Friday 4th July 2025
Blog Page 1998

Taking Time

Barney Norris
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Taking Time

Every year for the last few years, the Drama Officer has spent some of the Easter vacation at the NSDF in the hope that they might take on ideas and bring them back to Oxford. Events like the NSDF refresh our thinking; in amongst the workshops and shows, you find prejudices you had forgotten you had about theatre, and have the chance to interrogate them. So I headed off looking forward to a week of provocative and interesting plays.

This year the NSDF happened in Scarborough. The excellent workshop programme, organised by Artistic Director Holly Kendrick (ex-Oxford, and the first ever Drama Officer) and managed by recent Oxford graduate Chris Wootton, featured Richard Beecham, Richard Hurst, Blanche Macintyre, James Kell and James Phillips, all directors, writers or actors who came through Oxford, and the venue managers included Sam Sampson, ex-Oxford and the last Drama Officer but one.

But this strong showing from Oxford graduate theatre professionals didn’t translate into the shows being staged at the festival. Although company members from The Magic Toyshop have been invited to join an Ensemble that will perform at Latitude later this year, no shows from Oxford actually got into the NSDF. And this isn’t unusual. Oxford hasn’t sent anything to the NSDF for a long time, despite the close relationship the festival has with the city – the NSDF even organises the North Wall’s summer Arts Festival.

This is a shame. The exposure to theatrical invention and professional expertise offered by the festival is inspiring, and a company that made it up there could only benefit from what they saw and who they talked to. So one question I had when I went to Scarborough was why there wasn’t an Oxford production in the festival.

The answer I came up with was time: the shows I saw were assessment pieces by drama students, the equivalent of a Finals paper. The participants didn’t seem to be more talented than Oxford actors, or to have better ideas, but they had been able to fully develop their productions as their top priority. That’s not possible here. One of the extraordinary things about Oxford theatre is that everyone involved does something else as their day job, and still, I think, regularly achieves genuinely exciting results in spite of this.

But even if we can’t match the time conditions in which all the work that went to this year’s NSDF was made, the festival still offers a salutary lesson to Oxford theatre: that the best work comes when you commit to it for as long as is needed, and that theatre is always worth taking time over, even if it means you only do one instead of two or three shows every term.

I’d like to see more shows applying for the NSDF next year. If you’re planning something you’d like to apply with, come and talk to me in the BT: I’ll tell you what this year’s festival was like, and how to make an application.

The OFW Blog: The Forum

Joanna Wilkin &Amp; Sally Rushton
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The OFW Blog: The Forum

Taking place in the hallowed Union Debate Chamber, Oxford Fashion Week continued its campaign on fashion with its Forum. After a break on Sunday following the successful Style Show, the event brought five well-renowned members of the fashion industry all the way to Oxford on a Bank Holiday Monday evening: Dolly Jones- editor of Vogue.com, Frances Card- Brand Consultant, Claire Wilcox- curator of Fashion and Textiles at the V&A, Tony McGee- Photographer, and finally – perhaps the female favourite – David Gandy, Britain’s number one male model. We popped along, as any other budding fashionista would, to hear about what OFW dubbed their “Fashionable Lives” forum, and also to have a good look at Mr Gandy, thank you very much.

Unlike last year’s event focusing around the debate “Fashion is an unnecessary luxury” and which featured an enigmatic performance by Sebastian Horsely, this year’s Forum modelled itself around a talk followed by a ‘Q&A’, allowing the audience to get just as involved as the speakers. It was thus a surprise, and what we believed ultimately to be a shame, that the event on the whole wasn’t more popular. On entering the hall just before the talk began, only the front few rows had been taken and there was still space for us and a few more fashion conscious students before any of the rows looked full. However this had no bearing on what would be a truly fascinating talk, something quite different from your typical term card fair. The five panellists had all experienced the fashion industry in their own way: from how they got into the business, how they saw it from their own unique viewpoint and their predictions for the future of fashion, the talks covered followed their fashion journeys whilst the question and answer provided an opportunity to ask those burning questions, some that revealed more that we wanted to know!

