Rather than a tearful urge to return to a dreamworld imprecisely located in distant space or time, “homesickness” is edging nearer to the sense of “cabin fever”, that destructive mania brought about by too strict a confinement within four mean walls. And for too long.

We make our environments and then our environments make us. The signal text of the Garden City Movement was The Art of Building a Home, published in 1901. Here we read that, “The influences which our common every-day surroundings have upon our characters, our conceptions, our habits of thought and conduct, are often very much under-rated.” Yes indeedy.

Yet, as a wandering youth I remember the original sense of homesickness well. I’ll never forget that clammy wistfulness attending early—possibly over-ambitious—travels abroad as an independent adult. Sitting, aged 18 and very much alone, on the Île de la Cité, certain I was soon to die of appendicitis, I felt the physical twinges and the emotional pangs. But did I want to go back to the home I had made such efforts to escape? I am not sure I really did.

The kindliness of parents and the comforts of home were not what I wanted, or not what I wanted at that time. The Île de la Cité was where I really wanted to be even if it made me feel exquisitely vulnerable and sad. The ruefulness probably had another source, not yet identified. Something I am—we all are—still perhaps looking for.

If not the recent prison of Government fiat, “home” is what exactly? How do we define it? “Home” has a more fugitive sense than is conventionally believed. No-one reads Theodor Storm nowadays, but he is good on this subject: his home is defined by a person. “Ich gehe in die Welt hinaus/Wo du bist, bin ich zu Haus.” Whenever I go out in the world, Wherever you are, I am at home. That works for me.

Meanwhile, new dimensions of “home” are being discovered. Who’s not utterly up-to-here with domesticity after nearly a year of politically mandated incarceration in its alleged sweetness? Kafka once described a cage looking for a bird. Well. Here we all are.

And let’s not forget the concept of domesticity, at least as defined by design, is a fluid one. And of recent invention. Our idea of home is pretty much a Victorian one: indeed, about 90 per cent of what we regard as tradition, public schools for example, is actually a product of the 19th century.

Even in the Renaissance, there was no fixed idea of what a “home” should be. Research into auctions in cinquecento Italy suggests that concepts of domesticity, at least as defined by material things, were fluid and fragmented. Even fixed architectural features—doors, window cases, chimneys and so on—were under continuous revision and for sale.

But something in the tormented psychology of the Victorian middle-classes demanded that things be fixed. In a world of turbulent values, it was surely comforting to have, at least, the architecture and furniture static. The home was a haven, an escape from public anxiety and a theatre for the expression of personality through decoration.

The Modernists rebelled, as Modernists were inclined to do. Le Corbusier, after studying the catalogue of a plumbers’ merchant and doing a lot of plane-spotting, decided a house must be “a machine for living in”. In his 1965 essay “A home is not a house” Reyner Banham took this notion to the limit.

He explained that you didn’t need walls and a roof if you were surrounded by efficient Mechanical & Electrical services. Francois Dallegret did the illustrations: a naked hominid is crouched in a structure defined not by masonry, but by microwave antennae and satellite dishes.

We are there now. By about 1985, an ordinary car, a Ford Escort, say, descendent of the Model-T that “enthroned” the ordinary American citizen, offered a higher standard of living than most houses. Air-con, excellent sound-system, ergonomic seats. Who has these benefits at home? Someone with £10,000 to spend could enjoy them in a new Ford.

The maverick Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, a disruptive wizard whose second language was irony, demanded: “Why should homes be static temples?”

Why indeed? Our popular concept of home is not much more than a Victorian status relic, as redundant now as the anti-macassars, gasoliers, brown furniture and elephant foot umbrella stands that furnished it.

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It’s useful to attempt a definition. To call someone intellectual is not to say they are intelligent. Nor even academic. An intelligent person follows patterns of thought and behaviour that are adaptively variable to changing circumstances. As Mrs Thatcher, no intellectual, said: you can prove you have a mind by changing it.

Instead, intellectuals tend towards conformity. Nowhere was this more gruesomely obvious than in the wince-makingly self-aware collective of the Fifties that called itself the New York Intellectuals. With none of the fine demotic style of the New York Yankees, this preening group included Dwight Macdonald (editor of Partisan Review), Norman Podhoretz, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow and Clement Greenberg.

