Tin helmets on, gang. I have just written a book in praise of elitism. In the Britain of Ed Balls, this may seem rash. Comrade Balls and his cruel-voiced Madame Lovely, Yvette Cooper, regard elitists with the fury that Chairman Mao’s ruffians once treated poets. And yet it had to be done – a book which argues that ‘social climbers’ such as the TV sitcom character Hyacinth Bucket are an example to us all. The more I thought about the Britain of Balls and Cooper, and the more I saw the shrivelling of beauty and the coarsening of manners. And the more I felt I had to urge you readers of Cherwell to embrace the idea that you are among the best and the brightest and that you should cherish your excellence.

All men are not equal. Some are born stronger than others and it is their duty to help the infirm. They will not do this by hiding like milksops. Leaders do not galvanise a frail citizenry by trembling behind matron and saying “ooh, I’m no better than anyone else”. False modesty debilitates a society.   Inequality exists, full stop. A few people are good at maths, many not; some have a flair for carpentry, others are no more able to assemble an Ikea table than the Masai warrior, plucked from his mud hut, knows how to play chopsticks on the piano. Unfairness – and, with it, a sense of gradation – is inevitable. The silliest response is to try to deny this truth. The second silliest response is to suggest that low grade is somehow more desirable.

Our rulers celebrate the crass and the grotty by flattening their accents, coarsening our culture, by jumping down in the gutter with the thick and the violent, the sexually incontinent, the drugged, the criminal, vexatious, cruel, indolent, selfish and unpatriotic. In doing this, our elite thought it was doing the decent thing. Alas, it was simply betraying the very people it aspired to help: the ambitious, blameless poor.

We are losing the idea of citadel, a notion of what is best and what is worth acquiring. Having reached Oxford University, you are part of that citadel. Be proud of what you have achieved. Try to conduct yourselves in a proper manner. Puff out your chests, by all means, and walk tall. But walk straight, too. Walk with honour. Commissions, working parties, think tanks, steering committees, conferences, charities, consultancies: egalitarianism has become an industry for the self-righteous, a largely secularist employment belt whose own high priests think themselves unbelievably important. In the past 20 years it has grown beyond anything envisaged by the socialist Fabians or even by their communist cousins. If the dotty old Webbs, Beatrice and Sidney, came back to Britain today they would be horrified by this behemoth of privileged paddlers. They would ask: where is the good, here, for our poor? The equality world has become a self-feeding monster, a job creation scheme for the clerical caste.

From university admissions to unisex hospital wards, equality runs like ground elder, strangling common sense. Officialdom towers over us, wagging its disapproval, instructing us to observe equality codes or face the withdrawal of public funds. Even the selection of candidates for our Parliament might have to comply with equality edicts, single-sex selection lists already being in operation in some parts of the system.  The language heard on airwaves is smudged by egalitarian neurosis. The content of our museums, the plays staged at our theatres, even our sporting ideals – all these quake before the great god equality, the constant, highly politicised impetus toward populism – in short, bog-standardism.

Despite all this, equality has not achieved its aims. Social mobility is dropping. The wealth divide broadens. “Equality practitioners”, as they call themselves, have simply become a new super-pod, brahmins amid the beggars, sixth form monitors of thought who draw their salaries from the pockets of the very poor they profess to help. No less an egalitarian than Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s malevolent henchman, once referred in a loose off-drive to “bog standard comprehensives”. Bog Standard Britain. You said it. Mate.

Sathnam Sanghera, award-winning author and Times columnist, and I, a lowly second-year Oxford undergraduate, share a very important thing in common: people cannot tell if we are male or female. Perhaps that needs further clarification. We both have an unusual first name, which means it’s very difficult for others to decipher our gender, when say organising an interview for Cherwell via email. Indeed, as I stroll over to Sathnam for our interview in a London café, clutching my tea and dictaphone, he informs me that he had been expecting a ‘bloke’. I am in fact a woman. He sympathises, saying, ‘People often think I’m a woman. Sometimes male readers even send me flirty emails. I feel your pain.’ And so we begin.

