renounce presidentialism, but also the Blairite taste for spin, message control and sofa government. That seems to be the message which Lord Sainsbury’s Institute For Government is trying to din into the Tories.  Mr Cameron could show that Westminster and Whitehall have such good traditions that the best response to 2009’s horrors is to remind the country that they are worth reforming. The effort might even give some meaning to the Cameronian theme of “Post-bureaucratic Government”.
 
If he got on with this work David Cameron could be seen to stand for something and it would have the merit of being both traditional and forward-looking. Tony Blair would look on in envy.

* The author’s new book, Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics: Or why old Tory stories matter to us all (2009) and his Mr Blair’s Messiah Politics: Or what happened when Bambi tried to save the world (2006)) were published by the Social Affairs Unit.

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For our Paris gourmandising treat we had thought of the Fontaine le Mars, graced by the Obamas to the quiet delight of the affluent denizens of the 7th, the arrondissement which you can’t get too lost in since you can always orientate yourself on the Eiffel Tower, which bestrides it. That would have been very Something’s Gotta Give.                  

Hopelessly late for the attempt, we got a reservation at the Lyonais home-from-home, L’Auberge Bressane instead. It’s unpretentious to a degree, but that’s a pose. The place is used to demanding customers and delivers an unobtrusive attentiveness. Don’t be fooled by the slightly battered panelling. It is untended as an evocation of wood work that has faded because no-one could afford or be bothered to do it up. Here, they’d bother if they wanted to look bothered.

Fact is, though, it’s as near to one sort of dream French restaurant as you’ll find. I mean that it is the sort of place that Maigret might have taken his wife to all those years ago. Then, one fantasies, there were mom and pop joints which were devotedly regional. But I imagine that there were upmarket, larger, equally rooted places as well. L’Auberge Bressane strikes me as being classic in that way, but all delivered with a modern professionalism.

Lyonais food is robust. My cheese souffle starter would have done for two or three. Its hat was jauntily lofty and crusty, its interior a maze of bubbles with a hint of runniness only in the deep inside. My companions had mushrooms, which were pretty good too. They adored their quenelles (two per person when one would have done), in a delicious sauce. (The English menus said these were “dumplings” which doesn’t capture their textured mousse-ness.)

But the big deal were my sweatbreads. A hundred years ago, I used to have them at Chez Solange in London. But I don’t remember sweatbreads treated as a lump and (I’m guessing) roasted, or maybe fried, like these. The sauce was a good rich creamy affair. The mash likewise after mash’s best fashion. I could have done with some spinach, but it wasn’t on offer.

We’d been persuaded to order the baked Alaska and it arrived as a massive affair (with three plates). Not my scene normally, but delicious and faintly reminiscent of Queen of Puddings, a concoction long out of fashion.

We arrived at 8pm and by 9 the place was pretty busy with groups of what looked like young money people, a few couples,  and various others. So a varied, appreciative crowd and a decent hum. No obviously “smart” people, and no tourists (except us, who were one local for cover and a pair of gawping out-of-towners).

One bottle of wine and few Cokes and fizzy water, and a bill (with tip) of £200. 

Next day, seeking the grandest snack in the world, we shopped in the foodies’ paradise of rue Cler. It is an eye-popping, salivating business to wander into Davoli, the deli which knows that it is at least as grand as its customers, and whose grandest customers like it so, and is a tiny, intense piece of theatre. You can always come down from the experience by buying creamy goat’s cheese at Marie-Anne Cantin, the  fromagerie (12, rue du Champ deMars) where young men minister to the goods and the customers as though both were visitors from elysian fields. 

The Italians at Il Giramondo, traiteur Italiano, 175 rue de Grenelle, run an altogether more informal place, but it has plenty of mettle. There is a genial shop-keeper who operates as the host for the cellar restaurant down below. Seeing the type of customer who were welcomed and descended, I wanted to eat there. I only got as far as poking my nose in: the scene was lively, top-end arty, and very inviting.

This is shopping of a type and class that I think were unimaginable anywhere in the world twenty years ago. It is neighbourhood shopping reincarnated as a sacerdotal ritual. I’ve seen it done in London, but I suspect only the Californians or New Yorkers could quite match – and then only with luck – what is achieved by Parisians. It’s shopping as styled by Tyler Brûlé but approved by Harry Eyres. (That’s a Financial Times joke, of sorts.)

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