Hugo Rifkind

It’s a remarkable stroke of luck for a columnist, but I have no views whatsoever on the euro. It’s not deliberate, this, just a function of my age. Most columnists seem to have started forming their euro views some time prior to 1992, and I simply wasn’t that sort of 14-year-old. ‘Do you worry about the effect that high German interest rates might have on Britain’s continuing participation in the ERM?’ is exactly the sort of thing we didn’t say to each other, while shaving odd bits out of our grunge-era hair and debating the merits of inhaling deodorant through a towel.

I suppose we might all be quite wrong about what it’s like to be Pippa Middleton. I suppose that’s perfectly possible. When Hugh Laurie wrote his novel The Gun Seller, I remember being told he submitted it under a pseudonym, so terrified was he that a grasping publisher might be willing to publish any old crap provided it had the name of Stephen Fry’s mate on it. With Pippa, for all we know, the situation might be similar. ‘Great news!’ one soulless publishing automaton may have said to another.

For months now, the whole idea of the Leveson inquiry into press standards has been dimly reminding me of something. Only recently did I figure out what it was. You know when anthropologists descend upon some almost-doomed Patagonian tribe, desperate to document their language, costumes and strategies for spear-throwing, nose-boning and rat spit-roasting before the last one succumbs to alcoholism and keels over and dies? It’s a bit like that. It’s the Domesday Book for the British press. This isn’t to say that there won’t be a British press 30 years from now. There had better be, or else some of us are going to be in trouble. But surely, by then, it isn’t going to look much like it does now. And I don’t just mean in delivery.

What I’m lacking, really, is any sense of the parameters. As I understand it, a best-case scenario involves the Greeks doing what they’re told. Everybody else tightens their belts a bit and there’s a bout of quite dispiriting inflation, followed by the ejection of a couple of countries from the euro, the slow retrenchment of almost every European public sector, the fundamental restructuring of industry here and in America, and a slow, slogging march back to stability and prosperity so that, in a decade or two, we can do it all again. Yes? Is that about right? So what’s the opposite? What’s the worst-case scenario? What happens when it all goes wrong? I haven’t a clue. Nobody is saying. Is it like the above, but just slightly worse?

How long do you suppose it takes Chris Huhne to shop for the most competitive energy bill for all seven of his houses? Ages, I reckon. If he had been driving during that infamous speeding incident on the M11 — and everyone knows, of course, that he wasn’t — then this would surely have been why. Racing home, for another thrilling evening of comparing the damn meerkat. The spectre of rising energy prices is one of those bleak and terrible things that you know will have horrible consequences, but with which you cannot quite grapple until the bill comes. The spectre of the Energy Secretary and Prime Minister trilling on about it is an annoyance of a more visceral sort.

The reason why everybody gets so shrill over abortion, I’ve often thought, is that nobody is quite prepared to admit what they are talking about. By which I don’t mean ‘the slaughter of babies’. I mean the pros and cons of a system of morality that is coldly utilitarian, and nothing else. Oh God, you’re probably thinking. Not abortion. We’ve already read a cover article about that. Can’t you write about something else, with some laughs in it? British agents pretending not to realise when they hand people over to tyrants for torture, for example?

I keep an iron bar under my bedside table. I was telling a colleague about it the other week, while mobs were rampaging across London. ‘ I keep an iron bar under my bedside table. I was telling a colleague about it the other week, while mobs were rampaging across London. ‘Where did you get an iron bar?’ she wanted to know, and I told her I’d salvaged it from a towel rail. I think it was that little act of ingenuity which impressed her the most. It’s terrible, really, the hopelessness of the urban middle classes. It’s wonder we still know how to feed. She’d taken to sleeping with a screwdriver. What was she going to do with a screwdriver, I wondered. ‘What are you going to do with an iron bar?’ she retorted. Swing it, I said.

I’m not expecting sympathy. Really, I’m not. But there was a time, and really not so long ago, when you knew where you were with news. Day one, thing happens. Day two, thing gets in the papers. Then, on day three, the parasites like me weigh in. That’s how it worked back in the distant time of, say, February. Since then, though, that tried and tested old model seems to have gone out the window. And it’s not simply that old media can’t cope, because new media copes even worse. BBC news hacks used to joke that their rivals at Sky ought to have the motto ‘never wrong for long’, but even that is an aspiration too far for the sprawling chaos of internet punditry. On Twitter, for example, you can be wrong for ever.

The same conversation, over and over again. ‘Well, you can’t write about it, can you?’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Duh! Rupert Murdoch? He wouldn’t let you.’ ‘You’re quite right, actually. He called this morning. “There are questions being asked in parliament,” he said. “The BSkyB deal might fall through and Andy Coulson got arrested the other day. But the one thing we’re all worried about, mate, is you writing a whimsical column about it in The Spectator.”’ ‘You’re joking!’ ‘Yes. I am joking.’ ‘Well I don’t find it very funny. A murdered girl’s voicemail? Service families? 9/11 victims? You ought to be ashamed.’ ‘Why? I didn’t do it.