 

David Gandy, Dolly Jones & Frances Card

Yet what we saw as the most poignant question asked, especially given the week, was whether fashion has a point, or is it as superficial and irrelevant as the empty seats suggested? For many of those attending (and organising) the event, fashion is an industry of great interest, but is it one that students with an Oxford degree should be so eager to enter, or should we pursue more “worthwhile” or “serious” careers, be it doctors, lawyers or teachers? It is true to say fashion is often not taken seriously: associated with frivolous shopping habits, irrational expenditure and impractical purchases (do we really need another pair of 6 inch heels?), it is appears wasteful, and referring back to the empty seats, not worth our time. However as Dolly Jones stated “fashion is a form of communication: it is what people judged you on before you even open your mouth,” fashion is certainly more than clothes, it is about identity, it is about personality and it is about culture. Furthermore, as Claire Wilcox described her learning of fashion through the history of textiles, fashion maybe mutative but it also synthesises our history, our political, social and cultural relations and expresses them through a form we can all understand. Yet, Francis Card argued during the talk that it is often the fear of fashion that creates a misunderstanding that consequently stops people from participating within it, leading to this criticism: yet as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada argues about cerulean blue, what David Gandy stated, why you choose to wear a certain thing today, and what Dolly Jones so aptly asks: why do you get dressed in the morning?

Dolly Jones, Editor of Vogue.com

 

Now, we each will have our own interpretation to the question, we each dress a way for different needs, different purposes and to achieve different goals, but what it does show is that fashion is intelligent. Thus whilst we are not here to justify our own devout following of fashion (and hero worship of the panel and what they stand for), we want to argue that fashion is worthy of our time. During the talk, the panel dealt with questions on the influence of art, the role of Web 2.0 and the usage of social networking, the impact of the internet and the recession.Furthermore, they all recognised the role of smart decisions, such as the expansion of fashion onto the internet (highlighted by he recent sale of Net-A-Porter, which was valued near to $350 million) but also unexpected misfortunes including the loss of the brand, Luella, in the last year. The debate and issues covered thus showed how competitive and volatile fashion is – but it also acknowledged that it is through creativity and, if inadvertently, sense that it continues to survive. For those who attended, the event provided a platform for a formal but informative discussion of what appears so often to be an exclusive industry. The event producers, Lindsey Meyers and Alyx Barker, should be proud of the discussion (if not the turnout): the panellists were well chosen by their team, the range prevented viewpoints and ideas from clashing whilst the dynamics of the guests certainly worked well overall. Not only was it aesthetically pleasing in certain ways, but intellectually challenging. Whilst it is most likely to be the least attended event on OFW’s programme, we don’t and wouldn’t want it to go. The event needs a shake-up, but it will be hard to know what to sacrifice: as Francis Card concluded, “it displays what fashion is about for Oxford”.

 

Tony McGee

 

For all those that missed the talk, we will be updating the page with our favourite snippets from the talk, plus our own exclusive interview with the panellists (and David Gandy’s faux pas, no fear!).

 

 

David Gandy

Photography: Sonali Campion

The Wrongs of Politics and Our Right to Vote

Joseph King
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The Wrongs of Politics and Our Right to Vote

Having spent half a lifetime in political journalism, David Seymour has a thing or two to say to those that can’t be bothered with the ballot box. As we take a seat in a South Kensington cafe he tells it to me straight: ‘The thing is, I’m all in favour of cynicism in politics as long as it doesn’t extend to the BNP or not voting’.

His point is not to be taken lightly. Election turn-out since the end of the Second World War has plunged from 80% to 60% and is expected to fall even lower in the wake of the MP’s expenses scandal. This is especially the case with young people; the Electoral Commission has recently warned that over half of 17-25s eligible to vote are not registered to do so.

‘But just because many young people don’t seem interested in the election, that doesn’t mean they’re not political’. I’m with David on this, and point out that many under 25s are heavily involved with climate camps, Twitter storms, and ethical consumerism. ‘Yes. Really it’s the politicians that say you’re apathetic about politics’, he adds.

‘The problem is that there’s a disconnect between being passionate about certain issues and actually channelling this passion into support for political parties’. Co-authering a new book Why Vote? he wants to remedy this. But he doesn’t want to do it by painting a picture of how marvellous politicians are. No, before telling me why I should vote, he wants to make it clear that politics is blighted by a serious malaise.
Personality is first on the list of problems and Gordon Brown is certainly in David’s firing range. ‘Sure, people that do see a lot of him think he’s fantastic. But if you stick him in front of a television crew, he really doesn’t come across like that. I’ve found this with so many politicians.’

