Bagehot's notebook

THERE is a paradox in here, somewhere.

As British political coverage emerges from the Christmas break, the most interesting news stories involve the future of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition, and how that question splits Tories into two camps.

Over in the Cameroon centrist camp, ever-more senior sources have been heard saying that the coalition is a marvel—a once-in-70-years opportunity to drive through ambitious reforms—and thus Conservatives should be thinking of some sort of electoral pact with the Lib Dems to preserve it. Andrew Grice of the Independent got a scoop last Friday, when friendly ministers briefed him that Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary (and a Tory) had urged cabinet colleagues to ensure that the Lib Dems won an upcoming by-election in the northern English seat of Oldham East and Saddleworth on January 13th, even though a Conservative candidate is contesting that three-way marginal.

The Sunday Telegraph quoted a senior Conservative minister close to Mr Cameron as saying he would be "relaxed" about the idea of having "some Coalition candidates at the next election" and noted that the prime minister had:

caused anxiety among his backbenchers last week by using a joint news conference with Mr Clegg merely to say he "expected" the two parties to fight the election separately

The Independent was back on the case this morning, reporting on the other camp in the Tory party, over on the right, which dislikes the coalition and is deeply hostile to the idea of making it more permanent. This time, the Indy talked about a campaign about to be launched by a prominent Conservative activist and blogger, Tim Montgomerie, to tug the party back to "Mainstream Conservativism", and away from the siren lures of centrist alliances with the Lib Dems. Mr Montgomerie is quoted telling the Independent:

"The liberal Conservatives who want an ongoing alliance with the Liberal Democrats are arguing publicly and behind the scenes for a continuing arrangement between today's two governing parties. Mainstream Conservatives must also organise and prove that there is a better future for the Conservative Party and the country."

Mr Montgomerie said that tax cuts, a tough approach to crime and opposition to an EU superstate were not "right-wing" ideas. They were supported by "the vast majority of the British people but not by the left-wing majority of the Liberal Democrats".

And the paradox? Well, it seems to me that the Cameroons who talk such a good game about the marvels of coalition politics are actually pushing for the destruction of coalition politics. While the right-wing Tories who wake up every morning in a thorough grump about life in bed with the Lib Dems are the ones who understand how coalitions work in countries where they are a norm.

To explain. The centrists who love the coalition—the liberal conservatives around Mr Cameron and the conservative liberals around the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg—have lots of plausible things to say about how tricky reforms and grown-up, responsible policies are made much easier when they are being promoted by two parties. If this were a Tory majority government, they explain, voters would always suspect that Conservative ideology explained the ideas being mooted. But because voters can see that a rather different party, the Lib Dems, are also on board, it is much easier to convince the public that these decisions are about the national interest, not ideological zeal.

They have a good line to spin, too, about the need to have some sort of electoral pact, or multiple pacts, at the next election. We get on so well, they say. We are so good together. How can we possibly turn around at the last minute and start attacking each other?

And yet, and yet. Once such Cameroons start down the road of electoral pacts, that "above ideology" sense of two parties acting in the national interest dies. What they are talking about is not the preservation of the coalition, but a merger of the bulk of their party with the bulk of the Lib Dems, presumably spinning off some MPs they dislike on the Tory right and Lib Dem left, and leaving them in a congenially centrist party. 

Now as it happens, that sort of centrist, liberal party might turn out to be fairly congenial to this newspaper, too. Who knows? But it would not be coalition politics, at least in the sense that I saw covering European politics over recent years. It would be a realignment of the British political firmament that would strengthen, not weaken, the British tradition of two-party politics.

On the continent, coalition parties understand perfectly well that they can work together in a government for a few years, then thump each other about at election time. Some of this is due to electoral systems (once you have proportional representation, you are stuck with four or five party politics at least). But part of this is because the parties thrive by playing up their distinctive identities. Come election time, supporters of each respective ideology seek to maximise the vote for the matching party, to increase the weight that their worldview will carry in the next government (which will inevitably be made up of more than one party).

At the last German federal elections, for example, the vote for the business friendly Free Democrats was greatly boosted by disgruntled backers of Angela Merkel's main centre-right Christian Democrats. Such Christian Democrats, who inhabit the free-market edge of Mrs Merkel's broad church of a party, thought the Chancellor had been pulling her party too far to the left, and overdoing her rhetorical attacks on the wickedness of capitalists and financiers. So they voted Free Democrat, in order to tug the duvet back in the direction of free market thinking, while pursuing their other aim, namely, to end Mrs Merkel's coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats.

In Belgium, where I was based, elections are not so much about choosing a new government (not least because elections in Belgium do not at the moment result in agreements to form new governments). Instead, they are about different tribes—French-speaking socialists, Flemish corporatists, Flemish nationalists et al— competing over their respective electoral quotas, with a view to maximising their interests in the new coalition.

I am not a big fan of that sort of coalition politics, for what it is worth, because it makes harder for ordinary voters to reward good politicians and punish bad ones. But oddly enough, the likes of Mr Montgomerie and his woo-the-base "Mainstream Conservativism" campaign may be on the money, in their understanding of what a Britain with coalition politics might really look like.

RETURNING to Britain this summer, after a long spell away, perhaps the most obvious change was in attitudes to food. At some point in the 13 years I was away, my native country had become a nation of obsessive foodies: the television schedules were crammed with back-to-back cookery shows, newspapers swooned over celebrity chefs as if they were Hollywood heart-throbs, and farmers' markets seemed to have popped up on every other corner. Yet I also detected an oddity: to a degree unmatched in any other country I have visited, modern British supermarkets devoted aisle after aisle to chilled ready meals, microwave curries, Thai dinners in a box, and other pre-prepared foods.

