And then there were four. Jess Phillips has withdrawn from the Labour leadership contest.

To some extent, this was a recognition of reality which would have dawned sooner or later. The new Labour leadership rules, adopted in 2018, initially intended to guarantee members more choice have had the effect of restricting it. MPs are no longer the sole gate keepers, candidates must either secure three affiliated organisations, one of which must be unions, or 5% of CLPs. That doesn’t sound onerous but the union pool to fish in isn’t a large one and CLPs tend to cluster around a couple of candidates. Thus far Phillips has failed to win a single CLP nomination. USDAW was, perhaps, her strongest hope of securing major union backing and yesterday they opted for Keir Starmer. The writing was on the wall.

Phillips also ran a lacklustre campaign with a couple of major mistakes. She has a vivacious and appealing personality, with a great backstory and strong critique of Boris Johnson and how Labour can succeed in a media environment not well disposed to the party. However, she has never been in the Shadow Cabinet and sometimes that showed. There is a major transition from being everyone’s favourite backbencher, influence without formal responsibility and stepping into the arena. That was clear in Phillips’ campaign.

She also suffered from something of the Liz Kendall syndrome. She wanted to “speak truth” but perhaps, she spoke a few too many. In a Labour Party leadership contest, which is essentially Labour’s primary as to who their Prime Minister designate is to be, you have to, well, appear to like Labour. As Liz Kendall found, a relentless desire to reveal home truths, however noble, doesn’t do much to endear you to the electorate to which you must appeal. Candidates must walk a tight rope between appearing credible, recognising the scale of the problem before them whilst also making the party feel good about itself. Phillips, like Kendall, veered away from the latter far too much. Moreover, Phillips as someone whose politics are recognisably and credibly left wing, allowed herself to be seen as the candidate of the Blairite right- which in a party which admires Corbyn 2–1 over Blair, is a death knell.

She also struggled for the same reason Starmer is doing well. Touring the country, talking to Labour members, I have been struck by the profound difference in mood among party members compared to 2015. Then, the party seemed stunned and angry, confused as to why it had lost. It pulled the Corbyn lever partly because he offered them sharp edged, clear diagnoses (and prescriptions) for what had gone wrong. The anger made members roll the the dice.

Today, the mood which hangs over the party isn’t anger, it’s fear. The scale of the election defeat has (rightly) terrified members. There is recognition that one more wrong move and the party could be finished. Fear, rather than anger, is leading many members to fold, rather than gamble. They believe that the party can no longer afford factionalism or division, that what is left of it must unite. These impulses are leading them inexorably to Starmer. He looks and appears every inch the “break the glass in case of emergency” candidate; One leading member of the left considering voting for him observed to me “we just have to face it, he looks like power. You can’t underestimate that.” Moreover, he occupies a place at the nexus of several crucial Labour Party power circles: A leading Shadow Cabinet minister of the Corbyn years but who many “moderates” instinctively feel is one of them (Thornberry on paper is the same but arguably has more baggage from her Miliband-era days). Like many successful Labour leadership aspirants, his politics are opaque, which is helpful. In Stockport, on Friday, I was struck by the number of local members (councillors, no less) who had supported Corbyn in 2015 and 16 who were now seamlessly moving to the Starmer column. When I asked why, they rejected the idea that this was a contradiction. “He is of the left” one told me, “why shouldn’t I vote for him?” Senior members of his campaign have told me that this isn’t schmaltz: “Some moderates seem to think they’ll get the party back with Keir. But we keep telling them to think again. He is on the left, he’s further to the left than me and some of the others on the campaign. He’s just not factional, that’s the difference.”

This idea appears to have suffused among the membership. The local members in Stockport, for example, told me they thought it likely that their CLP, which nominated Corbyn last time, would go for Starmer too. As well as being assured that Starmer wouldn’t dispatch Corbynism, they thought that RLB was “too divisive”, that her election would lead to more intra-party warfare which the party can ill-afford. Unity, was once more, Starmer’s great weapon. The party no longer seems to be seeking hard edged right angles but instead softer and blurrier lines. They don’t seem to want more Corbynite upheaval from RLB nor Phillips style truth telling. They want to be told and to feel that it’s going to be alright: safety first. That inevitably favours Starmer.

Phillips’ withdrawal could complicate this for Starmer. Her presence on the ballot was useful for his cause. It meant that implicitly there was always someone to his “right”, someone that the leftist could think, “well at least it’s not Jess Phillips.” With fewer candidates in the race, that task becomes harder. He will have to be careful not to come to be seen as the candidate of the dreaded Blairites; he may have to tack further left.

On the other hand, if he can continue to walk the tightrope, her absence does mean that he is more likely to win on the first round. Phillips’ has definitely succeeded in drawing new members into the party, many of whom will now vote for Starmer first, rather than second. A first round victory would be helpful for Starmer’s credibility and authority over the party. The last thing a unity candidate needs is eking out an Ed Miliband style micro-win.

