Prison works - or rather it works better than the alternatives, argues Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple explains why he is not a Marxist - and why Kenneth Clarke is wrong about prisons.

Mr Clarke was quite right to say that short prison sentences are not effective but, with the practised lack of logic of a man who has spent far too long in politics for the good of his own mind, he has drawn precisely the wrong conclusions from it. His error will cause much unnecessary suffering.

There are indeed many arguments against short sentences. The recidivism rate after such sentences are completed is very high. They pose large administrative costs on the prison system. They do not reassure victims that the suffering or loss inflicted upon them by criminals has been taken seriously by the state. They discourage and demoralise the police, who labour mightily, if mainly bureaucratically, to procure a conviction for very little result. They promote intimidation of witnesses.

Remember, I'll been walking the same streets as you in six weeks' time

has deterred many a crucial witness (criminals having absolutely no doubt about the value or effectiveness of deterrence).

In the sub-culture from which many criminals live, they are a badge of honour rather than a mark of shame. And if rehabilitation were one of the aims of prison - personally, I think it is a very minor one - short sentences would do nothing to contribute to that aim.

But it is quite wrong to suppose that if something is not very effective it has no effect at all. Short prison sentences are ineffective by comparison with long ones, but that is not to say that they are ineffective by comparison with no prison sentences at all.

It is a fact that a large proportion of crimes are committed by a relatively small number of people. It is not unusual for career criminals to commit a hundred or more offences a year. Therefore, keeping them in prison for six weeks, say, prevents the commission of 12 crimes. Of course, if they were kept in prison for four years, 400 crimes would be prevented. But it is better to prevent 12 crimes than no crimes at all.

The only possible argument against the logical response to a high recidivism rate after short sentences being a lengthening of sentences is that something more effective than imprisonment exists: but it doesn't. Community sentences (except if used very selectively indeed) are quite useless.

Let us examine the ways in which our grossly dishonest official class, of which Mr Clarke is perhaps a victim, has sought to persuade us otherwise. Success is often measured by the percentage of "completion" of a community order, for example of probation. But from the law-abiding public's point of view this is irrelevant.

What is important is how many crimes people on a community order commit while they are on it or soon afterwards. And the fact is that the recidivism rate, as measured by the re-conviction rate, is very nearly as high as that of imprisonment after short sentences, despite the fact that the latter are probably slightly worse to begin with, which is why they were sent to prison. (Almost all prisoners are graduates of community sentences.)

It is easy to show that huge numbers of crimes are committed by people already on bail or serving community sentences: so many, in fact, that they represent a considerable proportion of all recorded crimes. There are about 150,000 people on probation at any one time. At least 50,000 of them a year, and probably more, are re-convicted. Furthermore, the reconviction rate used in measuring outcome does not measure re-re-convictions, that is to say those who are convicted more than once, of whom there are many.

Now the conviction rate for all recorded crime in Britain is a shade over one in twenty. If the criminals on bail or serving community sentences are typical of criminals as a whole (there might be some criminals who never get caught and some who always get caught, but assuming a normal distribution, most will fall somewhere between these two extremes), then at least 1,000,000 and probably more than 2,000,000 crimes are committed annually by people on bail or serving community sentences. Thus at least 20-40 per cent of recorded crime is committed by people serving the kind of community sentences that Mr Clarke wishes to extend.

If we add in the numbers of crimes committed by people who have just served short prison sentences were added to this, we can see that it is highly likely that, if long prison sentences were imposed upon criminals as a matter of course (bearing in mind the need to take account of exceptions, extenuating circumstances and so forth), it is likely that the recorded crime rate would decline by more than fifty per cent, irrespective of any deterrent effect such a policy would exert. In reality, the effect would be even greater.

Why does something so obvious escape our political and official class? The late Lord Bauer wrote:

When nonsense shows systematic bias, it probably reflects the pursuit of unacknowledged objectives which often have political or emotional bases.

It is so in this case.

Those who argue against imprisoning criminals think they are being kind to those poorer than they because most criminals are poorer than they. What they forget is that most of the victims are also poorer than they, and furthermore that the class of victim is much larger than the class of perpetrator (if it were not, poverty would be in itself a marker of criminality, which it is not).