Was anyone actually doing any cooking in this new gastro-paradise, I idly wondered? For the Christmas edition of The Economist, I thought I would do a little statistical research. In 2009, according to the nice people at Nielsen BookScan, the British bought 7,269,924 cookery books, for a total cost of more than £70m. In the same year, according to an estimate from the Chilled Food Association, a trade association, the British spent £8.7 billion ($13.6 billion) on chilled ready meals. As I write in this week's issue:

The figures conjure up sad visions of a nation slumped collectively on the sofa, watching cookery shows while forking supermarket curry mouthwards from a microwave tray

Yet, prod a bit further, and the picture is a bit more complex. Judging by some of the most successful products on the market, the British seem to want to cook, it is just that they need the experience to be (a) exceedingly fast, and (b) very easy. Add a note of cosy tradition to the mix, and a celebrity chef, and you can easily end up with a hit on your hands. As my example, I chose a Christmas cake-in-a-bag, a supermarket product for nervous or busy bakers created by one of the doyennes of British tv cookery, Delia Smith, promoted by a loopily post-modern "television-within-a-television" advertising campaign, which seems to suggest that Britons are never happier than when watching the small screen.

Here's the piece:

BRITONS bought more than 7m cookbooks in 2009. They watch thousands of hours of cookery shows on television. In the run-up to Christmas in 2010, the latest tome by Jamie Oliver, a cheerful television chef, became the fastest-selling non-fiction work in British publishing history.

It is hard to know how much actual cooking follows. In 2009 the British also spent some £8.7 billion ($13.6 billion) on chilled ready meals. The figures conjure up sad visions of a nation slumped collectively on the sofa, watching cookery shows while forking supermarket curry mouthwards from a microwave tray.

But there are seasonal signs that British cooking might be hurried rather than wholly outsourced. Mr Oliver’s bestseller aims low, to increase the chances that buyers might put their mouths where their money went: its title promises “30 Minute Meals”. Another festive hit is a Christmas cake-in-a-bag from a revered British cookery writer, Delia Smith. Sold via Waitrose, a posh supermarket, the “prepared ingredients pack” contains precisely measured quantities of flour, brown sugar, black treacle, spices and dried fruit (pre-soaked in alcohol), plus a simplified recipe for nervous or novice bakers. Waitrose says that one cake-in-a-bag was selling every seven seconds in the period around “stir-up Sunday”—the late November day when British families supposedly prepare Christmas cakes to time-hallowed family recipes, making wishes as they stir.

Some have complained that the old ways are being smothered: “Delia put my Christmas in a bag!” sorrowed a cookery writer in the Daily Telegraph, a crusty newspaper. But actually Ms Smith—a household name for nearly four decades, so famous she is generally known by her first name alone—is doing something thoroughly British. Britons yearn for tradition, but these days live busy, rather atomised, lives. Their tiny, expensive homes lack larders for storing unused baking ingredients from year to year. Ms Smith is flogging a familiar idea of Christmas in an efficient, unthreatening form.

Old and more recent rituals merge in the advertising campaign for her cake. Using a television-within-a-television device, this shows a string of wholesome modern Britons (a young couple at home, a father and daughter in the kitchen, a pair of twenty-something women on a bus with a mobile video gadget, a lone Christmas-tree seller with a battered portable set) all watching a small-screen Delia extolling the excitement of “home-baked Christmas cake”, which is nonetheless “the easiest thing ever”. The sales technique is itself the real message: in modern Britain, the cosy glow of tradition now surrounds the experience of watching someone famous cook.

THE British government has just published a localism bill aimed at handing away some of the powers that make this country, it is said, by far the most centralised in modern Europe.

One of the more interesting changes being proposed concerns a push for 12 cities to ask their citizens if they would like a directly-elected mayor. Currently, even large cities like Birmingham or Manchester are run by frankly rather anonymous types, with power split between political group leaders and council chief executives. London has had a directly elected mayor since 2000, and the post has been filled by high-profile mavericks of the left and the right, Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. Both men inspire strong opinions, but at a very minimum, it is fair to say they are among the only local government leaders capable of making national headlines.

I wonder if one effect of directly electing mayors elsewhere would be, at the most basic level, to raise the national profiles of Britain's provincial cities. Perhaps, though, the roots of London's dominance simply go too deep.

What do I mean by that?

Well, in the interests of full disclosure, your blogger is by birth and upbringing a Londoner, and left to my own devices I could easily slip into metropolitan chauvinism: I like the countryside as much as the next Londoner, which means I get restless after 12 hours of cows, grass and smog-free air, and am frantic to leave after 48. But after living and reporting overseas, I will admit that one of the most striking differences between Britain and other countries is the fact that one city is so dominant in so many fields of endeavour. You can be a heavyweight lawyer, publisher, television executive, actor, politician, banker or corporate chieftain in Lyons, Antwerp, Zurich, Geneva, Barcelona, Milan, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Sydney, Toronto, São Paulo, Frankfurt or Munich, to name just a few non-capital cities. In Britain, anyone hoping to reach the top of a string of professions pretty much has to head to London.