Shortlisted for the Editorial Intelligence’s inaugural Comment Awards and author of the hugely successful autobiography  ‘The Boy With The Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton’, Sathnam’s career in journalism has been as slick as his trademark thick black frames in his Times headshot. His stimulating comment pieces manage

to be analytical as well as humorous and personal. However, Sathnam isn’t so appreciative of his balancing act skills. He remarks self-deprecatingly, ‘There are lots of people who write comment without putting themselves in it, it must be great but I just can’t do it. I do that because I’ve got no opinions.’

While I’m sceptical about his modesty, I wonder how much of his writing is genuine. Has he ever been tempted to write something controversial simply for the sole purpose of sparking a fiery debate?
He replies, ‘The amount of opinions newspaper writers are required to have is unnatural, no one has that many opinions. I think to make it as a Fleet Street newspaper columnist you need to be a bit mentally ill. You’ve got to have that thing that makes you more mean and say more outrageous things than anyone else. I don’t think I’ve got into that sphere yet. However, you do feel that pressure because whenever you write something mean you do get such positive feedback.’

In an age of twenty-four hour media and in light of the Telegraph’s damning revelations about MPs’ expenses, how influential is the British media within the country?

‘They run the country’ he replies laughing but deadly serious. So are they more powerful than Gordon Brown? ‘I think Gordon Brown would probably say that. It’s not healthy necessarily but you can’t say that, no one can say that, especially politicians.’

Sathnam was brought up in Wolverhampton by his Punjabi speaking parents who emigrated from India in the 1960s. His father suffers from schizophrenia and is illiterate. His mother speaks a little English but cannot read it. Alongside prominent ethnic minority figures such as George Alagiah and Trevor Phillips, Sathnam is critical of the multiculturalist policies that have defined immigrant life in Britain.

‘I think the consensus is there, it was a huge mistake to have made. It causes me a huge amount of pain and agony that my parents can’t speak English and it wouldn’t have been bad if they had been forced to. It would have given them a better life and it would have made life less complicated for us but equally I can see my parents’ point of view. My mum had so much on her hands, bringing up four kids and dealing with a guy with schizophrenia that she didn’t have time to learn English. I wish she would but I just find it easier to forgive her and I don’t think we should judge her for it, given what she went through. However, it’s much too indulgent; we’ve got ghettos, complete islands, communities that haven’t integrated at all. Even in Wolverhampton there are Asian communities that aren’t integrated at all, they’re living like it’s India, and it’s terrible.’

From Multicultural Britain, we flip to the BNP. With 2 MEP seats secured and an imminent appearance on Question Time, does Sathnam think they are a force to be reckoned with?

‘A Times reader as a mark of their gratitude subscribed me to the BNP mailing list, so every day I get the BNP update’, he replies drolly. ‘In the 80s growing up, the National Front was a force to be terrified of, riots and skinheads. Compared to what the BNP is now, reading their stuff, they’re a joke. I don’t think they’re to be frightened of at all, they are a parody of themselves.’
So should they appear on Question Time?

‘We should give them airtime. In a democracy it’s important to make people feel like their views, not matter how offensive they are to other people, are allowed.  Having this out in the gimpy way the BNP talk is the best way to have it out, otherwise, it’s more likely to come out in violence.’

With public faith in political parties at an all time low, who does he think will win the general election? ‘The Tories will win, absolutely. I’m on the sideboard with my politics, I’ve always been a Labour supporter but equally I realise those days are over and there’s very few differences between the parties now. I grew up in a time when there was. I think we need a change of government because it is becoming complacent and very incompetent.’

Although Sathnam admires some Tories like Kenneth Clark and Michael Gove, he has great concerns about Mr Cameron’s privileged background.

