The worst offence Iron Lady is supposed to have committed is that it shows her as having severe dementia. But actually, she is mostly portrayed as being about as wrapped up in her past as the next old woman. There are some sadly impertinent conceits (the idea that Denis resented her standing for party leader; that she is at war with his shade; his parting shot about her self-sufficiency) which seem silly, but they are at least self-evidently dubious or unproven. (I haven’t read Carol Thatcher’s book, and stand ready to be corrected.)

The revelation is in the politics. Since this is a movie from Mrs T’s point of view (as its makers keep saying) it isn’t perhaps surprising that we hear her own arguments for her opinions and actions. They do of course, says this right-winger, stand up very well. What I hadn’t expected is that I could recommend the movie to a young person seeking to get a snapshot of those days, and to grasp why so many in the country supported her at the time. The young may even understand why some older people have come to see her as far more right than they thought her at the time.

Bingo.

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Davies’ big mistakes were to slow the Rattigan to a snail’s pace, to make it unnecessarily gloomy, and to deprive its central character – Hester, Lady Collyer – of the anger, intensity, classiness, intelligence, wit and talent which she has to display along with the despair which at first overwhelms her and which she eventually largely overcomes. It is unfair to pick on Rachel Weisz, who may be capable of acting, when asked to. And it certainly isn’t her fault that she was allowed to speak a mid-Atlantic, classiness demotic. Obviously, she also can’t help being too young for the part.

For some reason, Davies goes out of his way to create scenes in which Hester’s husband, the judge, becomes a mother-ridden wimp, perhaps the better to create in our minds the idea that he might be a closet homosexual, which is nowhere in the Rattigan, and weakens the play’s point. At every other moment Terence goes out of his way to create slushiness and anachronism. It is hardly likely, for instance that a judge would have a huge scene with his wife in front of the chauffeur, or that middle class people would harangue each other in the street or in an art gallery. Come to that, in the 50s, gas fires did not self-ignite, nor did penurious middle class people leave the equivalent of a quid or two lying in the street.

Davies robs several characters of their real interest. Rattigan’s landlady and the disgraced doctor are both sharply-written and crucial to Hester’s self-discovery.

And what was all that singing about?

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The professors (as the journalists from the Guardian etc before them) come from a special, nice, serious, public-spirited planet which is worlds away from the bad behaviour of most of the Red Tops some of the time (and some, a lot of the time). It was good to spot Leveson spot this, and in terms say so. Fact is, the tabloids are closer to the majority of the people in the country than are the broadsheets. And the right-wing tabloids and right-wing broadsheets hoover up, or represent, a huge number of decent people.

So the fear is that the self-appointed masters of professional, high-minded, bossy-liberal journalism will hope they can shut down the waspish, irreverent, larky – and, yes, intemperate, vulgar, prurient – journalism which confronts it.

So it was also good to hear some of the professors admit (accept, aver,  insist) that journalistic good behaviour did not have to be taught in universities, but flowed from the culture of the places journalists work.

The seven academics rather make the point: one I could’t readily check, but the remaining six didn’t start out with degrees in journalism. Yes, I do see that there perhaps weren’t courses avaialble when they started out – but the point remains.

I am sceptical of the value of educating journalists in journalism, but especially of any drift toward conformism and control.

This insight flows well with my general feeling that now more than ever, our media will be filled with writing from every sort of source and these trends militate against a recent tendency to require journalists to be professionalised (educated, trained etc) on special courses.

I speak with the personal background of having broken into journalism as an outsider and relishing the very “otherness” that conferred on my work. I like journalism as a trade for outsiders. What’s more, I am allergic to the professionalising trends which some gatekeepers (journalism professors, maybe?) might enjoy. I was stung, in particular by my own experience of the closed shop which was once attempted by the freelance wing of the National Union of Journalists. That way lay the dead hand of control.

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It is helpful to say that England in Dickens’s time had the highest real wages ever known by this or most other countries. (It’s a mixed picture as this paper is good at discussing.) Awful things happened, and especially to poor people. Indeed, our own times are a walk in the park compared: but then our own times are pleasanter (at least in material terms) for nearly everyone, nearly all the time, than they have ever been.

It is frankly absurd to say that the material well-being of our times bears comparison with that of Victorian England.

Ian Hislop’s thesis was a muddle. He had the bold premise that Victorian bankers were morally superior to our own. There’s something to be said for the seriousness and moral purpose Victorians showed (and my own interest in a professional renaissance is based on that sort of thought). But he ran out of steam quite quickly: as he pointed out, there were bankruptcies, pure greed, nastiness, and instability in the Victorian financial world, and indeed they had greater and worse consequences than the venalities of some of our own capitalists. Hislop’s ending was about right: we could do with more of the best of the Victorian spirit.