Every now and then, British governments and national institutions such as the BBC go through the exercise of trying to shift whole departments or senior people to new locations outside London. When this fails to dent London's continued dominance, it is common to blame some ongoing metropolitan conspiracy. This may, however, be unfair: look at historical data and London's dominance has been astonishingly absolute for an astonishingly long time.

By chance, I am reading an essay on the Stuart dynasty (1603-1688) at the moment, by the Cambridge historian John Morrill. The following passage, describing urban centres of the mid 17th century, jumped out at me:

Paris, the largest city in France, had 350,000 inhabitants in the mid-seventeenth century. The second and third largest cities were Rouens and Lyons with 80,000-100,000 inhabitants. In Europe, there were only five towns with populations of more than 250,000, but over one hundred with more than 50,000 inhabitants. In England, however, London had more than half a million inhabitants by 1640 or 1660; Newcastle, Bristol and Norwich, which rivalled one another for second place, had barely 25,000 each. London was bigger than the next fifty towns in England combined.

NOT being a member of the Labour Party, or indeed any political party, your blogger had no vote in the Labour leadership contest of the autumn. But if given a vote, I would have cast it for David Miliband, the former foreign secretary and elder brother of the eventual winner, Ed Miliband. For what it is worth, I always enjoyed interviewing him or chatting with him as a correspondent. That is not to say that the elder Miliband brother is a brilliant retail politician with an instinctive, easy rapport with voters: even his closest allies admit he is a bit of a policy wonk. He also dithered, fatally, on two separate occasions when many Blairites hoped he might launch a challenge to Gordon Brown, proving himself neither loyal, nor decisive enough to ennoble his disloyalty with daring.

But he is a fiercely bright, an interesting thinker, a centrist, and he seemed to have a clear-eyed sense of where his party went wrong in its final years and months in office. He was well-respected among other foreign ministers, at least on the European Union circuit, and could certainly have been the first EU high representative under the new Lisbon Treaty rules, had he wanted the job. Though never fully trusted by the Blairite inner core ideologically, MiliD is also warier of the sort of statist, Fabian solutions that seem to appeal to something deep in his younger brother's soul.

Having lost the leadership contest by a narrow margin (thanks to the votes of affiliated trade union activists who backed Ed Miliband by a hefty margin), the elder Miliband withdrew from front-line politics and has been correctly discreet as he licked his wounds. Until now. Assuming he has been accurately quoted, the former foreign secretary has hitched up his petticoats and showed more than a flash of ankle to those still dreaming of a MiliD comeback. In an interview with a local newspaper, the Newcastle Journal, he has said:

NEVER underestimate luck in politics.

The sense that there was a new, dangerous edge to yesterday's central London protests against higher university tuition fees was enormously magnified by the news, last night, that the Prince of Wales and his wife had been attacked in their car as they drove down Regent Street. Switching on the television, you did not have to be a swooning monarchist to feel a jolt of shock at the pictures of a visibly alarmed prince and his wife, hopelessly—almost absurdly—vulnerable in their evening dress in the back seat of a vast, lumbering old Rolls Royce, complete with extra large windows for waving from and royal coat of arms mounted on the roof.

The newspapers were duly full of pictures of the royal couple, as well as images of the smashed window of their car and a great smear across its gleaming bodywork where somebody had thrown a can of paint. But of course, this was effectively an accident. The prince had been on his way to an annual charity theatrical extravaganza, the Royal Variety Performance (a duty which is already one of the trials of the royal year), when his car had been stuck in traffic near Oxford Circus, far from the centre of the student protests. By chance, a smallish breakaway group of protestors were in the same spot, apparently intent on smashing up some posh shops when suddenly the poshest car in Britain purred up next to them, bearing a prince in black tie. Some sort of attack on the car was more or less inevitable at that point. The prince was a victim of dreadful luck (and arguably poor reconnaissance and teamwork by the police and his protection officers, a question which is even now being investigated). But even as I watched I found myself thinking, this could so nearly have been so much worse. And luck has been at the forefront of my mind all along, during this first wave of unrest.

Let me explain. I'm pretty sure that if the occupant of the Rolls Royce last night had been the Queen, an elderly lady who also commands much more public respect and loyalty than her son, the country would have woken this morning in a much darker mood. What if the armoured glass of the Rolls Royce's window had given way, injuring the prince (or the Queen)? What if a police bodyguard had been injured, or pulled his gun? (There are reports in some newspapers that the policeman in the prince's chase car was bashing protestors away with his car door, which sounds a bit close for comfort if true). What if the royal car had injured someone when it finally made its escape at some speed? A different outcome to any one of these what-ifs would, I think, make Britain feel a markedly edgier country right now.

I thought the same at the first student protests that saw windows broken at the Conservative party HQ, and a fire extinguisher thrown from the roof, narrowly missing the police below. If the extinguisher had been a foot to one side and killed a policeman, the politics of austerity would have taken a quite different turn.

Is this a turning point? Regular readers will know that my hunch 10 days ago, during the last student protests, was that this was not a revolution in the making. I still think that. It does not take very many trouble-makers to create the sort of violent scenes seen yesterday.

Nor were all of them students, though when I was on the streets last week I did not see too many of the "rent-a-mob anarchists" being talked about in some tabloids this morning. True, there were some of the older, tough anti-globalisation types you see at things like G8 or G20 protests. But the people who worried me were more the young 16 year old kids from tough outer suburbs, many with scarves over their faces. They radiated some of the same sort of anger of the "casseurs" seen at Parisian demonstrations, from the grim housing estates around the French capital. Though at French protests it is true that casseurs are often a group apart from the main body of demonstrators, and spend as much energy attacking students and passers-by as they do fighting the police.

