Psychology

When Labour blocked Andy Burnham from standing as its candidate last time around, Douglas Alexander, the Scottish Secretary, rejoiced at avoiding "three months of psychodrama – who’s up, who’s down, who’s getting on with who…" But as Gareth Roberts remarked in The Spectator’s Coffee House, "I’m not quite sure what the difference is between psychodrama and good old-fashioned plain original-flavor drama." Indeed, Mr. Alexander’s characterization of psychodrama sounds like the essential lineaments of pure politics: "Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out," as King Lear puts it. King Lear itself might be a classic psychodrama, if madness is the defining feature.

I once stood in a queue behind a Scotsman checking out of a hotel in Germany. After he had finished scrutinising his bill in agonising detail, he demanded that it be reprinted, this time removing the €1 discretionary charge which had been added in support of the local homeless. More recently some friends of my daughter’s met a Yorkshire-born Spectator writer at a local fête. They mentioned the connection, expecting some mild pleasantries. Not so. ‘’Appen that reminds me: he still owes me for a taxi.’ When I heard this, I was bemused. Then I remembered I had indeed shared a taxi with the Yorkshireman in question, requesting a minor diversion to drop me off at Cannon Street. This, granted, would have added two quid to the overall fare. Point taken.

I’m committed this winter to too many expensive building projects at once. As the balloon of my bank balance drifts ever lower towards the waves, and the crests of red ink lick the wicker of my basket, I’ve realised something has to be thrown out. Thus it was that last week I found myself in London’s Hatton Garden. Tucked into my little knapsack was my passport and a couple of one-ounce mini bars of gold I had bought after the last banking crisis, and stored in an old kettle. It was late afternoon, and dark.

A young Chinese girl, at school in an English-speaking country, approached me after I gave a talk at a conference and asked for my advice about what she should study. I knew nothing of her, except that she was pretty, with beautiful dark eyes, and was almost certainly of high intelligence. I was touched by her naive assumption that I would answer benevolently and in her best interests. It suggested that she had not yet encountered much of human malignity. ‘What are you interested in?’ I asked. ‘I was thinking of history and psychology.’ ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘definitely not psychology, at all costs not psychology.’ My answer emerged spontaneously, without any reflection – too spontaneously, in fact.

One of Dominic Cummings’s many insights in the run-up to the Brexit referendum was that ‘most people were both more right-wing and more left-wing than politicians ever realise’. Political obsessives naturally frame all questions – indeed shape their own identities – along a left-right spectrum, and so assume everyone else sees the world in similarly clear-cut terms. They really don’t. Indeed one of the most dangerous habits of journalists is their readiness to brand as ‘far-right’ opinions which are held by fairly large swaths of the population, many of whom might be otherwise left-wing in other contexts. What is risky about this is that it may achieve nothing other than promoting greater self-identification around the very causes it is attempting to disparage.

A few years ago, my old school magazine featured a pupil’s brief account of a geography field trip. Before the magazine was mailed out, someone had noticed a jokey reference to a minibus being driven erratically after the teacher had visited the local pub, and worried that this might be libellous. The school could have reprinted the magazine, or else thought ‘publish and be damned’. Alas they did neither: they stuck a white sticker over the offending paragraph in every copy. This led to the piece receiving perhaps 1,000 times more attention than it would otherwise have done, the attempt at censorship spotlighting a harmless joke that most people wouldn’t have noticed anyway.

At the beginning of the spring term of my second year at university, a French boy called Xavier looked up from where he was sitting, on the floor of my friend’s flat, and announced that his new year’s resolution was to give up fantasising. Xav was deep in unrequited love with my friend so we assumed at first that he was simply through with pining, but that was not quite what he meant. He wasn’t taking a break from romantic fantasies, Xav said, so much as all the pointless wallowing in imaginary scenarios in which he came out top. Wishful thinking, you might call it. He was spending too much time doing it and he would from now on resist the temptation.