Gareth Roberts

Radio 4 is in trouble. Listening figures for the station have dipped to their lowest level since 2007. The Today programme, Radio 4's flagship morning show, is doing particularly badly: its audience fell 12 per cent year on year, from 6.5 million to 5.7 million, according to Rajar. For anyone who has tuned in to Radio 4 recently, this decline won't come as a surprise. ‘I’ll just stick Radio 4 on’ was the default habit of my life when bored, from about the age of ten in 1978 to fifty in 2018. It felt like the still, reliable centre of the nation. It was also handy as a blood pressure reducing device. But, in the last few years, something changed.

Talk of a new Labour-Lib Dem coalition is in the air. This is piquantly nostalgic to those of us whose earliest political memories were forged in the fire of the red-hot excitement of David Steel and Jim Callaghan’s short-lived Lib-Lab pact of 1977-78. My initial reaction, along with many others I’m sure, was a guttural ‘oh God no’. But a moment later a different aspect of it occurred to me, in a fine example of what the young people call ‘cope’. My banter senses started to tingle. Because, yes, it would drag out and exacerbate the country’s current despairing decline. But it would also be hilarious. PR might very well remake British politics, but not in the way that the progressives intend There is something inherently funny about coalitions.

Two things are buzzing about in the air at the moment: decline and artificial intelligence. Douglas Murray and Louise Perry have written recently in these pages about social desuetude: Murray on the five million or so Britons who seem to have opted out altogether of economic activity; Perry on the worrying lack of new humans being born. Could AI get us out of these holes?  It’s tempting to scoff at new tech and the alternating warnings and promises about what’s coming down the line. Many of us in the demographic bulge of older citizens will recall the heated clamour of the early 80s. We remember how the auguries about the microchip revolution turned sour when we found that toilets still had to be cleaned and bins still had to be emptied.

Who are Labour? Focus groups regularly report a lack of familiarity on the part of voters with His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, even with their leader. ‘Don’t know’ looms quite loudly on Keir Starmer’s focus word cloud, though dwarfed by ‘Boring’. Despite this – maybe because of it – Labour are still a good stretch ahead in the polls. A recent slight crumbliness in that lead has sparked Labour to produce attack ads which use a formulation I hadn’t seen since reading the walls at my primary school, i.e. – ‘Do you think people should wash under their arms? Janet Figgis doesn't’ – but even these flavourful communications are all about Rishi Sunak and the Tories.  Labour might be running the country pretty soon.

The Gary Lineker debacle has exposed the breathtaking historical and political ignorance of the supposedly educated. Lineker's suspension – and subsequent return – has also demonstrated (as if we didn't know it) the power of the managerial class establishment. But the transmission of Match of the Day last Saturday sans Gary and his co-mutineers revealed something else. The truth about much modern television is that the percentage of actual content is dwarfed by the amount of waffle. As the row rumbled on, the BBC was contractually obliged to run the day’s football highlights package. Without the banter, chat and flimflam Lineker is paid £1.3 million a year for, this clocked in at a mere 20 minutes.

When Covid first hit the headlines in early 2020, I remember asking myself a question: who’s the health secretary again? And then I remembered: Oh God. Matt Hancock is, you may have noticed, back in the news. The disgraced ex-health secretary doesn’t ever seem to be out of it for very long. But even prior to the pandemic – before we came to know and love Hancock, in those innocent days before his weeping, before his red-hot doorway loving, before his gulping of blended sheep vagina – he did not inspire confidence. Hancock had that Alan Partridge joke of a branded app for a start. Then there was his unprepossessing demeanour; he looked cocky and guilty at the same time.

The recent self-defenestration of Nicola Sturgeon led to a rash of columns listing her dazzling lack of actual achievements, many of which added the caveat that she was the consummate, in fact the most successful, politician of her generation. These statements seemed somewhat contradictory at first glance. But then the reader remembered – oh, yeah, right – the other politicians of her generation.  Looking back over the last 13 years of Tory governance, it’s hard to find anything to stick laurels on. Brexit was an achievement, yes, but that was foisted on the Tories by an uncooperative public, and the Tories tried their damndest to wriggle out of it even then (and they still might).

I have a problem with magic. Even as a small child with a big imagination, I found magic very hard to swallow. If a character in a story teleported using a technological aid, that was fine. If a character vanished in a magical puff of smoke after an incantation, I was having none of it.  I became aware of the Harry Potter book series quite early for a childless adult. A friend worked in a central London bookshop and was tiring of parents descending in their lunch hours enquiring ‘do you have any of these books by Harry Potter?’ Intrigued, I read the first two – the only two at the time – to see what all the growing fuss was about.

Liz Truss’s recent written confession is remarkable for its childlike air. It reminded me of my buck-passing wheedling whenever I was caught doing something naughty aged about eleven; ‘No, I didn’t know what I was doing – but neither did the Treasury, yeah what about the Treasury, eh, mum?’ I can remember when the British disease, being the ‘sick man of Europe’, etc, was a national obsession but mostly of the right and the reactionary. Think of the low-status laughs to be had from Basil Fawlty bemoaning ‘more strikes!’ or Alan Partridge tutting and muttering ‘This country …’ But in the 2020s doominess seems to be the default for everyone, all sides of the political spectrum.

An urgent ecumenical update: the conclave has taken place. The great community leader has descended from the summit of Sinai, bearing, not tablets of law, but sorrowful tidings. Yes: the Archbishop of Canterbury has ‘grabbed a coffee’ with Sandi Toksvig, following her twee plea for an audience a few months ago on the subject of the Church of England’s attitude to gay sex.  The good news is that the ‘long-promised coffee’ was 'calm and considered,’ according to Toksvig. The bad news is that Sandi is sad: Justin Welby had to report, unsurprisingly to anyone paying the slightest attention, that any change in the Anglican Communion’s stance on same-sex relations is likely to be – in Sandi’s words – ‘glacial’.