And of course, the big problem of Hislop’s thesis is that the modern affluent pay far, far rates of tax than ever the Victorians gave away in philanthropy. And it is of course a problem of socialism that it makes virtue compulsory and that runs contradictory risks. On the one hand, compulsion robs virtue of its moral quality. On the other, compulsion makes virtue invisible.

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So far as I can see, since the late 2000′s the UK’s GDP has slipped several percent from its historic high. It is now somewhere around its 2005 level, and slightly rising again. If in the decade 2009-2019 it rises back to where it was in 2009 (say), it would only be true that we had lost a decade of growth. But – and surely this means something – at no time in that process were we worse off than we had been in 2005 – and that was an historically affluent year which itself followed many years of amazing trend growth, itself only sometimes interrupted by periods of faltering or sagging growth.

Of course, if the “wealth” we enjoyed in 2005-2009 was largely phoney, immoral, or debt, then in some sense we haven’t lost affleunce as lost the delusion of it.

We are supposed to be enduring a “lost decade” in output and that this is not going to be recoverable. But what does this mean? On the face of it, it is hard to believe we won’t one day produce as much as we did in 2009, or whatever.  We are perhaps supposed to believe that we are losing productive capacity and can’t get it back. Is this anything like the destruction of British factories wrought by Hitler’s bombers, and if so – surely we rebuilt then and could again? Indeed, Germany’s post-war industrial success is sometimes attributed to the fresh start they had as they recovered from the RAF’s depradations.

It is of course peculiar that we have less equality than we are used to (though that picture is quite complicated). It is interesting how hard it is to see solutions to that problem, if it is one.

It is true that the plight of un- and under-employed young people is sad. But I think it may be wrong to think they have lost a decade or are a lost generation. For one thing, they presumably have the means to continue their education, including self-education. Even at a virtual level, they have resources which no previous generation in history can imagine. It won’t be the fault of the capitalist hegemony if this generation fails to produce mountaineers, poets, musicians, linguists, philosophers, mathematicians and even entrepreneurs out of a period of enforced leisure.

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It was fascinating to see Max Mosley seem to tell Marr that he supported the idea of DSK as the victim. Well, we’ll see. But I did have a flicker of anxiety as to whose privacy had been invaded here and whose reputation traduced. Pace Leveson, is the unfolding of this saga showing the presss in a good light? For a start, are the methods of the US journalist and his sources kosher? Would Max Mosley really endose them, on reflection?

I have no idea, yet. But what is so absorbing is that we now have the media and cultural habits of the US and France on display in one case. Presumably the DSK story is a nearly perfect comparative study for Leveson.

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On those lines, we ought to beware any nonsense about “Faustian Pacts” in which it is supposesd that celebrities lose their rights if they ever speak to the media; or invasions of privacy are warranted if the reporting is accurate. A celebrity whose kitchen has once been in OK magazine does not thereafter lose the right to leave her curtains open at night. Part of why Mr Mosley is so important is that his case reminds us that his privacy would have been no less sacrosanct had his sex games involved a Nazi theme.

Mr Mosley is right, too, to insist that the principle of prior notifaction is crucial, and foremost. The problems which flow from prior notification are the ones we have to deal with, not flinch from.

It’s worth saying that my normal response is to be sceptical when people take offence at common abuse and other  nonsense. The “sticks and stones” argument is quite a good one. I have been sentimental about the 18th Century habit of bawdy and scurrilous gossip. Happy days, etc. On reflection, I am not sure they were all that happy, but in any case we are in different territory now.

Indeed, it may be that we need a scrupulously honest professional press now and do so exactly because the gossipy, profane and vicious voices of the masses are out there in hyperspace. The media who are in Leveson’s dock are of interest to his Lordship and the rest of us only because they claim to be decent and honest. We are trying to work out ways of making them be what they claim to be.

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One episode (“The Calorie”, 24 October 2011) I’m thinking of was devoted to the idea of calorie-counting. The show lined up various people who argued that there was no solid connection between a food’s energy content and its being a contributor to obesity. So far so good, one may say. It may be that it’s no good just going by the calorie count on food packaging. (Thought that’s one of the means by which I am discriminating between foods, and it seems to work, more or less.) Along the way, contributors complained about ”processed food”. The show’s sign-off was to the effect that we might overcome any confusion by insisting on ”real food”.

But this is nonsense, surely, and we were in effect reminded of some of the silliness of the idea in an episode of the show (“Future Food”, 14 November 2011) which looked at a subset of the foodie movement:  “food futurists” are deliberately messing with our ideas about the stuff. They were toointeresting for the Food Prgramme to ignore, but they were mostly off-message.

Some of my irritation with the the FP caliphate is that they are sure that words like “slow”, peasant, natural, old-fashioned, revivalist, heritage, artisinal, organic, free-range, or co-operative are good. I don’t share that, but I get it.

