To Cambridge to debate the "Arab Spring". My side argues that we should not "regret" the events and thus wins. Despite being largely in agreement on the facts, the other side had to "regret" the Arab Spring and so lost. There is an almost immovable certainty about such things. Few people want to be thought (or, crucially in a public vote, seen) to be against anybody and nobody wants to be thought to be "pessimistic" about anything. Anyone who is "optimistic", or can paint their opponents as "pessimists" nearly always wins. Is there any way around this or must we simply accept that certain arguments are always naturally slanted either for or against us? Welfare good, taking it away bad and so on.

***

For the second time in a few months I go on BBC Radio 3 and find myself facing not with a longed-for constructive and nuanced conversation, but a harridan. A little while back it was an Oxford tutor so angry about Samuel Huntington that she could barely speak. This time a similar interlocutor is fresh from the National Theatre, high on the class resentment fostered by a lifetime of success and a top-up from A Taste of Honey. Everything I say produces a flush of hostility and simple rudeness. After I attempt to explain certain virtues in the scholarship and grammar school system I think she actually accused me of personally aiming to grind down the poor. I am reminded of why I normally refuse to discuss anything to do with class in Britain. It is our national obsession and nothing seems to be able to wean us off its poison. It is the one national characteristic I would really not miss.

***

The mainstream media campaign to paint UKIP as a party wholly comprised of nutters and fruitloops continues. Yet it is suffering, to my mind, from a form of expectation inflation. The Times recently had a week of stories revealing the "truth" about the party. One story attempted to depict UKIP's central office as some sort of asylum. Yet the craziest revelation they broke was that one of the workers at UKIP HQ allegedly occasionally brings her cat with her to work. I cannot be alone in finding this a terrible disappointment. I would have been more shocked if the paper of record had splashed on the fact that they had found a "You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps" mug in UKIP's office kitchen.