So those who argue for the non-incapacitation of criminals are arguing for victimisation of the poor, whether they intend so to argue or not. Of course, it might be possible to argue that what Mr Clarke is trying to do is to ensure that the costs of crime remain where they arise, ie among the poor, and not transfer them to the middle classes.

An unfortunate effect of this is that it de-legitimises the state, one of whose indisputable tasks is to keep the peace. A state that wilfully fails to do so for a large section of its population can hardly be regarded as legitimate: a reason, perhaps, why so many people do not vote.

If I were a Marxist, I might add as another possible explanation the need of lawyers for clients and criminologists for subject matter. The class of lawyers and academic criminologists has increased greatly in the last few decades, and crime is one way of ensuring them employment (under- or unemployed lawyers and academics are very dangerous). The last thing, therefore, that lawyers and criminologists as a class would want is a decrease in crime.

But I am not a Marxist.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor.

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Christie Davies considers Horace Walpole and his cat: <em>Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill</em> at the V&A

Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
6 March - 4 July 2010
Daily 10am - 5.30pm (Fridays until 9.30pm)

The artistic collection once owned by Horace Walpole (1717-97), displayed at his famous house Strawberry Hill and now reassembled at the V and A is as exquisite as Strawberry Hill itself, which will be opened to the public in Twickenham later this year. The long, expert and painstaking restoration is nearly completed. The exhibition is both a treat and a promise of treats to come.

Walpole lived an age of architecture that imitated the horrors of the Greek temples of Agrigentum in Sicily with their rows of columns marching round them like hapless hoplites suddenly frozen into stone; Pirandello knew better and lived next door in Chaos. Walpole rejected this rigid Euclidean, compass and ruler only, approach to shape and pioneered the flowing Gothick, a light playful almost frivolous style.

It is quite unlike the heavy-serious, moral gothic of the nineteenth century's sententiously sermonizing Protestant churches and the pugnacious Puginism of their Roman Catholic contemporaries. Walpole (Eton and King's) original love of gothic was inspired by the hours he spent in King's College Chapel in Cambridge looking up at the glorious fan-vaulted ceiling as an escape from the droning prayers and the pip-squeaking of the choirboys. King's has always been a haunt, indeed a producer, of aesthetes and eccentrics. Walpole's successors at King's have included Oscar Browning, William Johnson Cory and John Maynard Keynes who, being too ungainly to become a ballet dancer, married one. I have often wondered what it is that Kingsmen have in common.

Strawberry Hill was a model of dancing eclecticism which merged all manner of real and imagined parts. Strawberry Hill was play. It was a place of affected shadowy "gloomth" yet separated only by its windows from the brightness of nature of bosky, rural Twickenham before it was spoiled by rugby hooligans and Vince Cable the grim political economist. The interior of the house was an intricate play of the shadowy and the well lit. Walpole spoke of its romantic shadows as "Gloomth" as opposed to the glumth of the contemporary great houses, which were all pillars and triangles and no fun.

Walpole filled his house with "fantastic" items to which he could, sometime fancifully, attach particular historical characters. A black obsidian Aztec mirror he attributed to the Elizabethan magician Dr John Dee and claimed that Dee used it to communicate with the spirits. Dee's name means black so it may be a pun; black mirror, black name, the black arts.

Many have condemned Strawberry Hill as a sham, as unserious and frivolous, as mere game playing. But what is wrong with that? There is nothing aesthetically deficient in rococo d?cor or in the paintings of f?tes gallants by Boucher, Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Watteau. The very varied aesthetic pleasures to be derived from Walpole's diverse collections are far superior in honesty of feeling and meaning to the monotonous cerebral deceptions of American abstract expressionism; the latter have as much glowing, tactile qualities as algebra but lack its capacity to enlighten. In the post-modern era which has succeeded that bleak and fraudulent modernity, we can once more celebrate the eclectic blending of styles favoured by this scholarly connoisseur.