Much will depend on what happens with Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry, which I’ll write about separately. GMB backing Nandy (she is close to parts of its leadership) is an enormous coup. Had they backed Starmer, it would have been very likely that this would have become a two horse race and all over. Thornberry, after a good hustings performance, has picked up two CLPs overnight- half the number as RLB, despite zero institutional support. Nandy now seems certain to make it to the ballot paper and that will shift the the chemistry of the choice and of every hustings to come. There’s a long way to go, at this point in 2015, it was Burnham’s to lose. But one thing to me is clear- whichever party can best appear to guarantee unity, is likely to win. If that stays as Starmer, it’s his for the taking. Should he become tarnished, damaged, make a significant mis-step, that role could be taken by Nandy. Her place in the race means that there is a spare for the non-Corbynite elements of the party to move to. In short- it reduces his margin for error.

Mr. Johnson surely knew this when he wrote his words about letter boxes and bank robbers- without the burka’s cachet, without its searing power as a new touchstone issue, his column would not have achieved what he intended, which was to keep himself in the headlines.

But the episode adverts to something else, something which though not shifting in the mantle of our politics, has long been been an irreducible, solid part of its core: all that is important in these matters in Britain, is that you are powerful- that you can say what you like, as long as you’re posh.

Consider Mr. Johnson’s words once again. His comparison of some of his fellow citizens to “bank robbers” and criminals and to inanimate objects. Although the words were written down, it is easy to imagine them uttered, with his trademark elan and effete toffish bluster. How amusing, his defenders say and how very droll- whilst at the same commendable for bravely airing difficult but important issues.

Now imagine the same words said with an Essex or Yorkshire or Brummie accent. Imagine them being said not by Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, but by a labourer, on camera for a clip on the six o’clock news, recorded at a building site, or at a down at heel pub, surrounded by men of Johnson’s age but wearing T-shirts and sipping pints and playing darts. Would those same Johnson allies have thought those men so culturally and politically pioneering? Or rather would they would think them prejudiced, ignorant, rude, vulgar and yes, probably racist? Would they look at them and think, yes, I agree with them?

No- they would not. But with Johnson, there is no such fear or worry of guilt by association. Rather, because of his verbosity, his humour, his Bertie Worcester cut glass accent and demeanour, because of his power, he cannot be any of those things.

In this he resembles another would-be populist, indeed, the first: Enoch Powell. When I made a film about the 50th anniversary of Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech earlier this year, I was struck by the ubiquity of one impression of Powell, which still lingers with the British public: “He was such a clever man.” Again and again, folk told me this, or some version of this. So it is with Johnson.

It is perhaps not mere coincidence that both men were classicists. Their speech and prose littered with Athenian and Roman and Corinthian allusions. They are, more than anything else, case studies in the British class system. People think and say, that they cannot be prejudiced because they are posh or clever or learned. Powell was not careless with his words, as some have suggested Boris was with his jokes. But either way, in a double whammy, it is their place atop of the English hierarchy of culture and class which makes them all the more grievous. Because they are perceived to be learned and cultivated, it lends their words more weight. It legitimises the prejudices of others, further down the class food chain, it suggests that certain things which probably ought not to be alright, in fact are. That is why I give the suggestion that there has been an increase in the numbers of attacks on women wearing the niqab in recent days absolute credibility.

There is something else invidious about posh prejudice: that the British class system allows those prejudiced against little opportunity for redress, precious few avenues to air their own experiences, unlike those more powerful who attack them. On Sunday, both Johnson’s father and sister took to newspaper columns in defence of their kith and kin. Who can blame them ? But that they did so was thought unusual by almost no-one. Few at the centre of British national life seemed to think it rum that three members of one family could so easily write national newspaper columns, have such ready access to the organs of information and power. One family, one family’s view, through talent yes, but privilege too, was able to dominate our national conversation. I do not recall, leafing through those same newspapers, a column, or a word, written by a working-class woman who wears the niqab. Our national conversation does not reach that far. The power in our society is refracted and dispersed through the narrowest of prisms.

Rachel Johnson, in her column in the Mail on Sunday wrote of her elder brother’s words: “I read his piece. It read like a column written on a Sunday morning while on holiday in Italy, with a bottle or two of Asti Spumante chilling in the fridge for lunch.”

Yeah, we’ve all been there, Rachel. But the situation where the words are written or uttered ought not to make such a big difference on our assessment of their rectitude. Whether penned by a former Foreign Secretary in the hills of Umbria, with Asti Spumante in the fridge, or by a working class man in Walsall with a six pack of Stella, British elites ought to be more consistent in their mores.

Perhaps though we should not be so surprised, this cultural double standard purveys much of British life. The great Timothy Spall once said that “eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you’re just mad.” So it is with prejudice.

On 16 December in the early hours, my grandfather, my best friend since I was old enough to know what that even meant, died at the age of 73.

It was unexpected and it was instant — a blood clot, sat in his chair.

The 2017 of my mind, likewise, instantly transformed.

It now will live as the year Grandad did not — the year I lost the man who made me what I am.

He taught me so much.

