Just as pornography has almost succeeded in making sex boring, so the great tide of gloomy analysis of Britain’s ills has almost succeeded in making politics a bore. The prospect of sitting down yet another evening with a group of house-and car-owners, eating very good food and drinking wine, and hearing about how poor they all are because the Trade Unions are now running the country is as disenchanting as having to hear for the fourteenth time about someone’s gall-bladder operation. To read in newspapers, not for the fourteenth but for at least the four hundredth time, that the country is being wrecked by socialism, scrounging and threats to freedom from the extreme Left, is no longer funny, or even horrifying, but just unbearable, like the dripping of a leaky tap.

It would be a good deal less exasperating to have to read, and listen to, endless disgruntlement if the complaints were based on reality. Tiresome though it may be to get an exhaustive account of someone’s hospital operation, one can still have genuine sympathy with the teller because, after all, the operation did happen and was no doubt pretty unpleasant. The really desperate feeling comes on when you have to listen to someone’s account of unreal misfortune: the slightly dotty landlady who thinks her tenants knock on the water-pipes every night to annoy her, when in fact they spend their evenings creeping round on stockinged feet so as not to provoke her wrath, and what she needs is not new tenants but a visit from a plumber.

Complaints about plutocratic coal-miners, suggesting that they are the sort of people who go out in Rolls Royces running down the starved and downtrodden middle classes, and about the dangers of Communism, which is actually weaker in the United Kingdom than in any other European country, are far harder to take even than such a landlady’s fears.