Unfortunately Walpole's only real successor in Britain has been William Burges, architect of Castell Coch, Cardiff Castle and the Tower House, Kensington. Together with Strawberry Hill they constitute four tiny islands of joie de vivre.

Every style that preceded the classical was there in Strawberry Hill and is represented in the exhibition. In one exhibition room are stained glass windows and a finely gilded suit of armour. It includes a shaffron, the armour for the head of a horse with high raised protective ear pieces for equine ears pricked-up by excitement and a projecting sharp spike fitted between the gaps that enabled the horse to see. What terror that massive spike-nosed horse must have inspired in Swiss pike men, Welsh longbow men and Taborites alike before it ended up in the Boucherie Chevaline and the tables of the hippophagous. From here the viewer moves to the Holbein chamber where Walpole slept alongside Holbein drawings and a variety of paintings and portrayals of that period; next to Walpole's bed hung his great prize, the broad red Cardinal's hat of the great Wolsey himself.

The library was Walpole's gothick gem with matching bookcases and furniture rising to ogee arches. It was a working library in which he composed the antiquarian works for which he was famous. Walpole also wrote the gothic novel Otranto and the extensive and waspish memoirs published after his death that tell us so much about the eighteenth century.

In Walpole's state apartments hang portraits of his family by leading contemporary artists including Allan Ramsay and Sir Joshua Reynolds alongside earlier works by Lely and van Dyke. Walpole's father, Sir Robert Walpole is portrayed standing next to a table on which sit the great purse of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and busts of George I and II, the two kings whom he served. Also in the picture is Walpole's mother who claimed descent from Cadwaladr ap Meirchion, King of Cambria, one of the sons of Cunedda those men of the North, who in the 5th century AD drove the savage and pagan Irish invaders right out of our island. Some say they have returned but I cannot possibly comment.

What concerns us here is Walpole's wish firmly to embed not only his house but his family in the long history of our nation. Walpole was not lacking in humour, for he also collected satirical prints and was a patron of Hogarth. On display is Gillray's The Introduction with that characteristic mockery of an over-eager, eyes-popping out George III.

Nowhere is Walpole's exquisite and fastidious taste better displayed than in the cases of miniatures painted in watercolour on ivory or vellum and of enamels. He owned 1200 pieces of china including three hundred oriental items collected by his artistic mother.

Walpole's only lapses stem from his perverse desire to collect art produced by women, for he had deluded himself into thinking that there was such a thing as "female genius", a purely expressive outburst of feeling unhindered by thought. We can see some of these errors in the exhibition in the paintings of Lady Diana Beauclerk and in the representations of animals by the cross-dressing sculptress Anne Damer to whom Walpole left Strawberry Hill in his will to be her studio. The caricaturists of the day had great sport with Ms Damer. Their work is not merely bad but bad enough to inspire numerous PhDs in wimmen's studies in some dreadful spinsters' college in New England.

It is interesting to speculate what manner of a man the elegant and fastidious Horace Walpole was. He adored and lived with his mother and was a confirmed bachelor whose only relations with women were with those whom he could not possibly marry, such as elderly dowagers and women who had been exiled from polite society because of their past scandalous conduct. Sometimes they showered him with welcome works of art and sometimes with unwelcome attentions and affections from which he retreated in good order.

Walpole compensated for his lack of family life through his love for his cat and his many close male friendships. Indeed the exhibition begins with the very tub for goldfish in which Walpole's cat Selima drowned. It is a Chinese wonder of floating blue pines, blossoms and clouds. Perhaps the cat thought it too could float, for it crouched on the rim, eyeing the goldfish, and fell in. The grief stricken Walpole asked his dear chum from Eton, Thomas Gray to write a suitably catty elegy for the tragic moggy but Gray rather stretched it out:

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat (1748)
Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purr'd applause.
Still had she gazed; but 'midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The genii of the stream:
Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue
Thro' richest purple to the view
Betray'd a golden gleam.
The hapless nymph with wonder saw:
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretch'd in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What Cat's averse to fish?
Presumptuous Maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch'd, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled.
The slipp'ry verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in?..