He’s basically the reason you’re even reading these words. He was the one who got me interested in politics. He even sent me the advert for my first job in TV.

And he’s still teaching me, even now.

For in his unbearably sad death, he has taught me so much about how we as a society approach the end of life.

And what I’ve learnt isn’t comfortable, for either the left or the right. Because death exposes the inadequacies, flaws and worst sides of our institutions — public and private.

When you die, you’re very likely, like my grandad, to be pronounced dead at a hospital.

This is naturally an extraordinarily traumatic time for any family.

It was even more traumatic for my grandmother, married to my grandad for 53 years and together for nearly 60, to be told barely an hour after her husband’s death that his body had to be out of the hospital in 48 hours and she had better make provisions to that effect.

The NHS is a wonder — and it saved Grandad’s life 10 years before when he suffered from a major heart attack — but once you’ve breathed your last, it makes it abundantly clear that the final discharge must come quickly and the baton of responsibility has been passed.

A 72-year-old woman was handed a leaflet with the numbers of a few local funeral directors and sent on her way.

I couldn’t help but feel that this was painfully inadequate.

And the NHS’s indifference is symptomatic of the wider attitude of the Government.

We are fond of talking about a cradle to grave welfare state but it’s not quite true.

Rather, it is from cradle right up to but not including the grave. From there on in, you’re on your own.

That’s never truer than with the funeral.

And here the inadequacies of the state mix with market.

The average price for a cremation now stands at over £3,500 and for a funeral the costs are greater still at over £4,500.

The Fair Funerals campaign estimates that prices are currently rising (per year) at four times the rate of inflation.

My experience was a positive one largely thanks to a recommended local funeral directors who were cheaper than average, but by any measure the market is broken.

Indeed, it’s hard to say that the funerals market behaves like a market at all.

There is almost no price transparency or competition. Very few people — especially if they haven’t been involved in a funeral — have any idea about what they ought to be paying.

No one (for understandable reasons) has walked down a high street to see a funeral director’s window adorned by a price tag for a funeral this winter — or seen the sight of a special offer (buy one get one free wouldn’t sit right, I admit). Nor do they haggle.

The market is dominated by a very few companies and there isn’t much competition. And the insurance market has its problems too; many like my grandad find it difficult to obtain funeral insurance at a decent price as a result of recent ill health.

And so — as with any imperfect market — we might expect the government to step in and nudge it in the right direction.

But I see little evidence of it so doing, indeed in recent years it has made things considerably worse.

One of the main drivers of funeral price inflation is the cost of burial plots. Local authorities — strapped for cash — have been increasing the price of our final resting places at an extraordinary rate in order to balance the books.

And there’s little in the way of government support either. The Social Funeral Fund Payment is available to those on certain types of benefits.

It used to cover the cost of a basic funeral. Now it barely covers a third. And it isn’t easy to claim either. The form is some 24 pages long.

Ah yes — the forms.

I’ve filled in a lot of forms in recent weeks on paper and on the phone: death certificate, car insurance, works pension, gas and electricity, DVLA.

These are necessary evils.

What is less necessary is the slow impersonal grind of the state when dealing with death and with those who have been left behind.

I’ve spent hours on the phone providing the same details for my grandmother’s benefit claims to a myriad of government agencies.

Why couldn’t it all be done with one phone call? It is, after all, one government.

And then, only a few days after we lost him, her local authority wrote to her to say that as a result of my grandfather’s death they had overpaid the household by £80 and would be seeking the money back as soon as possible.

But her claim for pension credit and other related benefits will take at least four weeks to process.

Yet I could see, from a benefits calculator online, exactly to what she was entitled in only 10 minutes.

All the time, throughout all of this, I wondered again and again, what would my nan do if I wasn’t around to do this?

How would a woman in her 70s, not an internet user and in the throes of appalling grief, navigate this morass?

What of the countless widows without family experiencing this every day? How many of their stories have we not heard? How much money has not been paid to which they are entitled? How much extra grief and pain have they endured as a result?

Beyond his death, when I reflect about his life, his wonderful, full life, it teaches me something about politics more widely.

Sometimes politics seems like a game, both to its practitioners and observers, like me.

Grandad’s life is a reminder that it is not, and that what happens in Westminster and the City can wreak havoc on people’s lives.

In the early 1990s he lost his house as a result of Black Wednesday and rocketing interest rates.

He remained assetless from then on.

His company pension, for which he worked so hard, was much less than it ought to have been following plummeting annuitisation rates as a result of the financial crisis.

And whatever modest savings he had accumulated were reduced in value by a massive programme of quantitative easing.

As a result he, and millions of pensioners like him, aren’t in poverty but struggle and have to work, as he did for the half the year, every year, right up to his death.

Millions like him, just get by.

A reminder, contrary to what we often hear, that many pensioners aren’t wealthy boomers, popping back to Britain now and again from second homes in Tuscany.

In the end, as a result of forces beyond their control, thousands of older people will die without enough money to pay for their funerals and will have to rely on family and they in turn might have to rely on credit.

And that’s what’s chilling about all of this.