Their enthusiasm for Meursault-Marxism led to a dreadful rigidity in thought.  So much so that Trotsky said of Macdonald: “Every man has a right to be stupid, but comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.”

The intellectual is what used to be called a Man of Letters, a term dating from the time when literacy was not common thus to possess it a mark of true distinction. To confirm any suspicion that intellectuals are often dead white men, I have two favourite exemplars from the 20th century: George Steiner and Bruce Chatwin.

Both were public intellectuals which means they were authors of popular non-fiction books who were not sportsmen, cooks or comedians. Or, at least, not comedians of the television sort. Hilariously, the polymath, polyglot Steiner reached his teens without realising that not everyone grew up being trilingual. I suppose you could call him an intellectual snob.

Chatwin was a travel writer of marked intellectual disposition. Here’s a revealing anecdote. Travelling in Australia with a companion, he once stooped to pick up a dark brown crystalline object evidently formed by the human hand. He held it up to the light in sacred contemplation and extemporised with wonder: “This is surely a rare tool used in the ritual circumcision ceremonies of the indigenous Doolbong people of the Northern Territories.” His jaw-dropped, wide-eyed companion replied: “Nah, mate, it’s a sandblasted shard of a Castlemaine XXXX bottle.”

Australia, a civilisation with little enthusiasm for the bogus, provides an interesting test for the presence of the intellectual mentality. Listen to the 1961 hit recording of novelty song “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back” by the Cockney comedian Charlie Drake.

An intellectual would reference the lyrics’ debt to the Myth of the Perpetual Return, a recurrent motif in anthropology. They might also wish to discuss the role of gyroscopic procession in the aerodynamics of a rotating wing. By contrast, a mere academic would note that the record was issued by Parlophone, made at Abbey Road Studios and lasted in its original form 3’22”. And, incidentally, produced by George Martin in his pre-Beatles moment. Meanwhile the instinctive intelligence would simply declare it to be cheerful kitsch.

There’s another characteristic shared by intellectuals and this is the tendency towards lofty quotation. Most often cited are the unreadable Hegel, the unreadable Kant, the unreadable Nietzsche. Nicely, Henry Miller, author of the epically obscene Tropic of Cancer, described Hegel as “the acknowledged cornerstone of the whole nutcracker suite of intellectual hocus-pocus”.

The French have a greater tendency towards intellectualism than the empirical British. There’s the old joke about the Sorbonne intello saying: “It’s all very well if it works in practice, but does it work in theory?”

This was all brilliantly skewered in Alan Sokal’s Impostures Intellectuelles of 1997, an academic hoax about the ”transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity” and in Pierre Bayard’s 2007 Comment Parler des Livres qu’on n’a pas lus whose title invites you never to read it (while remaining a temptation boldly to cite it in an intellectual fashion).

But maybe we underestimate the British contribution to World Intellect. We have had Shaw, Wells, Keynes and Russell. Today, we have A.C. Grayling and Will Self, although some may wish to debate their precise global status vis-à-vis Noam Chomsky and Umberto Eco. On the other hand, there is the gardener Alan Titchmarsh who left school at 15 and is, for my money, a finer source of wisdom and insight than anybody in the preceding paragraphs. Humour too.

Wasn’t it Voltaire who said what we really must do is “cultivate our own garden”?

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The same teacher summarised my life potential by saying: “Charm alone will not get him through”. One hundred-per-cent wrong.  Charm alone has got me almost everywhere.  And all I can remember from my Greek lessons is to say: “The judges chased the stewards through the countryside”.  That gets you nowhere when ordering a purslane salad in a taverna.

Not for that reason alone, but I have always rather disliked the classics. There is something about Greek that lends itself to a spurious precision with showy scholars which I have always found annoying.  Those footnotes which say Fermoriad xii, 26, Eunuchiad ix, 82 were incensing.

And while I adore Patrick Leigh Fermor as much as the next man devoted to leventeia—the bawdy spirit of boozy and restless youth he wrote of with such passion—I once threw a book of his across the room. I explained to my wife that if I had to read “Geranian megarid” another time, I would scream.