In October Brown was asked about his favourite biscuit during a live web chat with the parents’ website Mumsnet: he failed to answer. ‘You know, that’s a classic! If he does say ‘I like chocolate digestives’, does he think he’s going to be attacked by the BMA or suffer criticism by McVitties rivals?’ Leaning forward and tapping on the table to drive home his point, he says: ‘I mean what is the bloody issue? Biscuits will be sprinkled on his political grave, really’.

‘Young people have an idea that a lot of it is all bollocks’

Another problem is cowardice. ‘When they’re ministers they say they’ve got to criminalise more drugs, and do more CRB checks. But when they come out of the spotlight and sit down with a cup of tea, they have completely different ideas’.
There’s unpublished Home Office research, he assures me, that shows that the reason the number of burglaries has dropped suddenly isn’t because of intervention of the state with a tough law and order policy, but because the price of drugs collapsed with the invasion of Afghanistan. A side effect was to flood the market with drugs.
‘Tough policy isn’t what works in containing drugs, but they don’t want to be seen to acknowledge that. When will we ever hear a politician stand up and say “I know how to cut crime by 50% over night. The way to do it is to decriminalise drugs.” I’m not saying we should just do this. But if you’re arguing about crime, why has no politician got the balls to admit this?’

Seymour also thinks Parliament is a shambles. ‘MPs are used as lobby fodder to put through the next policy gimmick. The BBC’s The Thick of It is really it. That’s what’s actually happening inside. The House of Lords is actually far better than the House of Commons because most don’t give a toss about the whips or gimmicks.’

He hasn’t come to a conclusion about whether the character of politicians can change. But he does think that part of it is a reaction to the way the media operates now. ‘Politicians weren’t confronted with these things 40 years ago. There was no real direct challenging on TV. Now they are all the time and they just have to run the party line.’
There is a glimmer of hope, however. Seymour eagerly tells me that in this sea of political inanity, there are some that still keep politics afloat. His favourite is Ed Milliband. ‘Most politicians listen but respond with a stock politician answer. But Ed: you can challenge him on anything and he will have a debate about it; he really does it! That’s also why Cameron and Clegg are where they are. People realised they were actually good at having an open debate.’

‘To say you’re not going to vote is to let them get away with it’

But what about the rest? Can we intervene? ‘Yes! To say politicians aren’t doing anything for us, so we’re not going to vote, is to let them get away with it’. What’s more, and students should take note of to this, Seymour believes that ‘young people are in a better informed, more educated position to vote than ever before.’ This is partly because of the development of the internet and new media technologies. Sites such as Youth Net and Left Foot Forward provide a platform for young people to communicate about politics in a way they could never have done previously. He also suspects that young people are far less inclined to vote on the basis of celebrity or empty policy. ‘They have an idea that a lot of it is all bollocks’.

That’s all very well. But if you’ve got one vote, there’s not a lot you can do. ‘But the point is’, Seymour rebuts, ‘that you’re part of a bigger mass. Go out and get active!’

Hearing this, I feel a sense of urgency. Maybe, as a ‘young person’, I really am in a better position to avoid either naïve enthusiasm for voting as an end in itself, or cynical rejection of democracy as a meaningless charade. Sadly – and I’m sure most students (apathetic or not) can sympathise with this – buying a round in the pub that evening rather than purchasing a copy of Seymour’s new book Why Vote? got the better of me. Perhaps they stock it in the Bodleian.

Why Vote? A guide for those who can’t be bothered is by David Seymour and Jo Phillips. Published by Biteback.

 

No Ordinary Rally

John Rendel
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No Ordinary Rally

What do you do when 8th week comes to an end and exams have been taken? When the Balls and their associated hangovers are just fading memories, leaving you with three months of nothing but the world cup or the new term to begin?

Many people would argue that the following are the best things to do with your time:
1) Become a tourist guide
2) Catch a wild trout and eat it for dinner
3) Hold a fake protest against 1920’s jazz music
4) Serve Earl Grey tea in Russia’s Red Square
5) Climb a mountain over 5000ft
6) Go to the mobile phone throwing championships in Finland.
7) Perform a Shakespearian monologue in a classical amphitheatre.

New College Graduate John Rendel who runs the growing charity Promoting Equality in African Schools (PEAS), thinks that he has come up with a way to get all these things into one wild adventure.

His solution is U Rally – a two or four week road trip in August to wherever you want to go! Participants compete for points scored by completing up to 51 ‘Pub Story’ Challenges, like those featured above. Through the pub story ‘points multiplier map’, you can increase the points you score by completing the challenges further from home. Teams also score points by ticking off potentially hundreds of postcard challenges which often involve simply visiting marvellous places in Europe, North Africa and the closer bits of Asia.