So much of our politics, our sense of justice and morality rests on the idea that if we work hard enough, everything will come good in the end.

And yet it doesn’t always work out like that.

My grandad and many like him, did everything right.

He came from very little and worked very hard.

He attended night school for five years. He built a career and a family. He was a success.

But those vast impersonal forces of state and market buffeted him and blew him off course. He was to some extent failed by both, in life and death.

That should pose enormous questions for politicians and thinkers on left and right for whom the deployment of either is always supposedly the answer.

And yet, I can hear him now: “Always look on the bright side, son.”

As hard as that is with death, that bright side is this: whilst death seems to bring out the worst of our institutions, it brings out the best in humans.

Whether it’s the kindness of friends apparently lost long ago, to the love and solidarity of family and even strangers, death can be strangely uniting.

Perhaps then, we just need to make market and state a little bit more human.

As 2018 starts and the 2017 is left mercifully behind, that’s something all of us, of every political hue, could unite around.

It could neither see its people, nor what they wanted, properly.

Given the events of the past few weeks and months, the charge against many British politicians must be considerably worse since then: these days, they don’t bother to look or think about Ireland all.

But we’re thinking about it now. Because it is Ireland, not money, which threatens to destabilise the Prime Minister’s negotiations.

Ireland has the power of veto over Britain moving onto the next stage of trade negotiations, which it has said it will use if it is not satisfied that the Brexit settlement won’t make the border in Northern Ireland less porous.

We now have less than 10 days to sort the problem before December’s EU summit.

Many in Westminster’s media and political class have seemed surprised at Ireland’s perceived truculence.

They shouldn’t have been, if they’d been paying attention to what the Irish government has been saying for months, it’s clear the writing has long been on the wall.

The typical British response to the situation in Ireland has been perfunctory and, at times, bordering on insouciant: usually going along the lines of “where there’s a will there’s a way”.

“Ireland will sort itself out.”

The competing narratives of this question apparently extend up to and including the leaders of both countries themselves.

So much so that, at an EU summit in Gothenburg last week, Theresa May is reputed to have told Leo Varadkar that “we are close” on a deal — to which the Taoiseach responded that this was “fantasy”.

Indeed he told me in an interview later that day that the two sides were “nowhere near close”.

This situation we find ourselves in now stretches back to the referendum.

During the campaign, aside from a few game attempts by former prime ministers (and architects of the Good Friday Agreement both) John Major and Tony Blair to discuss it, Ireland — and the issues pertaining to the border which Brexit would inevitably involve — barely got a look in on the mainland.

Given that Brexit might imperil the hard won political stability of one of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, that is extraordinary.

That curious and ahistorical attitude stretched up to the then Northern Ireland Secretary, Theresa Villiers herself.

Thus the Irish and British public were treated to the bizarre spectacle of a British Northern Ireland Secretary publicly advocating and campaigning for a political outcome which, whatever its overall rights and wrongs, would almost certainly lead to a destabilisation of the political situation and stability in the region for which she was responsible.

The situation since has not been much better.

There is perhaps no finer example of the Anglo-shrug of all matters Irish than the much vaunted 4,000 word article by the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson on Brexit, which he wrote before the Conservative party conference.

4,000 words of his usual glittering penmanship. Not one word about Ireland.

How are we to explain that? Especially from politicians of the Conservative and Unionist party, of all things?

In some ways it involves the passing of time. The darkness and damage of the Troubles, to many of us on the mainland at least, seem remote and distant.

The Good Friday Agreement has been almost too successful: it has allowed us to put Northern Ireland’s troubles in a box marked “history”.

It has thus apparently given way to a deep complacency amongst a generation of politicians who assume things will be fine in the end.

Some, perhaps more troublingly, are aware of the risk but ultimately care about Brexit more than Ireland — and are therefore willing to roll the Irish dice to get it.

In some ways, in terms of our ignorance of matters Irish, t’was ever thus.

Britain has generally ignored its smaller neighbour until its problems proved so great that it had little choice but to confront them.

But there’s a difference this time: for the first time, with its veto, Ireland has serious power over her larger neighbour.

They have the power to unlock something we desperately want — but the Irish key looks nearly impossible to obtain.

The Irish government has been clear that they will not accept any situation where the border is any harder than it is at the moment.

To that end they have suggested that the best option (as reiterated today by Irish EU Commissioner Phil Hogan) is for the UK to stay in the customs union and preferably the single market too.

But the British government has also been clear since the PM made her Lancaster House speech in January: we are leaving both. To resile from that would not be tolerated by her backbenches or indeed, many in her cabinet.

Ireland has therefore suggested some sort of special status for Northern Ireland. Perhaps the province could stay in the customs union and single market.

That, however, has been rejected by the DUP for the obvious reason that Northern Ireland would become more closely bound to the Republic and the rest of the EU and slowly drift away from Britain (by far the country’s biggest export market).

The truth is much of the Brexiteer argument on Ireland was always rather woolly.

For a start many of those who currently say that the Irish situation will be fine in the end do so in the same breath as saying that a No Deal outcome is possible — and some even say that it is desirable.

