I am not fond of the idea of bright young people signing up to become the aparatchiks of the Murdoch enterprise of pandering to the worst tastes of the illiterate, thoughtless, judgemental, prurient, leery working class. I think it is slightly ridiculous to hear Rupert Murdoch’s anti-elitism, coming as it does from a scion of whatever one might call Australia’s Establishment. Andy Coulson has always seemed to present a sort of resentful suriliness, and I can readily accept that Rebekah Wade/Brooks has been a manipulative figure, to say the least. But both he and she seemed to me to do very well at Leveson, though.

Partly, I am programmed to empathise with the accused. It follows, perhaps, that I  find it hard to find prosecutors attractive. But Robert Jay does seem to be bringing something particular to this party. At the least, he seems like the grammar school, scholarship boy swat who at last has a chance to get back at the upper class and working class bullies who in the different ways sneered at him in the playground. At worst, he sometimes seems to smirk at his own rather tawdry successes and to seek Leveson’s approval and connivance at them.

Robert Jay is bound I suppose to seem to be doing the Guardian’s work for it: he is in accusation mode and the accusations are mostly Guardianish. All the same, the upshot is that I happy when the accused come up with good arguments for the News Corps operation.

There is a lofty side to all this. The media can only get so far by being right, and right-on. It ought to be mildly riotous, awkward, smutty and scandalous: that is a feature of its only sure way of doing good, and this is to be counter-intuitive. (On these grounds, I have to accept that the scabrous cartoons of the Guardian are as justified as the topless birds of the Sun.) I suspect Lord Leveson sees this, and that he is probably only too aware that he may not only be coming to the scene of the accident way too late, but also that accidents will always happen and regulations to forestall them may do more harm than good.

That is why Coulson/Brooks seemed to do well as they suggested that the power of the press wasn’t used to corrupt commercial advantage. More generally, they were right to stress that the power of the commercial media does indeed derive from the readership not the proprietors. So far and so far as we can see, the press were not too powerful but the political class was too weak.

Most peculiarly, it is impossible to know whether the push of editorial prejudice is more powerful than the pull of the desire to sell papers. So far as we can see, Rupert Murdoch has lost money when he has pursued his prejudices (say, by banging on about EU arcana). But we can roughtly guess that his opinions have not damaged the nation much if at all, not least becuase they have bored rather than energised the masses.

I imagine Lord Leveson is way ahead of me on all this. He has to balance Max Mosley, the Watson family, Hugh Grant, Ian Hislop, Brian Cathcart, and, yes, Coulson/Brooks. I am mildly confident he will get the answer about right.

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I don’t pretend to say what this rash, outbreak, riff or trope of messed-up young women means or is meant to mean. But it’s there, and I love it.

(My headline cheated: Salander isn’t a cop, but an investigative researcher.)

One could say that Jane Tennison started the rot (a sort of den mother): she was what these youngsters might yet become. One could also say that, like Tennison, Rachel Bailey, Lydia Adams and Katrina Ries Jenson make the case for women cops who suffer very obviously career-based problems: they are normal women stretched to the limit by their devotion to a demanding job. Most of the others would have been mentally-troubled whatever their work.

I’m guessing that young women identify with these characters (at least as much as I used to with Steve McQueen in Bullet).

These women investigators mostly flout authority and convention and all have profoundly messed-up private lives. The subtext may be that females cannot succeed in the work world without breaking the rules, and will be punished for it, at work and in the heart or home. Their female intuitiveness is valued, but its corollary – impulsiveness – also punished (Carrie, Sarah). Some have men, but reduce them to machine satisfaction (Saga and maybe Lisbeth). Some hopelessly adore unavailable men (Katrina). Others mother dysfunctional men (Laure and Rachel).

The appeal of these characters to their creators (or to us) may be that they are (a) feminine avenging angels on the track of screw-up violent men (who often target women) but also (b) that these are young women who have cast off generations of fictional portrayal of women as passive, nurturing, supportive, collegiate, consensual and sensible.

The Chick-dick list

Carrie Mathison (Homeland, US) Bi-polar and then some

Saga Noren (The Bridge, S, DK) Asperger’s and then some

Laure Berthaud (Spiral, FR) Cosmically needy

Linda Wallander (Wallander, S) Depressive (Reality note: this was a doubly sad business.)

Lisbeth Salander (Stieg Larrson saga, S) Presumably Aspergers, and then some, and maybe more

Sarah Lund (The Killing, DK) Deeply sad and obsessive

Rachel Bailey (Scott & Bailey, UK) Woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown

Katrina Ries Jenson (Those Who Kill, DK) Obsessive, sad, w/l balance out of whack

Lydia Adams (Southland, US) A marginal case, maybe. Still, she’s finding finding a man of her own extremel tricky

Jane Tennison (Prime Suspect, UK) Not at all crazy, but w/l balance out of whack, and a pioneer.

