Alexander Glover

Each of us, I suspect, has at least one pretty niche belief. A view so odd that its best chance of ever being revealed may be through the discreet inquiry of a pollster. A YouGov survey has discovered just such an unusual attitude among our population. A poll of 2,300 British adults found that a mere 6 per cent would volunteer to fight for their country in the event of an ‘imminent’ invasion. An astonishing figure, even in an unpatriotic age. (A further 14 per cent said they would fight if called up, 17 per cent would refuse any order to do so, and 52 per cent declared themselves ineligible on physical grounds.) How can we put that very modest number into context? Let me throw out a few examples.

If there were ever an event to describe our present moment, it would surely be the theft of Morgan McSweeney’s iPhone. The government device was snatched from his hand no more than a mile from the Houses of Parliament last October, though the incident has only recently come to light.  Putting aside, for a moment, any controversy over the probable (and from McSweeney’s perspective potentially rather fortunate) loss of important messages to and from his disgraced mentor Peter Mandelson, the episode presents some symptoms typical of modern life. On McSweeney's part there is the seeming resignation to having one's phone ripped from your grasp, now an accepted inconvenience like bad traffic on a bank holiday.