The winning team in the four week event will receive the much coveted ‘Hub Cap’ trophy with those in the two week event (the two weekers) competing for the slightly less coveted but no less envy-inducing ‘Steering Wheel’ trophy.

The whole event is being run to raise money for the charity PEAS, with the aim being that 100 cars will raise enough to launch an entire, sustainably-financed secondary school under the PEAS ‘smart aid’ model. The event costs £100 per-person to enter and each team is asked to raise a further £750 for PEAS.

The charity PEAS was founded in 2005 and now runs 5 low-fee secondary schools in Uganda. With many African governments introducing Universal Primary Education, many students are finishing primary school but then are unable to follow on to secondary school because of lack of quality and access to state secondary schools. PEAS is trying to change this situation by creating affordable and high quality schools, as well as trying to improve state run schools with the help of the local governments.

The next sign-up window for the U Rally event is at 4pm on Sunday May 9th, with the last a month later. All you need is a car (just get a dodgy old banger for £300), a route, some mates, two or more weeks free from August 1st and a sense of fun. This definitely beats sitting around all summer.

Even if you can’t make it to the event this summer, U Rally is giving you the chance to make a quick buck by paying £50 for every team you encourage to sign up. Just ask the team to record your name on the sign up page as they register.

 

A Croq of Old Hit

Peter O'Connor
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A Croq of Old Hit

The sun is obscured by a blanket of cloud, there are several empty pitchers littered with browning fruit slices and freshers with wooden mallets are staggering across the quads without arousing the wrath of the porters. Yes, it can mean only one thing- that the British Summer is here, and with it, the fine game of croquet.

As a state school kid from suburbia, the game of croquet has always struck me as something of a joke. When trying to think of the most ridiculous sport imaginable, croquet would often come to mind (2nd only to Polo, in that at least croquet didn’t utilise equine locomotion). To my unwitting mind, the game simply consisted of the upper classes rambling around a lawn in tweed blazers, knocking brightly coloured balls through hoops in some seemingly unintelligible fashion. The aim of the sport was quite beyond me, a pursuit too distantly surreal from my own lifestyle for me to ever care for it, let alone want to play it.

Fast forward to Oxford, some arm twisting in the college bar after a few drinks and the promise of a lazy “sport” which many involves quaffing gin based spirits. I have become an overnight convert to this summer pursuit. Speaking of which, the game is essentially that- a pursuit of one team’s balls against another’s, to try and pass through a circuit of hoops before the other team in a specified route, in order to hit a peg in the middle of the pitch and win. The game sounds simple enough- at this stage. However, players win extra shots by hitting another a ball, in a similar way to which extra turns in snooker or pool work. Therefore, a tactical game of positioning, to build as many shots as possible in a row to help you through the hoops, through extra goes hitting your own balls, as well as those of your opponent, are required. As such, croquet is not merely just a game of skill, like some kinds of drink related game. It is not like a posh darts or pool or bare knuckle brawl. Rather it has the cognitive finesse of chess, draughts, or cheating on a quiz machine (although for those of us familiar with latter, know the common utility of a mallet in play.)

However, the real fun in the sport is the attitude with which it is played. Leisurely, with sly tactics and backhanded aggression, the game comes to life in a mix of skill, tactics and psychological banter that make it genuinely fun and eminently social. It is a very simple game to get to grips with, but very tough to master. And that’s without the inevitable home rules to account for different pitches. Whilst some may have perfectly smooth, pristine croquet lawns, others of us have to get use to dips and divots- not to mention wells and walls- all of which add to the charm of a game as you watch your opponents struggling to straddle a fence!

So, with summer here upon us, Cuppers is now well under way. What better way to lose yourself in the mystique of Oxford legend, day-dreaming of Alice’s own experiences of the sport in Wonderland, than to give the game a try? Well, at least that’s what I thought. How my illustrious SPC 8 shall do, against the slightly more illustrious SPC 7 in the most homogeneous draw in history, we will have to see. Somehow though, I don’t think we’ll go down in the annals of croquet history. Instead, I’ll make sure to bring along my anorak, a pitcher of the same from Sainsbury’s (for those of you who know your cheaper alternatives to popular summer fruit drinks served with fruit and lemonade!) and a good excuse to explain to give the porters to explain mallet marks on the quad. We were just playing whack a mole, honest.

There ya go!