In the case of a “no deal”, we would conduct only WTO trading with Ireland and the UK would be duty-bound to erect the hardest of hard borders on goods between north and south. It would be the biggest threat to the peace process possible.

The other contradiction lies at the heart of the Brexit Ireland paradox itself.

Adherents of Brexit usually claim it is a huge economic and political revolution. At the same time they say things in Ireland can remain more or less the same as they are now. It cannot be both.

After all, what is the point of Brexit if we cannot take back control of our borders?

In order to do so, we must have a border with the EU. One of those borders will be in Ireland.

The government is trying to find a good answer to an impossible riddle. Sometimes, goodwill isn’t enough.

Ministers are fond of pointing out Britain and Ireland enjoyed the fruits of the common travel area and free trade with Ireland long before we joined the EU.

That is true. But they forget it is no co-incidence that Britain and Ireland joined the EU on the same day.

If one had been part of a common market with Europe and the other hadn’t, that would have exacerbated the already considerable divides which existed at that time.

In leaving the EU now, for the first time in our modern histories, Ireland and Britain will be operating under different regulatory regimes. This is uncharted territory.

And we ought to remember too that EU membership was written into the particulars of the Good Friday Agreement. The agreement depended on a perfect equilibrium which EU membership provided.

Being in the same travel area, the same single market, the same customs union, the same overarching political confederation meant that both sides felt that the province had a political foot in both camps, one in Britain, one in the Republic.

The future was obtainable to both sides.

It gave the unionists certainty of Ulster’s links with the UK but also tantalisingly gave nationalists the hope that, however distant, Northern Ireland might slowly economically and politically drift south as their political and economic systems converged.

That is why the prospect of a hard border is so unacceptable to the Irish government now: It entirely cuts that off.

And on a personal level too, as Irish writer Fintan O’Toole has persuasively argued, the EU facilitated a pick and mix approach to identity for those in the province.

Identities became fluid, shared and particular. Brexit — once again — forces people to choose.

We’ve already seen some of the old acrimonies reappear. A war of words has broken out between the north and south.

Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster has warned Leo Varadkar “he should know better” and “stop playing around with Northern Ireland.”

DUP MP Sammy Wilson accused the Irish government of trying to thwart the Brexit process.

The Irish government has been no less vituperative. More worryingly still some of the vitriol is spreading to the press. The Sun newspaper recently instructed the Irish Taoiseach to “shut his gob”.

This can’t all come down to the British, the Irish will have to give to.

They have nothing to gain from Britain leaving the EU without a deal which would create the very hard border they are desperate to see avoided.

But their problems have been made worse by political instability in Ireland. The country could yet face a general election as a result of a domestic political scandal before Christmas.

That would make it even more difficult for Leo Varadkar to compromise. He will face considerable domestic political pressure to continue to play hardball. From their point of view it is the British who have decided to Brexit, it is for them, not the Irish to come up with a solution.

And no-one has come up with any solution which answers the problems. Someone is going to lose.

I fear that, when the history of this period and the Brexit process is written, it might not be the ins and outs of trade or courts and citizens’ rights over which historians linger long, but the effects on the peace settlement in Ireland.

An outcome no-one wants seems now inescapable.

I hope I’m wrong. The situation may yet be resolved. Either way, I doubt that twenty or thirty years ago we would have treated the situation there with such abandon or showed such lack of interest.

And so the insouciant shrug of the shoulders will no longer do. The Irish issue was the referendum issue which did not bark. It’s barking now. We must answer its call and do it urgently and convincingly.

As John Major said before the referendum, the hard men of the Troubles are still there. They are waiting and rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of a breakdown in the peace process. They are lying in wait.

The British government must make sure they never return. That might come at a cost of Brexit purity or the speed of Brexit or its form but ultimately the Queen’s peace, on the mainland and in Ulster must come first.

W.B. Yeats, that greatest of Irishmen, more alive to the subtleties and nuance of the Anglo-Irish relationship than almost anyone, once wrote that :”Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy…”.

I wonder just how far away we might be from things falling apart. Lest they do we need to reach for our Irish telescope.

Let’s hope our politicians, on both sides, hold it the right way round.

“The past…”, William Faulkner, the gothic writer said, “… is never dead, it’s not even past”.

How right he was. And it was in his native South where that fundamental truth was illuminated for all to see again this week, at times quite literally.

On Sunday we saw the ghostly spectre of hundreds of white supremacists and neo-Nazis march down the streets in Charlottesville, Virginia, a flame in each hand. All, ostensibly, because of the proposed removal of a statue of a man who died when Queen Victoria was in middle age almost 150 years ago.

There are two questions here:

Why has the status of our public monuments come to such a head of late?

And what should we do about controversial statues in public spaces?

The first, I think, is easier to answer.

Over the last few years, across Britain and the United States, issues of culture and identity have come to dominate our politics.

The right and especially the left have moved from being anchored in economic issues, as they had been in the 20th century, to become increasingly preoccupied with social and cultural ones.