In contrast, if teenagers were behind some of the serious vandalism and trouble yesterday, I would guess there was a solidly political core to their anger. The small number of teenagers I spoke to last week were incensed that a government full of posh millionaires was—as they saw it—removing the public support that would allow them any hope of attending higher education. It is an under-reported detail that many of the demonstrators are not just angry about the idea of rising tuition fees in the future, they are also very angry about the planned abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance, a £30 a week bribe (for want of a better word) paid to pupils who turn up on time every morning at sixth form colleges. There are, as it happens, good arguments to be made for and against the EMA. But to the demonstrators, the only explanation was that a bunch of rich people in power are heartlessly taking something from poor kids, because they are selfish and do not care.

A rather woolly prediction flows from this. I still think that mainstream student protests are the wrong trigger for a wider political crisis for this coalition government. That is because I still have a hunch that a lot of voters look at the protests and either recoil from the violence on display, or see the students as a relatively privileged group, at a time of cuts across the board.

But I do have a broader sense that the government has a problem with any sense that this country is being run by the rich, and the rich are not playing fair. At a time of austerity, the charge that this government is a bunch of millionaires sitting around the cabinet table hurts. I think Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, revealed a telling hint of a strategy to come when he taunted David Cameron this week about his days as a member of the Bullingdon Club, a raucous dining club for gilded toffs at Oxford with a track record of raucous, glass-breaking, food-throwing bad behaviour. Mr Miliband talked about the prime minister living on Planet Cameron.

Such appeals to class envy are not enough on their own to stir things up in British politics. But if they are coupled to a sense that the rich and privileged are playing the system for their own advantage, then things become toxic.

For my money, the most dangerous protests for the coalition, potentially, are the sit-in demonstrations at branches of Topshop and other stores owned by Arcadia, a firm run in a notably tax-efficient fashion by Sir Philip Green. Other big firms, such as Vodaphone, have also been accused of tax avoidance by protestors (though, just to be clear, the firms involved are not accused of tax evasion, which is illegal). But if I were in Downing Street, I would be wary of talk that this axe-wielding government was cutting from the poor while palling around with billionaire tax-dodgers. Earlier this year, Sir Philip was asked to carry out a review of wasteful spending inside government. Making him a government adviser, even an unpaid adviser, was a risk that may come back to haunt the coalition.

With Christmas looming, the student protests may well lose traction for a bit. But it is bonus season in the City next month, including in banks that have received a lot of public money to help them through the credit crunch.

Envy of the rich alone is not a danger. But a broad sense that rich people with privileged access to the government are not playing fair at a time of public spending cuts, now that is a danger. I think that is the story that is going to keep us busier than tuition fees.

OVER in the Westminster village, the drum beat of hostility towards Ed Miliband shows no sign of dying down. The grumbling has been further fuelled by the Labour leader's extravagantly, toe-curlingly bad performance at the most recent Prime Minister's Questions. I am not about to add to the rumour-mills. I have been writing about the Liberal Democrats and the student protests this week, so have not been asking senior Labour MPs whether they think their new leader is any good (oh, alright, I asked two, and neither was exactly gushing about his boss).

Well-informed types like Iain Martin at the Wall Street Journal are already to be found weighing the chances of various rivals, should there be a challenge for the Labour leadership. As we head into a frozen weekend, I have just two small thoughts to offer.

One is, Labour is a bit stuck. Even if the charge begins to stick, and lots of voters decide that Mr Miliband is a bit hapless, I have a hunch that—at a time of global economic alarm and domestic austerity—it would look stunningly self-indulgent for Labour to start squabbling about its leadership. It is not as if he was parachuted into the job by some emergency fast-track procedure: Labour held a grinding round of hustings and debates that dragged on for months, during which Mr Miliband's strengths and weaknesses were fully on view.

Two is, I have a feeling it is a distraction that Mr Miliband is not good at the public performance aspects of his job. The real problem with Mr Miliband, as our editorial comment argues this week, is that he is wrong about such big questions as the role of the state, the causes of the deficit, and why Labour lost the last election. To use a crude short-hand, though he is not "Red Ed", he is showing himself to be to the left of the broad mass of the British public.

But because he has been frankly a bit rubbish in big set-piece interviews and in the Commons, the internal Labour Party debate about his politics has been skewed. It works like this, in my experience. Trade union types, left-wing think-tankers and MPs who supported Mr Miliband as leader defend him noisily against charges of being rubbish, because they think he shares their ideological world view. They tend to want to have an argument about whether he is, or is not, an effective performer. Give him time, they say. Stop reading the lick-spittle right-wing press.

Those on the Blairite wing of the party who are appalled by his leadership would like to have a debate about things like the 50% top rate of tax, which the Blairites think should be scrapped if and when public finances return to good health, but which Mr Miliband has said is needed to make the country more fair. I am told by one senior source that they would like him to pick his battles and make clear that Labour supports some austerity measures, for the sake of credibility if nothing else.

Blairites think Mr Miliband can afford to distance himself from the trade unions who got him elected. They agree that the two big industrial disputes out there at the moment are not exactly inspiring to ordinary voters. The two biggest disputes, involving London Underground staff and British Airways cabin crew, essentially revolve around preserving coveted posts (in nice, dry ticket halls and on long-haul flights, respectively), rather than fighting compulsory redundancies. They would like him to make clear that industrial action rarely gets people very far, and focus on attacking the Coalition government for being too radical, and in too much of a hurry.