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Shute books are recognisable, and their most striking feature is the width and warmth of his sympathies which are in contrast to his passion for engineering detail. (It is a seeming contrast of course: stresses and numbers are not antithetical to romance.) Often, an unlikely hero – a middle-aged man, older - is stretched well beyond his comfort zone as he becomes involved in an adventure. Often, heroes and heroines are scuppered – but also redeemed - not so much by the depth of their feeling as by their reluctance to press their case noisily. These are novels which resonate by virtue of their mid-20th Century virtues. There is quite often (Requiem For a Wren) an unrequited love, or a love which is almost denied its destiny (A Town Like Alice). The Second World War almost always looms very large, often in fascinating technical detail, often involving ships or planes. The Far East often features (A Town Like Alice), sometimes with an overt spiritual dimension  (The Chequer Board). Shute is thoroughly at home with the transcendental: it is as the very core of a brutal war story (Most Secret).

Shute can sometimes be the tiniest bit clunky (Ruined City). The modern reader under 50 will find much of his tone a matter of curiosity, whilst older readers will hear their parents’ voices echoing as they turn these pages. I am sure, though, that Shute commands attention well beyond being educational or nostalgic.

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I am thinking of the world before Iris Murdoch (my mother’s favourite during the 1950s and 1960s) and Muriel Spark (whose books I loved in the 1970s). Lehmann’s core competition comes from Stella Gibbons, Betty Miller, Jean Rhys,  Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Bowen. Viriginia Wolf ought to be in there, but perhaps the point is that Lehmann and the others are middlebrow and Woolf’s highbrow competition doesn’t count.

I’ve been reading some off-road Stella Gibbons (so, not Cold Comfort Farm) and thrilled to it. In Westwood and Starlight alike she takes us to the heart of aspirational upper working class and lower middle class life in London and in both she dangles upper class – or at any rate affluent – life before the lower orders. The remarkable and very odd thing about Gibbons is her handling of mystery and magic. In Westwood, a house exerts a special hold; in Starlight a fey, almost crazy invalid seems almost to transmit light, or lives bathed it in. So Gibbons is marvellus in exporing the numinous. In both, the theme of a woman’s unrequited love matters a great deal, and it is the cross-threadedness of the thing which matters.

This is the sort of material I seem to like, and I turned to Jean Rhys for the potency of the rage of a spurned woman, and Nancy Mitford for the courage of a kept woman.

All in all, I set myself up to admire Rosamond Lehmann for her portrayal of upper middle class women making modern choices between the wars. In The Weather In the Streets and The Echoing Grove we see muc the same sort of woman and world. Our heroines are bourgeois but with strongly bohemian edges and they both make a bold choice: to love not merely inconveniently (adulterously), but to men who are – as it were – brown furniture and proud of it. So we have clever, free, artistic, popular, poor middle class women having deeply important affairs which turn away from the modern, permissive mores that appear to rule their lives.

The point of Lehmann is not merely the sort of dilemma she maps out, but the quality of the interior lives she gives her heroines and even their men. Her characters are not in a fog; they are not driven by mysterious forces; they do not intellectualise, propagandise or theorise. But neither are they swept along on a tide of subconscious impulse. Their conversation seem to me to leap off the page as real and awkward as those I have heard over decades, and Lehmann’s assumptions and descriptions of their thoughts seem to be on the button. (That last bit is even more difficult than having an ear for people’s speech.)

Lehmann is not alone n being very skilful and instructive. Similar themes and qualities are in Betty Miller’s Farewell Leicester Square, for instance.

I suppose I am an anti-feminist, in the sense that I dislike the the progressive victimhood, the campaigning reformism, of the feminism of the 1960s, 70s and 80s.  So I do wonder whether these women writers provide quite the fodder and ammunition modern feminists would like. Certainly, women in these novels have difficult choices to make: they have to choose between safety and romance, I suppose. Certainly, sexy and desirable men in these novels are relatively unreflective and unresponsive. Certainly, women are more or less in orbit round men. In Lehmann in particular, women sometimes make brave choices and usually have to suffer for it.

But I am not at all sure that Lehmann is trying to make a case that women’s economic dependency is the root of their emotional difficulty with men. I could easily imagine her writing a novel set in the here and now and posing much the same problems, even for a woman enjoying economic parity with her love object.  This more Men are from Mars territory, I suspect.

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RDN’s new book, The Right-wing Guide to Nearly Everything, is the most surprising right-wing book you’ll ever dip, browse or read.