It’s interesting that in 2009, when the Democrats controlled both Congress and the presidency, no attempt was made to remove Confederate statues in the Capitol building.

Today, however, the Democratic leadership are demanding such action is taken immediately.

Clearly there has been a cultural shift in a relatively short length of time.

This has been sent into overdrive by the election of President Trump who, I think uniquely in the pantheon of his presidential predecessors, seems determined to be an overt partisan of one of the sides of the culture war.

But this isn’t just confined to America.

Whether it’s Cecil Rhodes, Edward Colston or Oliver Cromwell, there has been a series of concerted attempts to remove certain public memorials and monuments of historical figures.

I think it is probably the endgame of a more fragmented, multicultural society which we have become over recent years. In the past, history was simple.

There was one history in each country which was written by the dominant group, which, throughout virtually all Western history, was white men.

Even if competing histories did exist they were not allowed oxygen, they were given no imprimatur of state approval.

Today, however, no single group holds such ideological hegemony, so questions over symbols and culture are more fiercely contested.

We need to reckon with our own histories and, when there’s no agreed narrative, it’s more important than ever to have some method to find a way forward.

here are several competing priorities here.

On one hand, we don’t want our historical monuments to be rewritten every generation. That would demean our past and leave open the accusation by malign forces that elites are trying to “rewrite history”, as Nigel Farage suggested a few days ago.

We also have to be humble and say that we as a generation are not the end point of human society. We don’t have a greater access to objective virtue any more than previous generations did or future generations will. Society’s mores and versions of history mutate, wax and wane as the years go by. A titan of one generation can look like a monster to the next, and vice versa.

But there has to be enough flexibility in the system to account for societal shifts too.

Is anyone saying it was wrong for the Russians, with the bloodlust of revolution ringing in their ears, to remove statues of Marx, Lenin and Stalin and to unceremoniously dump them outside the Tretyakov gallery in Moscow in 1991 as the Soviet Union crumbled?

Or that the citizens of Baghdad were wrong to pull down and smash the statue of Saddam Hussein as his regime fell in 2003?

Or if a statue of Hitler existed now in a park in Berlin, that it would not be an affront to Jews and members of the human race everywhere?

It cannot be satisfactory to simply say it’s part of history ergo we should leave it where it is without question. History is a living thing. What and who we honour says something about us.

But, whisper it, does Trump have a point? He says “the left” will be coming for George Washington or Thomas Jefferson next.

One thing he might mean is: Which of our heroes can live up to our exacting standards?

Charles Darwin was a great biologist but he was no feminist. Indeed he argued that women’s brains were “analogous to those of animals”. Today he’d be considered to have a brain analogous to a dinosaur and kicked out of the Royal Academy.

And what about Jefferson? He would be considered the worst kind of racist and xenophobe — he wouldn’t have been out of place on that white supremacist and Nazi march just a few days ago. He thought it best that people of colour were transported to Africa and that they were inherently suited to be slaves.

But should we remove a statue of Darwin or Jefferson? This brings us to the second point. It seems to me, no. And that’s as a result of the application of two criteria:

1: Were the views or actions we now find objectionable ubiquitous and near universally shared by their contemporaries?
2: Do they have other major contributions? Are they known for something separate to the issue at hand?

So to take Jefferson as an example again: His views were by no means unusual for his time, indeed they were commonplace. However, there were some people who weren’t slave owners and argued for emancipation. He gets a halfway pass.

But his contributions were truly enormous in other regards. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, he was the country’s third president, a founding father, philosopher king and intellectual behemoth. It would seem peculiar for the United States not to have a statue of him in a public place.

As for Darwin, though a sexist, he cannot be said to be uncommon for his time in that regard and was not principally known as an anti-feminist or anti-suffrage campaigner.

However, his status as father of modern biology must make him worthy of public merit.

General Lee, by contrast would fail both measures. His views on slavery, whilst shared by some, were rejected by many in the North and South, indeed so much so that a war was fought over the issue and it seems to me a push to argue any other achievement of his can overshadow his role in the Confederacy.

These criteria aren’t foolproof. There will be many borderline cases and it is no sure path to objectivity. But it is a start.

And in any case, statues don’t have to be burned or destroyed, they can be taken to museums, displayed as exhibits, or abandoned outside galleries. Perhaps every nation needs its own Tretyakov.

After all, public display implies honour, that a society thinks you are worthy of recognition. That is why it must be so galling for African-Americans to see a man like Lee honoured — a man who, had he had his way, would still have many of them in chains today.

And as for the borderliners, perhaps we need to recognise our contested narratives by having more statues and memorials full stop. Instead of honouring the same old men, many of whom with questionable views in one respect or another, let’s have more statues of exceptional women, of working class heroes and of ethnic minority pioneers.

“The past is a foreign country…”, L.P. Hartley said, “…they do things differently there”. We should respect that.

But we’re in control of the now.

And we shouldn’t be afraid, occasionally and with forethought, to do things our own way, in the present.

History wouldn’t respect us, if we didn’t.