But instead, they too find themselves debating whether he is or is not terrible on the BBC, and whether he was or was not mauled by David Cameron at PMQs.

They are in a bind.

"YOU ARE the backbone of a new movement. This is a movement that is capable of changing Britain, Europe and the world," bellowed the student representative from University College, London (UCL), standing on the plinth at the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square this afternoon. His claim was manifestly false.

I am sure he believed it, as a megaphone carried his words into a horizontal-sleet-laden wind. I suspect many of the crowd of a few hundred freezing young protestors gathered below wanted to believe it. They clutched placards denouncing plans by the Coalition government to raise a cap on student tuition fees to about £9000 a year, and they were genuinely, sincerely angry. Today's day of action was the third major demonstration by students in central London, and the foul weather had not deterred a good number of students from showing up, though they were outnumbered by chilly-looking police.

There were signs of troublemaking here and there: hairy, middle-aged Trots handing out tracts called things like Proletarian Struggle or words to that effect. Lots of ready-made signs distributed by the Socialist Workers' Party, a hardline outfit. A few gaggles of scary youths in hooded tops with scarves over their faces, roaming the crowd in search of trouble. An Iranian television news crew filming the scene.

Trouble there has been, too: mostly on a first student demonstration earlier in November which the Metropolitan Police badly misjudged, sending too few officers to keep order when a small group of breakaway protestors attacked the headquarters of the Conservative Party, a short distance from Parliament.

But this was not a British revolution in the making. At the risk of being proved horribly wrong by some stunning act of civil unrest on a campus, I think the current band of student demonstrators are too incoherent, too diverse and—in many cases—simply too polite and sensible to constitute any threat to the Government. This is not going to be a sneering blog posting, though on today's showing, British students are a lot more muddled when it comes to political ideology than their peers in other countries where I have reported. On the contrary, though I disagreed with almost every student I talked to in Trafalgar Square and later at UCL in Bloomsbury (now in its seventh day of a sit-in), I found myself oddly relieved.

The contrast was striking with student demonstrations I have reported on elsewhere, over the years. In France and China, for example, students are fantastically articulate, but in a slightly creepy, parrot-like fashion. In France, it is impossible to escape the feeling that students have been marinated in a sour soup of sub-Marxism by their teachers: talk to a score of them, and your notebook soon fills with near-identical little sermons full of abstract nouns and odd verbs, about the need for massive struggle that fundamentally rejects the brutalising logic of a capitalist system that renders the disfavoured fragile and promotes social anguish. In China, whenever the authorities turned on some invisible tap and briefly allowed students to vent their nationalist anger in the wake of some foreign crime against the Motherland, their words were literally identical, being taken from editorials in the state-controlled press.

The students in Trafalgar Square had not been filled with anything as coherent as an ideology. Two students from Middlesex University, who said they were finishing PhDs, declared that it was an outrage that the British government could "help Irish bankrupt banks, but cannot help their own students." An Anthropology student from Goldsmiths' College in London said he was "unsure" when I asked him how he thought higher education should be funded. "I mean, to be honest, stop putting money in the banks, and have higher taxes," he finally ventured. "To be honest, I blame the whole system. Capitalism needs growth, but the planet is finite. I'm still thinking about it," he told me.

Every student reserved their greatest ire for the Liberal Democrats—whose parliamentary candidates all signed written pledges vowing to vote against a rise in tuition fees before the General Election in May. There was especial contempt for Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister, who was variously accused of being a "Judas Iscariot", a "schmuck" and a "dickhead", for repeatedly vowing to oppose a rise in tuition fees in leaders' debates before the polls.

Two achingly middle-class teenagers, looking like choirboys who had been stretched and put into denim jackets, were at pains to explain why they had voted Lib Dem in May: "Because we live in Worthing, and it's a really Tory seat, we had to vote tactically," said one of them, Wilf. "But I don't think Labour or the Conservatives would have done differently," said his friend, Elliot. Did they think the movement would change Government policy, I asked. "It's important we show we're unhappy," they said.

Another gaggle of Goldsmiths students insisted that higher education should be free, because the government kept going on about how billions in debt had got the country into problems, so why were they now trying to encourage young people into debt? And university was free when David Cameron and Nick Clegg were at college, and that was a really terrible time with Thatcher and that, so how come it was not possible now. It was about priorities: they should just scrap nuclear weapons. And Everyone Knew that David Cameron and the millionaires in the cabinet would raise tuition fees, but from the Lib Dems it was hypocrisy.

Each time, I put the counter-arguments: that back in the 1980s perhaps one in six people went to university, while now it is nearly one in two, and so funding from general taxation looks like an impossible luxury now. That a graduate tax would be hard or impossible to collect from foreign students and being centrally-collected would rob universities of autonomy. Time and again, students predicted that the prospect of running up tens of thousands of pounds of debt would put people off from even applying for college, whether it was their younger brothers and sisters, their cousins or simply anyone from a poorer background. But in the years since Labour introduced tuition fees, there has not been any drop-off in applications from low or high income families, I argued. But now they are tripling the fees, came the reply.

A clutch of 16 and 17 year olds from John Roan sixth form college in London insisted the threat of student debt was enough to put them off from applying. I thought of assuring them they were wrong to be put off, before realising how hollow that would sound.