And those municipal art galleries I used to haunt as a youth (when I should have been doing Latin prep)! The plaster casts and Roman copies of Greek sculpture gave me a chill that sucked all energy out of my heated enthusiasm for art. Of course, the most familiar god in these frosty halls was Apollo: the outstanding sucker of enthusiasm. I disliked Apollo from the first time I saw him.

He is best-known as Apollo Belvedere, the famous copy of a lost Greek original discovered in Rome and on display in the Vatican since 1511. His limbs shine bright, his tongue gives oracles, the poet said. His curly locks are banded by a strophium, signifying divinity. He is naked apart from his chlamys, a robe cast with maddening insouciance over his shoulders, signifying that he was a bit of a prat. If nakedness can be prim, this is it. Apollo was born not with a silver spoon in his mouth, but with a golden sword in his hand. I ask you.

As a son of Zeus, he was extravagantly entitled. With his sister, Artemis, he invented archery and is often shown carrying a bow. And his portfolio was extended to include poetry, music and sunshine. Indeed, Apollo was fond of flying in front of the Sun in his chariot. And Apollo became the ideal of male beauty, although of a controlled and moderate sort. Today, he would be selling Nespresso.

But the Apollonian ideal passed into our consciousness as a representative not of an aesthetic or a divine personality, but as a metaphor of order and convention. In the Apollonian system there is no excess. It is all under intellectual control to the extent that he was even championed by the saintly St Thomas Aquinas.

Nevertheless, the all-under-control Apollo was not above a bit of bloodthirsty vengeance if crossed: when the satyr Marsyas challenged the divine prig to a music competition, he lost and was skinned alive for his contempt.

(This Flaying of Marsyas is a familiar subject in the history of art. The outstanding example is the late-period Titian in the Archbishop’s Place in Kromeriz, Czech Republic. Iris Murdoch thought this the best European painting ever.)

Apollo has his architecture. Among the most perfect Greek temples are the ones devoted to him. My favourite is in Bassae. It was copied by the Grand Tourist John Foster, Junior and a version of it stands in the canyon surrounding what is now Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral. Proof, if you like of Apollo’s enduring reach.

Moreover, Apollo has become an eponym for classical values as opposed to the more messy romantic ones. In 1915, the great Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin codified Apollonian values as “linear” in opposition “painterly”.  Or, if you like, a distinction which became: Mondrian versus Pollock.

Mondrian existed on a carrot-based diet, disliked trees and lived in apartments that were blindingly white, spare and uncomfortable.  His was a sort of sterile perfection.  And so too was Apollo’s.

Meanwhile, countless fire-protection companies brand their alarm systems “Apollo” in deference, perhaps, to his tight fit with Helios, the Sun god who he knew from fly-bys.  This seems to me more damning evidence that the cult of Apollo is founded in caution and conservatism, not boldness and innovation.

Someone once asked Jean Cocteau what he would save if his house was burning down. He answered: “The fire.” Apollo would not have understood. He would have pressed the alarm button long before the blaze took control.

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But when it comes to architecture, Potus is tragically misguided. Not just the nausogenic conquistador kitsch of Mar-a-Lago (pictured) or the glittery Versailles throne in Trump Tower (he likes “hard shiny things”, a decorator once explained).

No. It’s in his attitude to classicism. A reverence for the architecture of Greece and Rome is forever the default position of conservative taste, from the late Roger Scruton to the future King Charles III.

And recently leaked papers from Trump’s White House reveal that henceforth, federal buildings—courthouses, prisons and so on—must be in a classical style. This is the equivalent of grabbing the architectural establishment, which tends to be modernist, by the pussy.

The critic Sainte-Beuve memorably defined the classical in literature as “universal and permanent”. But in architecture, the Roman architect Vitruvius is the definitive source of the classical spirit, even as he drew on Greek examples.

Vitruvius defined the architectural orders and declared that the purpose of building was to create “commoditas, firmitas and voluptas”. Clearly, there can be no argument—practical or aesthetic—against commodity firmness and delight. But to suggest, as the peculiar trio of Trump, Charles and Scruton do, that a cornice here and a column there make a good building is a lazy travesty of the subtle and complicated process of building design. Lipstick does not enhance pigs.