“Vote Leave and Take Control” has to vie for the title of most effective campaign slogan in modern British political history.

The fact that I can’t remember what Remain’s equivalent was goes some way to explaining that side’s failure.

The testament to its success is that even after the campaign concluded, ministers, including the Prime Minister and other remainers, started to play the same tune and deploy the mantra.

But they ought to stop. Because what we know about Brexit so far shows that what ministers think “take back control” means and what the public thinks it means are wildly out of sync.

There can be no better example of this than this week’s fish furore.

The Environment Secretary Michael Gove, while speaking to a group of Danish fishermen, apparently gave them assurances that their trawlers would still be able to fish in British waters after Brexit.

He is apparently proposing a fishing regime which is more or less the same as we have now. The European fishing industry is thrilled.

Cue the first cries of betrayal.

Nigel Farage, who has great empathy with fish in that he’s known to drink like one, wasted no time in tweeting: “These comments from Gove are appalling. Just two weeks ago he was strong on fish.”

But not so fast, said Mr Gove’s advisers, you’re wrong — the Environment Secretary’s position has not changed and has been entirely consistent.

He had always said that the UK simply wanted to take back control of the waters and then would, of course, grant access. As their trump card, one of his advisers sent me this transcript of his boss’ appearance on the Andrew Marr Show from early July.

“We will have control,” he said.

“We can decide the terms of access.

“And then we will also be able, when we leave the European Union, we’ll become an independent coastal state, and that means that we can then extend control of our waters up to 200 miles… and that means that we then decide.

“Now, of course, we can then negotiate with other countries about their access.”

Hmmmmm.

What is that old phrase — “Too clever by half”?

This statement may technically be more or less consistent with what Mr Gove has apparently told the Danes but let’s be honest, Leave voters and fishermen around the coast of Britain won’t care.

They will have interpreted the statement “extend control of our waters” or “take back control” in one way: that the government would take control and therefore stop or at the very least substantially reduce foreign boats from fishing in our territory.

Because as far as the public was concerned the phrase “take back control” was a code, a clear signal that it meant cutting the numbers of migrants, foreign fishing boats, and for reducing European involvement in British life full stop.

For Mr Gove and fellow Leave campaigners to claim that they meant it in a literal sense alone is pure sophistry.

After all, can they really maintain that voters heard the phrase “we’ll take back control” and assumed it meant “take back control and then we’ll continue just as we were before”?

If so then voters must surely ask what was the point?

If you take control of the car and then simply drive it in exactly the same way, don’t change direction and take it to the same place as the other driver, you might well wonder why you even bothered.

Was it just a power trip? Just to say that you were driving the car?

Wanting to have sovereignty just to say we have it and then continuing in the same fashion should surely be the preserve for the logicians and the philosophers, not one for politicians and practical policymakers.

If you want to prove that, then just consider this:

If we are to take Mr Gove and his advisers at their word and accept the explanation that this was all about the technical matter of Britain enjoying the ability to exercise her sovereignty, even if it meant not actually changing policy, then it must stand to reason that the voters should have assumed that Britain might allow even more foreign fishermen to fish in our waters.

Likewise with immigration: taking back control must have meant that immigration could go up from the rest of the EU and around the world so long as we willed it.

Mr Gove’s position is now apparently that he simply wished to take back control in principle and then it was up to a future government to choose the policy and the rest of us were wrong to assume otherwise.

A minority of prominent Leavers may have been sincere in that belief and can say that is all they meant when they said “take back control”.

My contention is that the vast majority of the British public who voted Leave did not understand it that way — and any politician who attempts to explain themselves with such a justification is likely to be greeted with opprobrium from the same voters who backed them last June.

I don’t say this in any way to decry Vote Leave or the idea of taking back control or wanting the idea of de jure sovereignty. Taking back control is a perfectly acceptable and respectable slogan and point of view.

My point is that slogans aren’t just literal.

They carry subtext and are imbued with meaning and that of “Take Back Control” was clear for all to see — whether it be in fishing, immigration or the myriad of subjects to which it was applied.

For ministers and Leavers to claim otherwise and say they didn’t mean to imply to millions of voters that migration would go down or foreign fishing would be reduced or removed when they used that phrase is at best naive and, frankly, at worse, mendacious.

To promise to take back control and then not to change anything and then claim they’ve honoured the spirit of the referendum is dancing on the head of a dangerous semantic pin.

Don’t be surprised if you end up getting cut.

First published: 23rd July 2017

To educate, to inform and entertain is the BBC’s motto.

Well, after this week we’re certainly better educated and informed about the salaries of its top on-screen personalities.

Less entertaining, however, were some of the inequalities the list revealed: of the 96 names on the list of the BBC’s mega earners, just under a third were women. Moreover the highest-paid woman was paid considerably less than the top male earners.

Many absolute stars, like Emily Maitlis and Sarah Montague, failed to make the cut for doing much the same job as their male counterparts. Cue righteous and rightful anger from all sides, even from publications not exactly known as scions of feminism.