Because actually, none of us know. As with so much else from this Coalition, it is a bit of a gamble. Raising the cap on tuition fees while trying to design a loans system that is workable and progressive looks like a reasonable solution to the funding crunch caused by massively expanding higher education.

But if in a few years' time, it turns out to have deterred lots of poorer students from applying to university, that will be a bad thing. I hope it will not happen like that. The students I spoke to were convinced it would: and that fear of debt was the one thing that came up again and again. I have a hunch that our differing instincts are partly driven by something as simple as age: at 18, it seems horrible to face decades of debt in return for higher education, even if that education is an asset that opens up the chance of higher earnings later. At 18, a debt of £27,000 seems an impossible sum. As a middle-aged hack with a mortgage, the idea is less alarming, perhaps.

From Trafalgar Square I jumped on the Northern Line to UCL to inspect the student occupation of the Jeremy Bentham Room, named after the philosopher (whose straw-stuffed remains are on display nearby). The grand inner courtyard was decked with banners and chalked graffiti: one read "Let's Shift Some Godamn Paradigms." After the students had held a brief meeting to decide whether to let me in, I was ushered into the tidiest sit-in in history. There was the neatly labelled "Media" desk at which students tweeted and blogged, and a quiet work area for students on a deadline for tests. There were recycling bins and ordinary bins, timetables on the walls and lists of affiliated protests, and a giant screen for social media announcements. There were photocopied reproductions of 1968 French protest posters, saying things like "Nous sommes le pouvoir", with English translations helpfully added to the bottom in little capital letters. A sign read: "This is an open space for open people, We'll have no trouble here." There was no smoking, no stacks of beer cans. The students all looked pretty fresh: it turned out they were occupying the hall in shifts, so that they could pop home to sleep, attend lectures and keep up with their essays.

Outside in the hall lay a cardboard coffin, labelled Education RIP. Candles and flowers lay strewn around, but also little bits of paper with slogans referring to the Harry Potter novels. What's with the Harry Potter references, I asked the sit-in organisers? They rolled their eyes: there are some strange people around here, they said. A fresh-faced undergraduate, listening in, burst out: "Well, Harry Potter would be for free education." Nobody slapped him down.

It would be easy to mock: if this was the revolution, it was not going to be allowed to endanger anyone's grades. But would violence be worse? And the earnestness was not purely selfish: high on a list of demands for ending the occupation was a call for contract cleaners and support staff at UCL to be paid a higher "living wage" more in line with London living costs.

Back in Trafalgar Square, the least convincing hand-made sign of all read: "1968 revisited? Yes. But we'll finish the job this time." On current showing, Britain's student protestors are as close to revisiting Brideshead as they are 1968, and they are not that close to either. The anger and sense of alienation from party politics is real enough: there is much talk of using technology to create a new democracy. But a revolution, this is not.

A COUPLE of years ago, your blogger was talking to a British Conservative about the Irish government's struggles to secure a Yes vote in a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. If the Irish can just stall for a little longer, the Tory told me, Britain should have a new Conservative government committed to killing off Lisbon, and then their treaty worries will be over. "If our Irish friends can hang on a little longer, the British redcoats are just over the hill, ready to ride to the rescue," he said cheerily.

Um, is that the best possible analogy to offer Irish voters, I asked? Redcoats and all that? My source hmmed, and the conversation moved on.

I was reminded of that exchange today, while watching a House of Commons discussion of Britain's decision to join an emergency rescue for Ireland. One by one, Conservative MPs asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, to agree that Ireland would be better off leaving the euro and re-joining some sort of currency union with the pound sterling.

Mr Osborne showed commendable restraint, given that their suggestion was both economically and politically crackers, to use the technical term.

But there was more. Several other MPs asked Mr Osborne for reassurance that Britain would be contributing to Ireland's bailing-out only via bilateral loans, and to express concern about reports that Britain would be putting billions of pounds into an EU support mechanism controlled from Brussels. Some of them seemed to be under the impression that Britain was being asked to pop fat bundles of banknotes into a central pot of money being held by the European Commission. Mr Osborne dealt with them patiently, too, while taking care to blame his Labour predecessor for signing Britain up to the special EU rescue mechanism in question.

Start with Irish politics. Unless I am sadly mistaken, it is not inevitable that the average Irish voter will warm to plummy-voiced English MPs rising from the green leather benches of Westminster to ask a British minister to agree that "our Irish friends" would have been better off sticking with sterling rather than joining the "more flighty euro" (take a bow, Edward Leigh MP). Nor will the Irish public be automatically mollified to hear another Conservative MP asking the chancellor to give Ireland a seat on the Bank of England's monetary policy committee in return for re-joining sterling (hello, Mark Reckless MP).

Then there are the economic ramifications of leaving the euro. It has become an article of faith among British Eurosceptics that Ireland's woes are largely or wholly due to membership of the single currency. The argument goes as follows: Ireland is in trouble because of a monstrous housing bubble, that bubble was caused or at least made much worse by years of inappropriately low interest rates set in Frankfurt, in short the euro caused Ireland's boom and now Ireland can only regain its competitiveness by leaving the euro and devaluing its currency.

As Douglas Carswell, a Tory backbench MP and hero of the Conservative blogosphere, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning:

"We shouldn't be paying to help keep Ireland in the euro. If we are going to pay to solve this crisis, we should be helping to pay Ireland to quit the euro. Ireland's misery is only going to end when it has its own currency again. At a time of austerity, again we are paying vast sums to the European Union."