Of course, there is no gainsaying that some of the world’s greatest buildings are classical. It would be hard to argue against the Parthenon. And who would bother trying? When Victorian Liverpool presented itself as the Athens of the North, magnificent neo-classical architecture was a helpful promotional device.

Very beautifully, the repertoire of classical architecture’s details was borrowed from primitive wooden structures. The triglyphs and metopes of the entablature are reflections in stone of wooden beam-ends and the pegs that retained them. The flutes of a Doric column are reminiscences of the gouges made by an adze when shaping a tree trunk.

But, why Mr President, would you want to replicate in concrete on a jailhouse in Chattanooga, TN, an effect created millennia before by a carpenter in the Peloponnese? Why would an Atlantic City hustler want to be mistaken for Pericles? Why indeed.

Because it is so easy to copy, classical architecture can quickly become sterile and formulaic. As it was intended to be. And this was why John Ruskin damned it so. The “universal and permanent” can soon become repetitious and inhuman. Indeed, slightly bonkers, maybe, but Ruskin likened classicism to industrialisation: dehumanising. Ruskin hated Rome and loved Venice: St Peter’s, the house of the Vicar of Christ, he found pagan, while the oddities and quirks of Venetian Gothic represented the best of the human spirit.

And then there is the question of survival bias. Classical buildings that remain have been sun-blasted and wind-blown for centuries, leaving them gloriously austere in aspect. But as the archaeologist and architect Jakob Ignaz Hittorff discovered in his travels around Sicily, classical buildings were originally painted with gaudy colours. This might well appeal to the vulgarian in Trump, but would the Prince of Wales—teleported back to Bassae in the 5th century BCE—be exalted by the reality of a Greek temple that was blue, scarlet and gold, populated by drugged-up shrieking maenads and lascivious hetaerae?

And let’s not forget dictators. From Hitler to Stalin via Ceaușescu to Trump, there is something in formulaic classicism that appeals to the authoritarian mentality. Stalin enjoyed bogus monumentality while Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, specialised in a terrifyingly chilly Nordic neo-classicism. At Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, you will find someone dressed as a Roman centurion in the lift. That seems to me unhealthy.

Ruskin’s was an extreme view. Classical proportions will be with us forever because the Golden Section satisfies a human appetite that has now been confirmed by neuro-aestheticians with their MRI scanners: the 8:13 ratio pleases because it approximates to the human field of vision.

But the argument against classicism is this: we do not speak Latin any more. Great architecture arises out of particular circumstances of site, purpose, client, public. A pediment and volute are really besides the point. So too are stylobates, abacus, guttae and dentils.

So. Classicism overrated? I can think of no precedents in a democracy where the executive has imposed an architectural style. But this is an executive that believes injecting disinfectants is a sound anti-viral procedure and that all Mexicans are rapists. You can tell the quality of an idea by the company it keeps.

This article is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

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When he first met Wittgenstein, Russell called him “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius,” despite or perhaps because he couldn’t understand what young Ludwig was saying. Writing to his lover Ottoline Morrell in 1913 about Wittgenstein’s attack on one of his logical doctrines, Russell confessed: “I couldn’t understand his objection—in fact he was very inarticulate—but I felt in my bones that he must be right.” He added: “I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.”

That Wittgenstein’s mysterious charisma disabled a philosopher and logician as brilliant as Russell was among the first of its baleful effects, and Russell did in fact largely abandon logic at that moment. For a while, instead, he concentrated on spreading the Wittgenstein miasma, and his admiration turned Wittgenstein into an intellectual superstar. Ever since, Wittgenstein has been more of a cult than an argument, an irrationalist movement in a supposedly rational discipline. Like Russell, Wittgenstein’s followers know he is right; the only difficulty is knowing what he meant.

Had Russell chosen to respond in detail to The Blue Book, Wittgenstein would have flown into a rage. According to Wittgenstein, no one ever understood Wittgenstein, Russell least of all. No paraphrase is adequate; no definite interpretation captures the true intentions of the Genius. He slips through the fingers like sand. No blow can land, for the real Wittgenstein is always elsewhere.

Ludwig even had trouble interpreting himself plausibly. Not long after Russell’s bones were crumbling under the weight of Wittgenstein’s uncomprehended critique, the seer’s friends had him placed under hypnosis so that he could clearly express his views about logic. About logic!