But all that can be viewed in the exhibition is the homicidal Chinese vase that shanghaied the cat on which Walpole had engraved a line of Gray's ode. Why could the cat not have been cremated and its ashes kept for eternity in this oriental ornamental urn?

Today there are no Horace Walpoles left. He was a limp and elegant product of his time. It is impossible even to imagine a twenty-first century version of this unique collector and connoisseur. That makes it all the more important to remember what he was and what he created and the V and A has done just that.

Professor Christie Davies teaches at Krosno College, Poland.

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Bemoaning England (Again!) - Lincoln Allison argues that England will only start winning at football if we start fielding middle class players

Lincoln Allison, Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor of Sport and Leisure at the University of Brighton, argues that England keeps losing at football because the team is exclusively made up of uneducated, working class oiks - and uneducated, working class oiks cannot win the modern game.

For many years my paradigm example of the follies and fantasies of trying to explain human behaviour has been a football match played on 17 October 1973. England 1 Poland 1 and England ? champions in 1966, favourites in 1970 ? out of the 1974 World Cup. A simple account of the game might have it that England were jolly unlucky because they attacked for most of the game, made a lot of chances, hit the post and the bar and found the Polish goalkeeper, Jan Tomaszewski, in the form of his life. Another dimension of bad luck was that this turned out to be the finest team in the history of Polish football; it went on to beat Brazil and to finish third in the competition.

But the simple account apparently satisfied nobody. So far as all pundits and commentators were concerned England's defeat had to symbolise a broader phenomenon of national decline. It was an example of the general stifling of talent and initiative. Or its roots were in the demise of community and therefore the congested street football which had created the skilled players of the past. It was a consequence of the mass passive culture created by television. Or it was the fault of years of inadequate educational policy. And so on.

Meanwhile, of course, if Mr Tomaszewski had had the decency to make one simple error the need for competing explanations would have been obviated and the inquests would have been replaced by enthusiastic prognostications of our chances in the forthcoming tournament. The fundamental thing to understand about explanations of human behaviour is that they are only required when our expectations are confounded. And it is equally crucial to understand that what we are normally offered are not explanations at all in any logical sense, but opportunistic expressions of ideology and vested interest.

So now, here we go again. England's "golden generation" of footballers crash out of the 2010 World Cup to Germany in the round of sixteen ( a whole round earlier than usual) and they are corrupted by money, the victims of globalisation, symptoms of social collapse or a culture which (still) discourages flair and initiative. Etc! Whatever! My greatest contempt is reserved for Boris Johnson and Dave Whelan.

The Mayor of London, who I think is a likeable fellow and with whom I often agree, trotted out the old nonsense in the Daily Telegraph about the lack of competitive sport in schools because of leftist ideology. I can assure him (and I'm quoting my own research, not anybody else's) that the impact of this was fairly minimal compared with that of the Thatcher government's stipulation of hours of work for teachers and its encouragement of the sale of playing fields.

Also, it is important to note that the sport which has suffered a near-terminal decline in state schools is cricket, yet England have arguably the most successful cricket squad in the world which currently holds, inter alia, the world 20 over championship and the Ashes. The simple fact is that most state schools do play football, but they don't play cricket. So if success in elite international sport had much to do with what went on in state schools it really ought to be the other way round.

But Dave Whelan, interviewed on Radio 5, reached an even higher level of illogicality. The problem was the Football Association, he said, and it would all be much better if the Premier League ran the England team. The first part sounds plausible, the second is ludicrous.

The FA may not actually be up to much, but surely football must be run by some organisation which looks like the FA and which acknowledges that there are 45,000 football clubs in the country, not twenty. It must not under any circumstances be run by a set of institutions whose purpose is the aggrandisement of their owners, most of whom come from abroad, which are not much interested in many cases even in the employment of English players.

Whelan himself is a purveyor of tat, the founder of JJB Sports and the owner of Wigan Athletic. One could argue that his comments are part of a considerable history of class war within the middle classes: yet again the "down to earth" businessman, who knows how the "real world" works, condemning the gentlemanly, amateurish, out-of-touch, haven't-got-a-clue chaps in blazers. They thus have a certain historical curiosity, but neither the logic of the argument nor the historical record of tat-sellers in important positions can be taken seriously.