Likewise many commentators were justly angry at the small number of ethnic minority presenters on the list — a mere 10.

But in all the sound and the fury, one clarion call was mysteriously nowhere to be heard: a key piece of the puzzle which, in all of the lamentations over diversity, was time and again too poor to mention: class.

Which is curious, because if we actually talked or even cared about this peculiar taboo, we might begin to see one of the reasons the gender and race pay gaps exist in the first place.

I’ve been doing some research and number crunching. The list contains over 80 on-screen names. No fewer than 45% of the BBC’s best paid stars went to private schools. That compares to 7% of the nation overall.

Just think about that. If you send your child to private school it increases their chances of being one of the biggest names in TV and media by a factor of six.

The gender pay gap may be too large but it’s not nearly as big as the class pay gap for the people who never made it in the first place because of their background.

The injustice is pretty overwhelming: after all, are we really saying that those who are lucky enough to be born into households which can afford to pay for private school fees are six times more talented? Six times better imbued with the skills required to be a successful BBC actor, sports presenter or journalist?

And it’s in journalism where the problem is most egregious. Three in five of the best-paid BBC on-air journalists and presenters went to independent schools. That means you’re nine times more likely to be a top BBC journalist if you went to private school.

If you’re a working class girl, the odds are longer still. From Jeremy Vine to Mishal Husain from Sophie Raworth to Nick Robinson, the list is eye-wateringly long. Much attention was paid to the pay disparity on the Today programme, less to the fact that four of its five presenters went to private schools.

Tellingly, even among many of those who did go to state schools, the vast majority went to grammars. It’s possible to count the number of “bog standard comprehensive” working class boys and girls on one hand.

In the 1810s it was said that the Battle of Waterloo was fought and won on the playing fields of Eton so dominant was the school in the top brass of the Army. In 2017, its equivalent is the six o’clock news.

Allow me to declare an interest: I am a comprehensive school boy.

I don’t belittle for one moment my outstanding colleagues in TV or journalism who went to private school — they are all very talented people.

Likewise, I’m a former proud practitioner at the BBC and would defend it to the end of the Earth.

And it’s quite unfair to single out the BBC in this regard anyway, I’m sure the pattern of private school dominance is repeated across our industry: at Sky, ITV and across Fleet Street.

But I desperately want to see more state schoolers from working class backgrounds get into TV and media and I want to see us all try and do more about it. We might start on days like last Wednesday by actually talking about the problem at all.

Because class matters in journalism even more than across the other areas covered on that list. We journalists are the ones who day after day, are supposed to reflect Britain unto itself.

We’re supposed to be the ones who find and tell the stories that matter to our audiences, and for the BBC, all of its licence fee payers. How are we supposed to do that if we are drawn from an increasingly narrow social caste?

Maybe, just maybe, if we had more kids in journalism who grew up in tower blocks, we’d have been better at shining a light on the living conditions of some of our fellow citizens, like those who lived and died in Grenfell Tower.

Or we would be less disposed to the curse of group think which has led journalists to call it wrong time after time in recent years, whether it be Corbyn, Trump or Brexit.

And that’s why it matters who is making editorial judgements off screen too.

The BBC also published the number of its senior managers who earn more than £150,000 too, to considerably less fanfare. It is again dominated by those sporting the (literally) golden ticket of a private school education: James Purnell the director of radio; James Harding, the director of news; the editors of the flagships Newsnight and Today, Ian Katz and Sarah Sands.

Maybe the fact that the top echelons of the media are dominated by private schoolers explains some of the gender and BAME pay gaps. If you go to private school you’re more likely to hire other people like you, other private schoolers, who are less likely to be from an ethnic minority background.

Open the talent pool up to more talented, ambitious state school educated girls and they might look a lot more kindly on the pay of their female on-screen colleagues vis-a-vis their male counterparts.

It’s no secret that it’s hard to get into journalism and the media. Unpaid internships and an expensive postgraduate degree from City university (£9,000 a year) are almost as obligatory as passports at the border these days. Not to mention the fact that virtually all opportunities are concentrated in London.

None of this is the fault of any of the people on that list nor any one person in management of any organisation. But I do think, frankly, that many senior BBC managers and others from across the media’s boss class generally care about class diversity much less because it’s less tangible than sex or race.

Easier to point to new women or BAME hires, less easy and less headline grabbing to talk about class, which is, after all a more fluid concept yet connected intrinsically to both.

But just because it’s harder and less ‘zeitgeisty’ doesn’t mean it’s not important and we should start to recognise that diversity in our society is more than just about your sex or gender. It’s a complicated, tightly woven tapestry and your background and class, for which your educational background is a pretty decent indicator, is crucial.

Is a poor working class man from Scunthorpe less diverse than a wealthy ethnic minority woman from Hampstead who went to one of the country’s top private schools?

I think they both have something to say and we need as many different voices as we can in the makeup of our media. As welcome as it would be, the injustice of inequality won’t be righted simply by having equal numbers of men and women on screen even if they’re on the same pay.

The work will only have just begun. Diversity is about more than what you can see.