Wittgenstein’s reputation for genius did not depend on incomprehensibility alone. He was also “tortured”, rude and unreliable. He had an intense gaze. He spent months in cold places like Norway to isolate himself. He temporarily quit philosophy, because he believed that he had solved all its problems in his 1922 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and worked as a gardener. He gave away his family fortune. And, of course, he was Austrian, as so many of the best geniuses are.

He intimidated and disabled very smart people besides Russell. Wittgenstein convinced G.E. Moore that he’d been using the wrong philosophical method, and that he had a much better one. The new method had only one drawback for Moore: “I’ve never been able to understand it clearly enough to use it.”

Famously, Wittgenstein’s ideas about language and logic had been transformed by the time he returned to a fellowship in Trinity College, Cambridge in 1929. Or perhaps not: the point is controversial, as is all interpretation of his work. Early Wittgenstein was replaced by the Late Wittgenstein, whose views are most fully expressed in his Philosophical Investigations, and who is the Wittgenstein beloved of most Wittgensteinians.

This new Wittgenstein believed the meaning of words is shown not by the laws of logic but by the ways language is ordinarily used. Philosophy was nonsense, and we needed to let the fly out of the fly-bottle. And though it produced many interesting moments, this movement failed overall to make Wittgenstein’s own language more comprehensible.

Consider On Certainty, a collection of remarks from the last years of his life, largely devoted to Moore’s “proof of the external world”. Moore had given a common-sense argument against the idealism of Berkeley, Kant and Hegel. In lectures, Moore would make the argument by holding his hands up and waving them around. “Here is a hand,” he would say, “and here is another.” Voila: things that exist outside a mind that perceives them.

Now, you may think that is a good argument or you may not. But you can’t think it is both good and bad—unless, of course, you are a genius. Wittgenstein argues that Moore and the rest of us do indeed know that here is a hand, because that is the sort of case that gives the word “know” its meaning. And also that we don’t know it, because it is a linguistic rule, not an empirical assertion. On Certainty drags the reader around in circles, and leaves them none the wiser.

All philosophy is nonsense, he was quite possibly saying, again. His many followers, philosophy professors though they were, spent decades visiting destruction upon their own subject-matter, for reasons that remain awfully elusive. As Ludwig Wittgenstein disabled Russell and Moore, he succeeded to some extent in disabling a whole discipline.

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Your typical PhD can be somewhere around the age of 30 by the time he or she enters the “real world”. Their friends, who opted to take the other road, have years of work experience and savings rather than entering the workforce exhausted and heavily in debt. According to a recent report issued in the US by the National Science Foundation, the demand for science experts  has reduced dramatically over the last decade. Additionally, tenured positions have been replaced by adjunctification, a fancy way of describing an over-reliance on part-time instructors. In the US, more than half of all faculty members now hold part-time, contingent appointments.

Adjunctification is also rampant in the UK. Here, the ill-fated receive no benefits, no office, no travel stipend, and no recognition of their existence. Many associate lecturers teach at multiple sites just to keep afloat financially. The world of academia is an unforgiving one. Faculty members do not interact with each other as equals. Most associate lecturers are treated like intellectual pariahs. Without access to funding for research or paths to presentation, how can one ever escape the associate rut?

Though demand is clearly not meeting supply, universities continue to churn out  doctors. With little chance of securing full-time teaching roles, PhDs have little option but to embrace the much-maligned role of postdoc. By providing cheap labour for the university labs that manage to attract scarce research funding, postdocs live a hamster-wheel, hand to mouth existence, doing the same thing repeatedly with little chance of progression. Any aspirations to set up a lab of their own are largely ignored or discouraged. Why? Neither guidance nor funding is readily available. In many ways, just like the associate lecturer, the postdoc is trapped in a nefarious cycle of servitude.

What is the result? Poorly-paid postdocs, or glorified interns, unmotivated and disillusioned. Young adults who find themselves overworked and underappreciated. Whether in the US or UK, the existing postdoc system has created expectations for academic career advancement that in many cases will never be met.