The England team weren't very good. As an old geezer who has been watching professional football since 1953 I can assure more recent arrivals that only two or three of the current squad would have got into Alf Ramsey's winning team (which wasn't outstandingly talented) and that many of the 1966 reserves - such as Ron Springett, Brian Labone, Jimmy Greaves and John Connelly - would have walked into the current team. The USA had at least four goalkeepers whom England would have picked if they were eligible.

Of course, you don't have to have the best players to win. It can be done with tactics, application and team spirit and my favourite football fact is that when Greece won the European football championship in 2004 one of those who picked up a winners' medal was a Burnley reserve, Dimi Papadopoulos. But if you're not massively talented and not particularly well organised then you can't really expect very much. One might even argue that England did quite well under the circumstances since they outlasted the greater talents of France and Italy who were, admittedly, to differing degrees fractious and decrepit.

So what does need some explanation is the mass delusion that England were serious prospects. The fact is that English football is the object of slavish, massive hype. When I say English football here I mean the Premier League and the England team and though they are logically separate they are conflated. Journalists and pundits in sport are - unlike those in any other field - uncritical purveyors of the faith until they are let down when they squeal with pain and anguish. If you wanted a single example of this the best would be the BBC pundits covering the England-Slovenia game. The reality was that we were watching a poor and timid team struggling to a 1-0 win over an even poorer and more timid team, but suddenly it was time for protestations that the corner had been turned, brilliance was on show, the real England had finally turned up and so on. Emperor's clothes or what?

If the answer is that they were not very good it is as well to specify what they were not very good at: tactics, strategy, the ability to understand the opposition, the capacity to adapt to new situations and environments and unfamiliar problems. At this point we must bring up the obvious and important - though highly embarrassing - fact about English footballers which is that they are uneducated men of largely lower class origin whom one would not expect to be very good at these things. They have the virtues of the poor bloody infantry which are courage, stamina, hard work and physical fitness, all of which are of diminishing value.

England rugby and cricket teams have a fair smattering of members educated to think, which is why they have been able to adapt to changing problems and win world championships. So do most international football teams. But English football is best symbolised by Wayne Rooney. I suppose Rooney must be a very good footballer; his achievements are considerable. But he isn't when I've watched him. I saw him at Burnley last year achieving absolutely nothing even though he was playing against a team whose combined wages did not equal his own (and we won 1-0 which was enough to prevent Manchester United from winning the championship). And his face in the World Cup told the whole story: baffled, frustrated and angry, he never looked like a man who understood what was going on.

Before the World Cup started my youngest son, a keen footballer, announced that he was no longer supporting the England team because, "they are a bunch of arseholes". He pursued his argument by saying that there wasn't a single member of the England football squad with whom he would choose to spend an evening in preference to even the most boring member of the cricket squad. ("Yes, but they're our arseholes", protested his eldest brother.) It is not just that they are boring, dim and inarticulate; the majority of them have been involved in at least one incident which suggests that they have a sense of self-importance way above the justifiable level. They believe the hype, which is their greatest weakness. It follows that the only route to success and the ending of what will soon be fifty years of pain is the shifting of the social basis of English football. Since this is nigh on impossible I can only suggest to disgruntled England fans that they lower their expectations and take more interest in other sports.

Lincoln Allison is Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor of Sport and Leisure at the University of Brighton. His two most recent books are The Global Politics of Sport and The Disrespect Agenda: How the Wrong Kind of Niceness is Making us Weak and Unhappy. He is also the author of Amateurism in Sport.

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An extraordinary book by an extraordinary man: <em>A Journey</em> - Tony Blair

A Journey
by Tony Blair
Pp. 624. London: Hutchinson, 2010
Hardback, ?25

We knew Tony Blair's autobiography would be weird, but it's weirder than we dreamed. Many questions arise just looking at his portrait on the cover: that youthful, mint-eyed, greyed person: has he had a date with destiny or Photoshop, or both?