Mr Osborne avoided the invitation to tell the Irish to run home to the warm embrace of the Bank of England and de-facto currency union. He reminded MPs that it was for sovereign countries to decide their own currency policies. Yet a couple of times, he permitted himself the gentle observation that "Ireland has much of its sovereign debt denominated in euros." Were they listening? This is rather a key point.

If Ireland were to leave the euro tomorrow and devalue, as some Eurosceptics hope, its citizens, companies and banks would still owe huge sums in euros. Now, within Ireland, those debts could be switched into new punts. But the Irish state and Irish banks would still owe rather large sums in euros to overseas creditors (among them British banks like the Royal Bank of Scotland). Assuming international markets did not simply close en masse to Ireland, a big fall in the value of the new punt would make it much more expensive to service those debts.

At a guess, Mr Carswell's talk of paying to help Ireland to quit the euro is a suggestion that British holders of Irish euro denominated debt take a devaluation on the chin. Call me a hand-wringing worrier who spent too many years in Brussels, but I have a hunch other EU governments might not be so understanding.

To quote estimates from today's Financial Times:

According to data compiled by the Bank of International Settlements, the three largest creditors to the Irish economy at the end of June – including the Irish governments, banks and non-financial corporations – were Germany to the tune of €109bn, the UK at €100bn and France at €40bn. These sums amount to 2 per cent of France’s gross domestic product, 4.5 per cent of Germany’s GDP, and 7 per cent of British GDP.

There is also the small matter of the torrent of short-term liquidity that the European Central Bank has been providing to keep Irish banks afloat via a facility that offers euro-zone banks access to central bank funding at the main ECB interest rate for up to three months. To quote the FT again:

With €130bn ($177bn, £110bn) in loans outstanding at the end of October, Ireland’s banks account for about a quarter of the liquidity provided by the ECB

Do Tory Eurosceptics look forward to the Bank of England taking on that responsibility, following a currency union with Ireland?

For that matter, there is a crunchy debate to be had about the sceptics' assumption that low, Germanic interest rates from the ECB caused Ireland's downfall. It is true that the Irish interest rates were low during the boom years, indeed if you were borrowing to buy property they were negative in real terms. But the cronyism that links Irish banks, Irish politicians and the Irish construction industry pre-dates the creation of the single currency. And other countries have managed their own property and banking bubbles and busts outside the euro. There are also plenty of Irish economists and business types who will tell you that Ireland's success in attracting in foreign direct investment during the golden years was in large part due to being the English-speaking, common law EU member country that used the single currency.

But leave that one for another day: there are reasonable people on both sides of that debate. Instead finally, if readers will indulge a brief moment of euro-geekery, it is worth correcting the idea that Britain is being asked to stump up billions now for an EU bail-out mechanism. To keep things simple, the EU agreed to create new instruments in May 2010 to help euro-zone economies under market attack. As I wrote at the time from Brussels, there were two of these, and only the first will involve Britain:

First off, a €60 billion rapid reaction stabilisation fund, controlled by the European Commission, and able to send ready money to eurozone countries that are in a financing crunch. The mechanism is modelled on an existing scheme for non-euro economies, the "balance of payments facility". The money is borrowed by the commission on the markets, using the EU budget as collateral. Because the EU budget cannot legally go into the red, that means that all 27 EU members are on the hook if money from this €60 billion pot is disbursed and not paid back: to simplify, all members would have to pay extra into the budget to top it up. Britain, for instance, would be on the hook for 12% of any losses: Alistair Darling, still the British chancellor of the exchequer, approved this after consulting his Tory counterpart, George Osborne, by telephone. Secondly, a "special purpose vehicle" (don't call it a fund or Eurobonds, or the Germans will be very cross), which will be created in the next few days by an intergovernmental agreement among eurozone members, and which will raise up to €440 billion euro on the markets using a blend of loans and loan guarantees from the 16 members of the single currency club.

In other words, the  instrument that involves Britain is not a pot of money, it is a legal agreement to use the EU budget's credit rating to borrow money on the markets. The much bandied-about price tag of six or seven billion pounds is the theoretical maximum liability that Britain would face if the mechanism was used in full, the resulting rescue funds were handed to a euro-zone country, and that country failed to pay back a single euro cent.

Conservative MPs are adamant that any help for Ireland should be bilateral, and should not involve the EU mechanism.

This may sound rather theological. This has non-theoretical consequences here and now, I am told. If and when Britain makes a bilateral loan to Ireland, that will show up on the books of Her Majesty's Government right away. The EU mechanism is politically much harder to control, and that is a real issue. But from the point of view of managing Britain's debt burden, the EU mechanism looks like a rather attractive way of helping out neighbours in need.

As it happens, it seems that British help for Ireland is set to be a mixture of bilateral loans, IMF funding and commitments through the EU mechanism, all of which will add up to about £7 billion. That is a big sum, but not a huge sum, so the question of how liabilities are booked is not so pressing. But should there be contagion to much larger euro area economies, like Spain, the question of how to provide that help will not be so straightforward.

FROM a purely logistical point of view, it is a shame The Economist is not a monarchist publication. In every direction, the view from our head offices in St James's takes in palaces, royal residences and guardsmen in furry hats: it would be a fine location for Majesty magazine. If Britain's royal family ever seceded and founded an autonomous city state, this republican-minded newspaper would be in grave danger of falling within its borders.