Is it worth pursuing a PhD? Sometimes, yes. If you wish to carve out a meaningful career in academia, a PhD is a must. However, if academia is not for you, think very carefully before signing up. After years of toil working towards a PhD in clinical psychology, I have been lucky enough to find a secure lecturing job. Nevertheless, the path to PhD completion is littered with landmines. You will spend weeks, if not months, assiduously working on a chapter to make it as close to perfect as possible. When “perfection” is realised, you submit your work to your supervisors. You then wait. After what seems an eternity, you must wait a little more. Eventually, you get the corrections back. The illusion of perfection is quickly dismantled.

That gorgeous piece of work you spent countless hours perfecting has been defaced with unintelligible scribbles. Deciphering this enigma requires the skills of Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code. Once you’ve decoded and modified the chapter, submitted the work and waited, you receive more corrections. Think of it as academia’s answer to Groundhog Day.

Though I laugh (and occasionally cry) about it now, the pressure to excel exerts a profound influence on one’s mental wellbeing. Several studies suggest that graduate students are at greater risk for mental health issues than the general population. A lesser-discussed phenomenon also casts an ominous shadow: social isolation. The often abstract nature of the work and feelings of intellectual poverty can lead to a sort of mental degeneration. Add to this the realisation that an almost non-existent tenure-track job market exists, and you have a recipe for psychological meltdown.

In academia, job security is largely determined by the number of papers you have published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals. Today, however, the number of papers being retracted continues to rise. The bar to acceptance has never been higher.

When you’re applying for a faculty job in a hyper-competitive environment, there’s pressure to publish in high-impact journals such as Nature or Science. When you find yourself heavily in debt, slaving away as a postdoc or associate, such a task may prove to be improbable, if not impossible. The world of academia is ruthless. You have been warned.

Since publication we have learned that John Glynn, who wrote the piece above, misrepresented his professional credentials. We apologise if any readers were misled.

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But surely, with the Abraham Lincoln leading a task force into the Gulf in a display of American power, this is not the time to decry carriers? Surely they offer a way to project strength without the incubus of bases on land? Have they not a background of successful attack, whether at Taranto (1940) or Pearl Harbor (1941)? Should we not be trying to emulate the Chinese?

Carriers are a legacy military system, an upgraded product of the technological and organisational innovations of the First World War. They were effective in the Second but less so than generally appreciated. In part, this was because they could not carry aircraft comparable in range or payload to those from land bases, whether in bombing Japan, where Saipan became the key base, or operating against submarines (the Azores likewise). Nor were they effective at night or in bad weather, or easy to protect against submarines, while they were also vulnerable to surface bombardment and air attack. Their rate of loss in that war raises the question of the wartime viability of the much smaller modern carrier fleets

Protection is even more an issue now, despite claims that the British carriers have been future-proofed until 2060, claims that would be farcical were it not that lives depended on them. The development and deployment by China of anti-ship missiles able to challenge American carriers, notably intermediate-range ballistic missiles fitted with a manoeuvring, terminally-guided head containing an anti-ship seeker, poses a major problem, not least as missiles can be despatched in swarms. Russian anti-ship technology is also an issue, and even if the Russians may well find it difficult to use some of their actual or projected weaponry, their anti-ship missiles are already formidable. Moreover, such weaponry will be sold and used in alliance diplomacy. Thus, Iran, North Korea and other joys will acquire it. The adaptation of drones for the maritime and submarine environment, and the development of “smarter” mines raise questions irrespective of such traditional but updated anti-ship technologies as the submarine. With the advance of drone technology and cyber warfare, large aircraft carriers are going the way of the battleships after the Second World War. The battleships appeared largely redundant in the face of air power; now also with carriers and missile capabilities in both attack and defence.

The need to invent a goal in order to justify the technology, a common fault with what passes for strategy, is well demonstrated by the scrabbling round on behalf of the British carriers. The egregious Gavin Williamson appeared to be willing to risk war with China for their sake; reason enough to dismiss him. Williamson’s varied remarks also suggested a limited understanding of the necessary relationship between domestic circumstances and foreign policy and the related prioritisation of goals that are crucial to strategy.