Is this a frank book?
And then we open the book. Will it remind us of the one we can imagine Robert Harris's ghost producing? (Naturally, we looked to Robert Harris's review for some insights on that one, and didn't really get them.) Will Blair reveal himself in his own write? The answer to that one is a heavily qualified yes. As Mary Anne Seighart said on TV, Blair admits in the book to being manipulative, so how does one know the book isn't?

One might add that the book is littered with phrases like, "if I am being frank", and "to be honest", so that one knows one is in the presence of someone whose claim to be ?a pretty straight kind of guy? has layers of truthfulness. Still, whilst one can never prove that it is, this work feels unguarded, if only as to the author's sense of himself. That doesn't mean that he has told us everything, or sees things straight. We know he is still marketing himself and that he has loyalties to many people who are still in play.

The master of narratives
Above all we know that whilst Tony Blair is a post modern master at operating narratives, it follows that narratives may operate him even beyond his own ability to discern them. He seems to know even this. From Paul Johnson's review of Roy Hattersley's life of Lloyd George I learned that Keynes said of the Welshman:

He is rooted in nothing; he is void and without content; he lives and feeds on his immediate surroundings; he is an instrument and a player at the same time, which plays on the company and is played on them too; he is a prism which collects light and distorts it and is most brilliant if the light comes from many quarters at once; a vampire and a medium in one.

Something of the Blairite about him then?

It was always important to see Tony Blair as someone who was in the middle of magic. His book lets us know that he wanted to be and thought he was transformative. If he could imagine it, he could make it so. Reality was bendy in his hands. That's the post modern for you. This book testifies that he did indeed feel a bit as people like Matthew Parris and Peter Oborne (and I) thought he felt. Of course, that leaves hanging (as does the comparison with Lloyd George) whether and when Tony Blair started believing in something of his own.

The oddest question, and amongst the most pressing, was this: When Blair reports his inner thought processes (past and present), will they turn out to be interesting? The answer is (see above) that we can never be sure we've got them, but also that if this book is a real account of how he saw things, then he stood no serious chance of being a great Prime Minister. He could set a tone, and he did, and that matters. He could start and join wars, and he did, and that matters.

But in terms of domestic policy, he had no idea about how to set about achieving change. Indeed, since he admits that one of his few guiding principles was a vague dislike of the Establishment, he stood no chance of being within a stone's throw of being much like a British Prime Minister. The result was that he could spend money and undo and redo and rebrand earlier tentative Tory reforms of the Welfare State, and that's about it. (Oh, and devolution, for good and ill, and "reform" of the House of Lords, and the hunting ban and ASBOs. I sourly discount peace in Northern Ireland as something which came in its own good time.)

Blair on government
My book, Mr Blair's Messiah Politics, attempted to show how much damage Blairism had done to politics (its tone and substance) and the government of the country. A Journey comes very close to admitting that my kind of analysis was right. What's more it does so by implying that what was needed from Blair, and what he grew into during his premiership, was more leadership and less populism. The point here surely is that Tony Blair went from one rather dangerous position to another. He went from being the winning smile to being the lonely visionary. Representative democracy got dented if not crushed throughout the Journey.

He was of course wonderfully personable. In person, he was manly as well. He was protean. Anthony Seldon's review of A Journey insists that he was brave and I am inclined to agree. He also had remarkable karma: whether that was toughness, or Teflon indifference, or mad self-belief, no-one can really say.

The reviewers?.
The reviews of A Journey are as interesting as the book itself. I do not subscribe to the widely-reported view that it is an easy read: it is wildly over-long for its insight-count. I am well passed being willing to take an interest in exactly who said what to whom, even in the run-up to Blair's wars. Most reviewers do some of that but also pick up much of what matters more. For your convenience, I have filleted some of them, and cite them below.

The untutored genius
But for my money the reviewers seem to miss or underplay the greatest failings in Mr Blair's work. In his account everything that matters about his overall thinking or his detailed policy-making came almost as a revelation to his mind probably (though he doesn't say it) because he is just a wonderfully tuned being. He distinguishes between rhetorical skill and intellect and implies (this is the important bit) that there was a good deal of the latter around him and even (he doesn't quite say it) in him.