 

Luke & Jack Fill Your Ears with Films

Cherwell Film
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Luke & Jack Fill Your Ears with Films

The first in a new series looks at ‘Up In The Air’ starring George Clooney, as well as checking in on Uma Therman, Jennifer Aniston, and Gemma Arterton.

May Day!

Cherwell Photo
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May Day!

Fancy yourself as a photographer?

Want your photographs from around and about Oxford seen by the thousands of people who visit the Cherwell website every day?

If so, why not send a few of your snaps into [email protected]?

 

 

Photographs by Wojtek Szymczak, Jin Lee and Ursa Mali*

 

Wojtek Szymczak

 

Wojtek Szymczak

 Wojtek Szymczak

 

Wojtek Szymczak

 

Wojtek Szymczak

 

Jin Lee

 

Jin Lee

 

Ursa Mali

 

Ursa Mali

 

Ursa Mali

 

Ursa Mali

 

Corpus Christi Ball

Ollie Ford
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Corpus Christi Ball

Fancy yourself as a photographer?

Want your photographs from around and about Oxford seen by the thousands of people who visit the Cherwell website every day?

If so, why not send a few of your snaps into [email protected]?

 

 

The menu: a medieval hog roast and fresh fish and chips

 

 

Well dressed band member

 

The Hanged Man

 

Medieval Dancers

 

Medieval Trance group

 

The Main Stage

 

Medieval Dancers showing how it’s done

 

Different coloured tights

 

Oxford University’s famous Cocktail Society

 

Revelry

 

Debauchery

 

Ben Coopman and Matt Waksman finished the night

with their two hour set

 

One night down the pub…

Sarah Karacs
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One night down the pub…

Shakespeare’s Globe in Prague isn’t quite as grandiose as the one I remember from home: it doesn’t it have the same history attached to it; it’s about five billion times smaller, and it doesn’t actually put on any plays. What it does have to offer, however, is decent enough beer, a well stocked library that panders to the intellectual whims of its cultured clientele, and a permissive atmosphere in which its perfectly acceptable to sit with your obese tabby cat at the bar (so long as its on a leash, apparently). It is tucked away in a narrow and steep cobbled side street in the torturously hilly and little known Vršovice district.

So we were standing outside said pub, myself clasping a glass of red wine I’d accidentally ordered using an 18th century turn of phrase (thanks, Oxford), when two bearded men staggered towards us; one supporting his grey haired friend who could barely stand upright. The older guy, frail, gaunt but with mad bushy hair which gave his physique a lollypop shape, was muttering loudly to himself. They smiled jovially at us as the more sober one led his friend into the bar and dropped him onto a stool. Job done, the friend stumbled past us on the way out; leant into us and spluttered; “I think you know that guy”. Clearly the man’s nuts, I thought. Besides, my mother told me to avoid drunken biker types who carry geriatric hippies around in their free time. I edged away. The man persisted, pointing emphatically at the older man peering vacantly over at us from inside the pub. I was beginning to think one of my flatmates had a long lost, glue sniffing grandfather she’d completely forgotten about. As it turned out; the guy was only the saxophonist of Czechoslovakia’s most notorious dissident band; Plastic People of the Universe.

In case you haven’t heard of them, the Plastic People of the Universe were, and still are, awesome. They were a psychedelic rock band, formed in the late 60s, who were driven underground when the communist regime decided to object to their ‘devil may care’ attitude, ban the band from performing and eventually imprison its members. The response was phenomenal; Vaclav Havel – a dissident playwright and philosopher who later became president after the fall of communism – collected signatures from notable figures in Czechoslovakia in protest. Thus began a resistance movement that was to play quite a role in the eventual collapse of the regime. Vratislav Brabenec joined the band in the 70s, was imprisoned in 1976 for a several months, and was eventually forced to emigrate to Canada, but returned to his home turf in the 1990s. He continues to play with The Plastics to this day. He spends his evenings at his local, calling members of other, younger, bands “grandmother” and being bought beers by gormless, starstruck Czech students from England.