‘Cameron says that his wife really connects him with real people, he goes home and he talks to someone from the real world, she really keeps his feet on the ground. She runs Smythson – they sell £500 notebooks! If that’s his idea of reality, hello! For God’s sake! He really does milk the family in a way I don’t think Gordon Brown does. It’s cynical and he’s a gimp. I really hate him.’

OUCA’s recent scandal hasn’t helped Cameron shed the party’s elitist and sometimes xenophobic image. However, I am surprised to hear that this type of behaviour is endemic within the national Tory party.

‘David Cameron does all this stuff about his image but if you talk to normal Tory members, this is what they’re like, they tell horrible jokes and they’re very un P.C. I spent a long time being a political reporter and it’s my experience of what the Tory party rank and file are like. They’re living in the 1950s.’

Sathnam is every bit as convincing and witty as his weekly columns suggest. Not bad for someone once rejected for the editorship of Cambridge’s Varsity Student Newspaper. The reason? ‘The problem with your application is that we didn’t believe a single word that you said.’

Where is the new plant situated and how much is known about it?

It’s located near the city of Qom, a centre of Shiite, Islamic religious learning in northern Iran.  The actual site is on a base run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the main military force loyal to the hard-line Islamic regime. According to reports the facility is a small one, making it of little use for energy generation, but capable of arming a nuclear weapon.

Is Iran definitely after nuclear weapons?

Iran has had a nuclear programme since the 1970s and the Shah’s pro-Western regime, which was toppled in 1979. Tehran’s protestations that it is only developing a nuclear capacity for civilian energy-generating purposes lacks credibility. It is reasonable to assume that Iran wants a nuclear weapons capacity for reasons of international prestige. Does it want to develop a fully-fledged nuclear weapons arsenal, or will it stop just short of such a move, like Japan? This is a matter of conjecture, though most Western experts fear the former.

Under the IAEA, what is Iran allowed to do? Has it broken the rules?

Iran is a member of the IAEA (The International Atomic Energy Agency). The IAEA acknowledges the right of its members to develop a nuclear capacity for civilian, energy purposes. Notionally, Iran is acting within these parameters. But the IAEA also calls on member states to inform it of new developments on the ground, something Tehran has repeatedly failed to do. It is this behaviourthat has enabled the US and Europeans to elicit successive rounds of economic sanctions against Iran endorsed by the UN Security Council.

Why did Iran wait unitl now to reveal its second enrichment facility?

The regime only admitted the existence of the facility once it had been found out!  The US is reckoned to have known about it for a couple of years, making the revelation a matter of Washington’s preferred timing, designed to heap maximum diplomatic pressure on Tehran.

What is Israel’s bearing on the situation?

Israel sees Iran as its only strategic threat in the region. It is unnerved by the hard-line rhetoric of President Ahmadinejad, which denies the existence of the Holocaust. It does not want to lose its qualitative military edge. Israel fears that a nuclear Iran will embolden the enemies on its borders, like Hamas in Gaza or Hizbollah in Lebanon, which are allied to Iran. Longer term, a ratcheting up in regional tensions may discourage Jews from moving to Israel, or even trigger a stampede of emigration, thereby threatening its viability as a largely Jewish state. As a result, Israel has said that it will not co-exist with a nuclear Iran, a threat that must be taken very seriously.

What are the most likely scenarios?

There are three choices ahead for the US. One, conclude a ‘grand bargain’ with Iran, whereby Tehran gets respect and supervised nuclear energy, in exchange for disavowing nuclear weapons. Two, Iran refuses to respond sufficiently in the current round of talks (which commenced on Oct 1), resulting in attempts by the US and the Europeans to introduce punitive sanctions at the UN in order to enforce compliance. Three, sanctions don’t work, leaving Obama with his Kennedy moment: either the West accepts an Iranian nuclear fait accompli, or signals a willingness to use military force to ensure that Iran does not go  nuclear.