There is barely any recognition that his precious "progressiveness" was hammered out in Third Way thinking (which gets barely a nod) and which itself was a revved-up reworking of familiar themes. It is fascinating, by the way, that one of the few books he celebrates as formative was Harold Macmillan's The Middle Way, but its message is barely mentioned. He mentions books by John Macmurray, again without a real indication as to their contents.

It is widely said that a left-ish priest, Peter Thomson, had a big influence on Blair at Oxford. This is acknowledged in the book, and there's a longish quotation from Blair's eulogy at Thomson's funeral, but again, no sense of the lines of argument the men explored. Nor, of course, is there any sense that social activism (rather than socialism) and religion had been Oxford bedfellows since the nineteenth century. (As I learnt preparing my book, Mr Cameron's Makeover Politics.)

The role of other people was at most to be the echo-chamber within which or the anvil against which his thought was refined and articulated. More trivially, he tells us that (late in the process) he had the thought that the International Olympic Committee wanted to hear about the candidate-cities?'aspirations for the Olympic ideal. Seb Coe and others agreed, and the rest is history. But the thought is presumed to have popped into Tony's head as a result of his all round savviness. One can say the same for his thinking in any other area, for instance education or health.

And what of boring old government?
Tony Blair is rather inclined to play down his reliance on sofa government, but there are precious few references to Civil Servants in the book and they are not often obliging. Ditto, his own ministers, though the odd character is good because he or she "gets" it. The only people who get space, billing or good reviews are "my people", or "my team". Even they, as noted by several reviewers, are sidelined: they can never really share the lonely mantle of authority with him. Parliament barely gets a look in.

Conclusion
Tony Blair wasted his vast political capital. Along with plenty of others, he could foresee, imagine and desire big changes in the relationship between The State and The People, but he could not engineer them. Mr Blair thinks that was because he did not become a fully fledged Leader early enough. But I would prefer to stress - again - that early and late in his Premiership he had two different versions of the same failure which both sprang from his politics being too personal. They were too Messianic. Being frightened of the machinery of British government he couldn't reform it or use it. Still, he turned out to be the warrior I for one welcomed, and that means his gifts - even his Machiavellian abuse of democracy - weren't wasted. This extraordinary man very nearly says so in this extraordinary book.

Richard D. North is the author of Mr Blair's Messiah Politics: Or what happened when Bambi tried to save the world (Social Affairs Unit, 2006) and its 2007 digital update Mr Blair's Messiah Politics: A story of inspired government, 1997-2007.

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Will Hutton's <em>Them and Us</em> isn't just big and rambling, it's not well thought through - argues Richard D. North: <em>Them And Us: Changing Britain - why we need a fair society</em> -Will Hutton

Brendan Simms asks, did Terence Rattigan try to suppress <em>After the Dance</em> because it was too revealing about his affair with Chips Channon? Terence Rattigan's <em>After the Dance</em> at the National

The Elgin Marbles are going to Dresden - Christie Davies can exclusively reveal

It has long been known that when the Greeks went on their lavish spending spree based on loans from German banks, the collateral for these loans was selected Greece antiquities. Now in return for the German tax-payers rescue of the shattered Greek economy and purchase of Hellenic "gift bonds" it has been agreed that the Parthenon shall be dismantled and re-created atop a sandstone hill east of Dresden near the Polish border.

For the Germans it is a good deal for it will bring tourism and employment to a region that has been in economic difficulties since reunification. It will bridge the economic gap between Ossies and Wessies and at last make true the claim "Wir sind ein Volk" (we are one people). Dresden has a skilled labour force trained by the difficult task of restoring the ancient buildings of that gem-like city so horribly shattered by the shameful Allied bombing of 1945.

It is the only way in which the Greeks can assuage the anger of the German taxpayer at having their Geld und Gut used to support these schnorrers of the south. In return the Germans have promised that they have no further antiquarian claims on Greece and that they will provide special police units to deal with any public disorder in Athens that the removal of the Parthenon may provoke.