More particularly and seriously I can’t see that anyone would be wise to construct a diet which avoided processing. Even leaving aside the fact that to do so would eliminate cooking, one has to reckon with getting rid of bread, cheese, pasta and butter. All are processed, and all are variously good or bad for slimmers or gourmands, according to circumstance. Of course, most restaurant food is the ultimate in processing, but somehow escapes censure.

But I can’t see that an all-in-one TV dinner, for instance, or a military rations pack, or a Complan drink, must be assumed to be lesser – or unreal – food merely because they are extremely processed.  Ready-meals can be formulated so as to be healthy, tasty, and indeed artisinal, by turns.

Wherein does “real” food consist? One might go for provenance, animal welfare, conservation values, dietary merit, culinary diligence or talent. I see that ideas of authenticity and naturalness will sometimes come into play, for some people. But we have to remember, for instance, it might well be the case that the “unnatural” pig farming of the UK may have much higher welfare standards than the more “natural” farming of a peasant. And someone might well choose to source their food from intensive horticultural firms rather than free-range or organic beef herds.

The point is that there is no such thing as “real” food.

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I suppose it’s important that Laure is a fantastic colleague, and supports, sisters or mothers the more wayward of her team. When she does get romantic (if that is quite the word for her office liaison) it’s unwisely. Sarah, on the other hand, is an appalling colleague: she doesn’t so much upstage or suspect everyone around her as dismiss them as confusing or distracting her detective powers.

Indeed, isn’t it true that Berthaud is just about riding the tiger of the chaos of her investigations whilst Lund has merely to commune with her own understanding of the swinishness of the world to emerge with a culprit, eventually?

By a nose, Lund is the more interesting character because she gives so little away.

Anyway, they are the amongst most absorbing cops we’ve ever had, though Wallander and Maigret would give them a good race. Jane Tennison is in there, batting for the old bats and perhaps less fantastic. Perfectly English, Tennison can’t offer the touristic allure of the younger pair.

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The protestors are asking The City to explain itself, and (so far as this dedicated reader of the Financial Times can see) there’s been no reply. Where is The City’s answer to the question: Does The City do a good job?

The Big Question for The City
There are dozens of compelling questions, but we can cut our way through them by stressing that the overwhelming – the prior – question is: does The City produce sustainable finance?

This question is urgent, but also searching. The financial system has no merit – no chance of doing good, or of reform – if it collapses, is too volatile or can say little about the future.

So I agree that the Long Finance initiative is on the money when it asks: “When would we know our financial system is working?” The question has the merit both of ordering and of challenging subsidiary questions.

So the question is not whether The City is good for more obviously exciting things such as:

• equity
• the environment
• resource sustainability
• climate change
• the Third World
• work/life balance
• gender equality
• manufacturing vs services
• philanthropy
• its employees
• fast growth.

People who ask The City about such questions have to prove their relevance to reliability. It’s that way round.

Getting a response from The City
The City is the trade association for the totality of its trades and professions. But is it one brand and one business? For all I know, different sectors of The City have profoundly differing interests. Some may thrive on financial catastrophe, for instance.

Even so, I long to see some body – Gresham College, Long Finance, the City’s Corporation, or anyone – making coherent arguments about what The City does, what its benefits – and yes, its tensions – are, and what it seeks from government. It can’t make those cases without first of all saying what it does well enough to need to be left alone, or encouraged, to do. Come to that, it will need to be clear about where it fails, and where it needs to be regulated.

The City cannot merely say it has been part of Britain’s economic success. Its history now includes its recent history which shows dramatic failure to be good at its job.

I can see that there is an argument for The City’s saying very little, for fear of exposing profound conflicts, uncertainties and even sheer nastiness. Better to muddle through and hope for the best.

I can see that some players may not like to make an issue about the incompetence or wickedness of the Square Mile for fear of its revenge.

If those gloomy thoughts are true, then what follows is wishful thinking.

I am, though, inclined to argue that The City’s Corporation is in some sense a professional body whose business is to align the pro bono with the capitalist.

This is importantly a matter of character: if The City was a person, what sort should it be? I imagine it should be ambitious, greedy, reliable, honest, frank. Such a person would seek the advantage of himself; his firm; his firm’s owners and investors and also – in some limited but limiting sense – society and even the future. Some of these are mutually exclusive or at least in tension, and some are unquantifiable.

But such a person would begin where Long Finance begins. He or she would ask: Am I stressing and exploring the importance of The City delivering returns for the longer term? The answer might be: I am contributing to the future by being short-termist. Or: I am contributing to sustainability by being a shark.

The point is: the question must be asked and answered by each City person and The City as a whole. And the proper replies and proper actions will only come from people of character: those prepared to be awkwardly decent and awkwardly frank.

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