“So, Plastic People of the Universe toppled communism, that’s cool.” I stuttered. (at least I didn’t comment on his haircut, which was the thing I did the last time I met a rock legend.) He blinks, takes a slow gulp of his beer; the foam clings to his long, bedraggled beard. “Of course not”. He shrugs; “It was all going to happen anyway; we just happened to be the band that were sick of the all the bullshit.” “But Plastic People were a political band, right. I mean, you were pretty much the only band in Czechoslovakia that dared to stick it to the man!” He laughs gently, rearranges his dishevelled checkered shirt, and stares at my ear. “We were a rebellious bunch of kids who wanted to do as we pleased. That can’t be said of most musicians at the time. But the music itself wasn’t political.” He pauses, lights a cigarette and adds; “I prefer to call our stuff poetical”. Incidently, Brabenec is also a writer, wrote a great deal of the lyrics for the Plastics, and also has degrees in both Theology and Horticulture.

He’s starting to fade, fails to hear my following questions, his thick rimmed glasses sliding down his nose. A jolt. Out of nowhere, he proffers; “I’m an old man now. I don’t know. I am supposed to go somewhere tomorrow because someone I know has died. But I can’t remember who they were.” He looks up at me, droopy eyes clouded in smoke, and kindly asks, “So who are you, why are you in Prague?” I say my name and that I study Czech. He beams. “That’s great, that’s just wonderful. Everything is wonderful” and his eyes begin to close. I politely excuse myself. We left shortly afterwards; whilst he remained, dozing in that same stool by himself. Every so often, one of the punters would go over to talk to him, ask him a couple of questions, and then retreat back to their table. I don’t know how he got home.

 

If you want to find out more on the fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia, Sarah recommends Tom Stoppard’s recent play “Rock n’ Roll,” Vaclav Havel’s memoirs, the Czech cult film “…A Bude Hůř”, (“Its Gonna Get Worse”, featuring Brabenec), or a good old-fashioned history book.

 

 

Shirley Williams : Climbing The Bookshelves

Olivia Williams
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Shirley Williams : Climbing The Bookshelves

Williams (no relation, unfortunately) is a remarkable woman and overlooked by our generation as a political figure. She read PPE at Somerville and almost as soon as she left stood as an MP, when she was just 23. During the 1970s she was variously Paymaster General, Secretary for Education, and found herself on the IRA’s hitlist as Minister for Northern Ireland. In the 1980s she then founded the SDP with fellow Labour defectors Roy Jenkins, David Owen and William Rodgers. Daughter of Vera Brittian, she is now Lady Williams of Crosby, residing in the House of Lords, having finished a ten year stint as an emeritus professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Governance and travelling the world to investigate nuclear proliferation.

For all such achievements, she is totally unpretentious, exuding quiet stoicism and bonhomie. She spoke eloquently and amusingly, managing to create the atmosphere of an intimate chat round the kitchen table, despite the heavy subject matter of constitutional reform and ideals of public service. She charmed the overwhelmingly middle-aged audience at Christ Church with the political anecdotes for which they were clearly hoping. When reminiscing about standing as an MP, she explained how voting patterns were revealed in front gardens: she didn’t bother with the tidy ones with boxwood hedges or gnomes as this was a clear indicator of Conservatism, broken prams or debris in the front on the other hand was a sure green light for Socialism, and those with slow growing, tenderly nurtured trees were Liberal Democrats.

Despite her trailblazing enthusiasm for female MPs, she was unimpressed by ‘Blair’s Babes’, a short-sighted stunt that had left her cold. Particularly niggling to her was that famous photo of them all, lined up in identical smart suits, as she said, a ‘faceless sweep of red, with lovely haircuts’. They were surrounding Blair ‘as though he were God in a Renaissance painting’, and they the innocuous, adoring cherubs.

She has all the homely honesty that people these days complain politicians are lacking. Unscripted, plainly-dressed, and softly-spoken, she earnestly mourned the era when politics was a ‘noble, high-minded profession’, when matters of ideology were passionately tousled over. Today she regrets that politics is ‘about details, not about the heart and body turned upside down’. It has become ‘a side show’ and respect for politicians is being lost.

As a topic of conversation the diminution of cabinet government perhaps sounds dull, but her heartfelt anxiety was arresting as she criticised the presidential prime ministerial style adopted by Blair and maintained, to our detriment, ever since. Parliament is too disciplined and has become a legislating machine, in her words, a ‘processing plant’ for ill-considered legislation, only half debated. Of the mind-boggling three thousand new laws created since 1997, a great many are ‘inadequate and superfluous’.

Particularly in light of the recent expenses scandal, for the first time in her life she is ‘rather worried’ because, in the minds of many, bankers and MPs have been conflated into one cheating incompetent elite. She doesn’t think that Britain is broken, but she is clearly apprehensive, not least of all because we have become so ‘dangerously apathetic’.

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