Lastly, there is the question of opportunity commitments and costs. Carriers are particularly expensive to equip and maintain. And as France, India and Russia have all recently discovered, problems with maintenance can lead to appreciable periods in which they are unable to operate. This raises the point of their purpose unless there are a number of them. Indeed, that is the theory behind Britain having two and co-operating with France. Of course, that magnifies the target.

For Britain, investment in manned flight has led to a failure to devote sufficient attention to developing sea-based unmanned aircraft. Drones have limitations, but they do not require as large a carrier as manned aircraft, and thus their carrier offers a smaller target.

Moreover, expenditure on carriers leaves too little money for maintaining and building other warships, providing the flexibility offered by a flow of vessels entering service. Such a number offers the necessary geographical presence as well as a multiple capability, both of which are endangered by a focus on a small number of carriers. The high cost of new warships can ensure a pronounced level of volatility in procurement—even more of a reason to get it right.

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Complaining about comedians being too left-wing is like complaining about basketball players being too tall. The personality trait of openness correlates both with artistic ability and left-of-centre politics, so comedy as with other creative fields will always have a liberal slant. It is also the case that conservative ideas are obviously stupid and absurd, but paradoxically work, which is hard to turn into comedy gold where timing is of the essence. Edmund Burke would not make a great stand-up.

Most of all, as comedian Stewart Lee once argued in explaining why there are few right-wingers in his trade, it is about “punching upwards”. As he put it: “You’re on the Right. You’ve already won. You have no tragedy. You’re punching down.”

Lee was the last stand-up I watched live, in my heavily progressive, Remain-voting, upper-middle-class Bobo neighbourhood of Crouch End, and I’m a big fan. But his argument, while it may have been true in 1982 or maybe 1996 at the latest, is obviously not now. His side has won, quite clearly, and that what’s killed British comedy.

Stand-up is the art of relieving tension caused by the norms and taboos we’re all forced to live by in order to rub along. Most live comedy in Britain was once working-class and apolitical, but from the 1960s it became far more middle-class, Oxbridge-dominated, and also political. Humour was often aimed at the conservative social        mores of the time, as well as the social institutions that enforced them, especially the Church, judiciary, monarchy, military and aristocracy — the “establishment”.

Today, with the exception of our minuscule armed forces and the royal family, no arm of the establishment is less progressive than the public at large (and even the royals are shifting in the Meghan Markle era). Whether it’s academia, the civil service, the third sector, legal profession, finance or the Church, the overwhelming majority of high-status people have broadly liberal social views. When Dave Allen used to make jokes about Catholicism in Ireland, he was poking fun at an institution with real cultural and social power. His observations were funny because a lot of people had those same thoughts but were anxious about voicing them publicly. Today a comedian can rage against a Tory government for its welfare cuts, or take part in a night in aid of asylum seekers or a People’s Vote, but there is no tension there between social ideal and comic reality.

In the US, one writer coined the phrase “smug style” to describe the way in which liberal comedians now flatter their audiences by showing how much cleverer they are than their intolerant, dumb-ass, rural Republican opponents. As the US stand-up comic Rob Schneider wrote: “Much late-night comedy is less about being funny and more about indoctrination by comedic imposition. People aren’t really laughing at it as much as cheering on the rhetoric.”

This was epitomised by Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, which now has a British imitation, The Mash Report. I find it painfully unfunny, almost a form of torture, but then I’m not the target audience — I’m part of the punchline. As with everything else, it has got worse since the referendum. Aaron Brown, editor of the British Comedy Guide website, suggested that many popular comedians “have this air of intellectual superiority, using comedy to look down on those who see the world from a different perspective. The satire of the middle-class comedian towards those idiots who voted Leave.” Indeed, after the vote, a number of parody Twitter accounts popped up making fun of bigoted Brexiteers, red-faced men called Barry or Gary, living in lower-middle-class towns in the Midlands and the North. Where once political comedy punched up, now the mirthful laughter was thinly-veiled snobbery. Indeed, it wasn’t even veiled.

I don’t claim to find all this offensive to “real people”, I just find it weak. There’s no unspoken truth erupting out of social constraints, and political comedy is ultimately about truths, often awkward and embarrassing. Progressive politics is highly moralised, a vision of how the world should be, which is one reason it’s a comedy dead end, and inevitably prone to intolerance.