The Germans have been in love with Greek culture since the time of Schiller and Winckelmann. One German statesman even believed that the people of Schleswig-Holstein were descended from the ancient Spartans and that this accounted for their distinctive gruel and unrivalled hardiness. Even more strangely a German clergyman was convinced that Jesus was Greek and that this accounted for his charismatic qualities. On this view the Parthenon already truly belongs to Germany, rather than to the profligate people of unknown ancestry who now live on the territory of the ancient Greeks, a people long ago conquered by the Macedonians.

The deal has been secretly negotiated between Antiochus Epiphanes the Greek special envoy for international debt and Professor Dr. Dr. Hermann Starke formerly of Dorpat University and famous for his Gedanken der griechischen Werke, who is now head of the Stifftung Arminius based in Dortmund that oversees all German archaeological projects in the Eastern Mediterranean. Its enormous endowments were provided by Hedda von Zillergut the unmarried heiress of a fortune derived from Germany's biggest import-export business Schlockgesellschaft, in memory of her mother Elma who was born in Izmir.

The sticking point in the negotiations was that the Greeks demanded as they have done for decades, that Britain's Elgin Marbles be returned to their rightful place on the Parthenon. The British have always refused to do this because the marbles would have been wrecked by the corrosive acidic smog from the industrial plants in Piraeus and the endless Athenian traffic jams. Yet so determined were the Greeks to have them that they borrowed money to construct a hermetically sealed capsule close to the Parthenon in which they could be displayed.

The British pointed out that this did rather destroy the point of the exercise. However, Britain's objection has collapsed with the decision to move the Parthenon to the smoke-free hills east of Dresden. The old polluting factories of Karl-Marx Stadt, now once again Chemnitz, have long since been closed or moved to the Kaliningrad triangle. Most of the inhabitants of the cities of the Free State of Saxony go to work by tram because they cannot afford to run a car. It is a contrast with Athens where the better off all have two cars, one with an odd and one with an even number plate, so as to evade restrictions on which days to drive into the city.

The British have been promised in return the Ishtar Gate of Babylon from the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin. This will in theory be a permanent move but the Babylonian antiquities will also be collateral for any future loans Britain requests from Germany; Britain would in effect be given preference in this respect over failing Eurozone countries. In this way Germany hopes to gain the most comprehensive collection of antiquities in Europe.

From a European point of view one crucial benefit of Athens losing the Parthenon is that it will crush the nationalist arrogance of the Greeks, end that country's disputes with Turkey and Macedonia and settle the Cyprus problem. One of the causes of the collapse of Greek finances is that in the past the country spent as much as seventeen billion dollars (5.6% of its GDP) on defence, an expenditure the backward little country could not afford and one far greater than other European countries. Who were the Greeks planning to attack? Is the spirit of EOKA and AKRITAS still strong? Why were the Greeks not prepared to rely on NATO for their defence and align themselves with American foreign policy?

With the Parthenon gone the Greeks will be forced to discard their absurd over-identification with ancient Greece. No more absurdly expensive exercises in national boasting like the Athens Olympics which first left Greece with a budget deficit of 6% of the country's GDP. A humbler modern Greece divested of its appropriated past will be willing to concede disputed islands and oil drilling rights to Turkey and to give the people of Macedonian ancestry in Northern Greece the right to self-determination. The present Greek collapse is not as many think the result of individual greed but of collective hubris; the Greeks grossly overestimated their own capabilities and this is the punishment that follows the sin of pride.

We thus have a very welcome win-win-win solution. Germany wins a prize its historically minded people and eager archaeologists have long coveted - the Parthenon complete with Elgin marbles. Britain inherits Babylon and obtains economic security from the only country in Europe with a decent economy. The Greeks have been rescued from total disaster and forced to abandon the false and base cultural assumptions that led them into trouble in the first place.

Christie Davies discussed Greek corruption and predicted the European crisis in an invited lecture in Prague in 2007. He claims no prescience whatsoever.

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