The Right-wing Guide to Nearly Everything (aka RWG2NE) is

* an interactive eBook

* 650 entries on everything from art to xenophobia

* definitely right-wing, definitely fair-minded

* funny and serious

* proof that the right-wing can be nice as well as nasty

* evidence that the right-wing can be clever as well as dim

Check-out facebook.com/RWG2NE  and Twitter (@RWG2NE)

RWG cover 2012

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Most of the arguments, much of the tone and many of the actual participants were unchanged: this was an event which was pretty similar to hundreds of others held over the past 20-odd years.

Of course some things are different. Over the years, it may be that more of the world’s educated people have come to believe in the climate catastrophe theory. What is striking is that the powers-that-be seem to accept that (having tested the proposition) there is a real but quite slight will to act on the matter amongt their peoples. Arguably, command and control polities will be able and willing to act more decisively than the democracies. In the past 20 years, I hazard, politicians have been chastened by their voters’ reluctance to care much. In short, when push comes to shove, climate concern is, as it always was, an elite concern.

The other big thing which has happened is that, at least in the UK, nuclear power has become less unattractive to elite (and some green), and even mass, opinion. Fukushima may have dented this shift a little for now, but its effect may be quite short-lived.

So far as we know, nega-watts (conservation) and low-carbon mega-watts are less attractive or more expensive than fossil fuels at least for now. Working out which will work best will take some time, and had better be done as cheaply and conveniently as possible if the public is to support the adventure. As a right-winger and a pragmatist, I reluctantly accept the solutions will necessarily be mandated by government, but should involve as little government intervention, and as much market implementation, as possible.

Nuclear is the obvious odd man out. Right now, it could do a huge amount of heavy-lifting, whilst alternatives really get sifted and effective. We might have what one might call the French option: a large-scale technology which delivers lots of low-carbon electricity, probably at greater expense than its fans suppose but fairly safely, barring accidents.  I have no idea how the public will balance the near-certainty of the occasional nuclear catastrophe against their reading of the horrors of climate change. So far, they seem to face both with some equanimity. My assumption is that – rationally and fairly - the more one takes climate change seriously, the more one has to accept that the occasional Fukushima is worth enduring.

It is tempting to suppose that a small population of nukes is useful and poses a statistically smaller risk of catastrophe. But one might argue that several issues – both technological and managerial - might tempt one toward doing a lot of nukes effectively rather than a few ineffectually.

One curiosity. I noticed that several participants felt that if the public didn’t “get” climate change or the horrors of nuclear or the need to conserve energy, or more spending on cleaner energy, then that was a failure of communication. Maybe. I prefer to suppose that the public has understood a fair amount and just doesn’t care much. More communication might make them care even less.

Another curiosity. A couple of people said that the next wave of persuasion ought to be amongst women, as though females were less persuaded than men but might become better activists for the cause once they were. I said, good luck with that. It seems to me that women are, on the whole, rather less inclined than men to get engaged in rather abstract issues such as climate change and insofar as they do, consider it quite narrowly from the point of view of their own families. And, oh, I added jauntily, modern mothers seemed more inclined to argue (within the family) for a bigger Chelsea Tractor to keep their little ones safe than (out there on the hustings) for  more bike lanes.

But I want to be clear. My un-PC remarks about women were what they were. A bad joke, say. My scepticism about climate change enthusiasm, however, does not flow (I think) from my politics (or sense of humour) but from my reading of the politics of my fellow citizens. That’s why I think it bears repeating: climate change policy must be as cheap and convenient (and as useful on many counts) as possible. That sort of policy may not work very well, but nothing else stands a chance of happening at all. That I am, as a right-winger, drawn to such a point of view should not blind people to its chance of being an accurate account of reality.

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Surely these four men – and the Greenpeace bosses – can claim credit for having driven the UK nuclear industry on to the back foot if not actually into the ground? Friends of the Earth not only dispirited the British public and politicians about the nulcear industry, they were for years foremost in condemning almost any sort of industry and engineering as being unspiritual, unnatural and generally not holistic.

It is of course quite possible that nuclear cannot be made usefully commercial, and quite possibly that’s because its waste disposal options are rendered uneconomic by green shibboleth. It is also quite possible that the French have mastered the art of making utilities – incuding buying UK utilities – profitable and that the UK has lost it. Those are quite separate thoughts, both depressing.

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Mr Bragg seemed pretty content to assume that most protest – he identified the Occupy people in particular - could be compared with that of Rosa Parks. I said that this was really importantly wrong: RP was making a protest about serious discrimination and arguably had no other avenue of expression. These two elements to her protest were no part of the Occupy movement’s theatrically elegant staging of statements of a few commonplace views on capitalismm, which they make in a culture offering everyone zillions of outlets for their views.

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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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