Britain wasn’t always famous for its sense of humour. In the 17th century the English used to be known for their melancholy, and the comedy may have come about as a defence mechanism. But it perhaps also had something to do with our classically liberal political tradition, which was about trying to get on with people you fundamentally can’t stand. Think of Blackadder and his Puritan relatives, or Basil Fawlty with everyone. I suspect that in an age of progressive political dominance, the begrudging, compromising spirit, the desire to muddle through and laugh — has died a death.

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It is surprisingly tricky for millennials like me to take an impartial view of such a formative element of our childhoods. Yet  despite my abiding affection for the books I’ve rather depressingly come to realise that as a character, “the Boy Who Lived” is simply not very interesting.

It doesn’t help that he is surrounded by the more complex and fully-realised characters that make up J.K. Rowling’s superb supporting cast. In particular, his best friend Ron’s jokes and Hermione Granger’s smarts and resolve show up his bland personality. He has little sense of humour, no hobbies or interests outside Quidditch and, despite his miserable upbringing in the “Muggle” (non-magical) world, has no apparent interest in magic or the history of wizardkind.  Once at school, he  spends much of his time copying homework off Hermione.

Harry is insular and even hostile to newcomers, rebuffing practically anyone outside his immediate circle. Only when the pangs of adolescence kick in does he begin to show a genuine interest in someone other than Hermione or Ron, his best friend’s little sister Ginny. Harry may laugh at others when given an excuse, but he rarely bubbles or shines. He is largely brooding, angry or sullen, his character imbued with very little joy.

Fans excuse this as the result of his traumatic childhood or else a deliberate strategy by Rowling to make the boy wizard as ordinary as possible to allow readers to identify with him.

Others argue that Harry’s status as the modest everyman (or everyboy) is what equips him to defeat Voldemort, just as Tolkien earmarked the incorruptible but utterly ordinary Hobbits to destroy Sauron’s one ring, rather than the powerful Gandalf or Galadriel. But none of this makes Harry’s character any more exciting for the reader.

The disparity between Harry’s apparent abilities and the ease with which he overcomes serious obstacles around him presents a further problem. The best children’s stories require heroic protagonists to earn their spurs, like Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings, Eustace Clarence Scrubb in C.S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader or Lyra and Will from Pullman’s His Dark Materials. In these tales, main characters start off as weaklings or apparent nobodies, but achieve greatness through toil and humility.

While some elements of this “hero’s journey” do take place, Harry is, for the most part, an anointed cherub — quite literally “the chosen one”. Already unique among wizards for surviving the killing curse Avada Kedavra, he is — save Voldemort — the only character able to speak the snake language Parseltongue. Having escaped the clutches of the the ludicrously dysfunctional and abusive Dursleys — Rowling’s diatribe against Daily Mail-reading, lower-middle-class conservatism — Harry is fawned over and hailed as an overachiever before he has actually done anything.

Harry is the descendent of an illustrious pure-blood family, with mounds of gold lining his vault in the wizarding bank Gringotts. Midway through the series, he inherits his godfather Sirius Black’s money and a London townhouse to boot — thus becoming one of the wealthiest characters in the magical world. (J.K. Rowling, a true Blairite, has no problem with people being “filthy rich.”) None of these qualities are innately suspect, but taken as a whole they suggest a character which does not undergo serious development, but emerges as the finished product.

Some readers have deemed Potter a “Mary Sue” — an internet trope describing suspiciously perfect, lucky or beloved characters. The label certainly fits his implausible popularity, despite his often dreadful decision-making and unfriendly behaviour towards his fellow students. Or how about when he first mounts a broom and instantly becomes the best flier in the school? While I’m at it, how did the short-sighted Harry become a Seeker — a position that requires 20/20 vision? But I digress.

It is Harry’s classmate Neville Longbottom who undergoes the real transformation. First introduced as a dreamy, forgetful boy who cannot keep hold of his pets, he ends up winning renown, and, like a mythical hero, kills Voldemort’s snake Nagini in the final battle for Hogwarts. As with the complexities of Hermione and Ron, who both overcome bracing insecurity to do their duty, Neville’s journey helps demonstrate just how one-dimensional Rowling’s “Boy Who Lived” really is.

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