You might expect, therefore, that the engagement of Prince William to his long-time girlfriend Kate Middleton would have left a visible mark on the neighbourhood this week. The Metropolitan Police seem to have expected something of the sort. As the nation woke to the news of the engagement on Wednesday morning, crash-barriers and fluorescent-coated constables guarded the entrance to Clarence House, home of the prince's father. Reading the acres of news coverage this week, it seems that excited crowds did gather in St James's after previous royal engagements. Not this time. Cycling to work yesterday, I saw a single television camera and journalist and no members of the public. Cycling to work this morning, I saw fewer crash barriers, fewer police constables and no onlookers, though someone had thoughtfully erected a small blue marquee, presumably for the press in case of rain. The tent was empty.

To summarise a lot of words (I read it, so you don't have to) the majority view of the daily press here is that the country finds it quite exciting that the prince is marrying someone middle class, this will make the royal family more popular and thus the monarchy has been strengthened.

I wonder if it is as straightforward as that. For one thing, it seems an odd assumption that popularity and the survival of the monarchy go together: the late Diana, Princess of Wales was both stupendously popular and frankly lethal to the Crown.

Your blogger never really understood the fuss about the late princess, still less the lynch-mob mood of compulsory grief that followed her death. I always had a hunch that Diana-worship was a form of British narcissism, skilfully steered by the tabloid press. People always cast the thing in moral and personal terms. I thought it was as much about culture.

I have a hunch that modern, urbanised Britain is a bit baffled by the royal family. Or rather, they are familiar enough with the purely royal aspects of royal life: the ribbon-cutting, hospital-opening, state visiting thing. But they feel little or no sympathy for the parts of royal life which overlap with the habits of the old-fashioned rural aristocracy. With all that money and leisure time, the royals actually choose to spend their free time in cold places like Scotland, wearing heavy tweeds to kill grouse or deer in the rain while being eaten by midges. They put on kilts and attend Highland Games. Their children go to church wearing ties.

At least after her divorce, the Princess of Wales behaved less bafflingly: she took her holidays on shiny yachts in the sun. She went to the gym and had lunch with famous people in spiffy bits of central London. She cultivated tabloid journalists, even as she visibly suffered from the attentions of an intrusive press. In short, though she was posh in her own right, rich and famous, she behaved more like a rich and famous person than a posh person. If lots of modern Britons had been princesses, they would have behaved like her.

There was a time, back at the height of Diana-mania, when the two models of royal life were in direct competition and you could start to imagine that hostility might do for the older, stuffier model. Now, despite the family sagely shipping in invigorating supplies of non-posh DNA, I wonder if bafflement is not the greater long-term danger. When the royal family behave like old-fashioned aristocrats, they look out of touch (and deference will not keep them safe). But if princesses are not created by an accident of birth but can be contracted into the royal family from the ranks of the middle classes, why are they royal at all? I am not about to quote my illustrious namesake, whose remarks on daylight and magic have been reprinted in every newspaper this week. But he was right, you know.

AS DAVID Cameron flies to China today he is under pressure to raise human rights with Chinese leaders, notably the case of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel laureate serving an 11 year prison sentence for advocating democracy. Officials have briefed the press that the prime minister—who is leading a large trade delegation to China in the hopes of drumming up billions of pounds in exports—will raise human rights in a "sensible and measured way".

What does that careful phrase mean, exactly? Here is my prediction: we will never know.

Let me explain. British politicians have faced loud calls to raise human rights when visiting China for many years, certainly since the suppression of the 1989 democracy protests in and around Tiananmen Square. Yet China's vast market has been making trade delegations salivate for even longer. The magical essence that allows this square to be circled? Cynicism. And my own experience as a sometime China correspondent is that when it comes to showing cynicism in this field, Chinese and western politicians are pretty evenly tied.

A yearly highlight for China correspondents, at least when I worked there a decade ago, was the press conference thrown by the Chinese prime minister at the end of the annual full session of the National People's Congress. It offered a unique chance for Chinese and foreign journalists to question one of the most powerful men in the country and—vitally—to know that proceedings were being carried live on Chinese state television. We foreign hacks took the responsibility seriously. We knew this was not just a rare opportunity to hear the thinking of the head of the government, but also—by asking questions about matters that the Chinese state media normally hushed up—to convey information to millions of ordinary Chinese viewers without the usual filters and barriers erected by Communist propaganda chiefs. We would agree among ourselves who was to ask questions, and discuss their wording carefully to make sure the moment was not wasted.

At the 1999 press conference, a question arose about American criticisms of Chinese human rights. The irascible but relatively reformist Zhu Rongji was prime minister. Mr Zhu responded with a mixture of pride in his own record and contempt for what he painted as the formulaic way in which foreign leaders raised human rights with him to keep public opinion sweet back home.

Mr Zhu (who like many Chinese leaders of his generation had suffered during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution) recalled his meeting earlier that month with the then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Beijing. During their private talks, he told the press conference, he informed Mrs Albright that he had been risking his own life "struggling for China's democracy, freedom and human rights" when she was still at school.

It is always like this with foreign leaders, he told reporters. They would produce lists of what he termed "so-called democracy activists", and would ask him to release them. Very few foreign leaders failed to raise human rights, he said. "It seems if they don't mention human rights, they would find it difficult to justify their visit."

I hate to admit it, but there was evidence that Mr Zhu was quite right about the cynicism of foreign leaders. Take Tony Blair. Early on in my time in Beijing as correspondent for a British daily newspaper, he arrived with a large pack of travelling Westminster lobby reporters in tow. Mr Blair was already deep in talks with various bigwigs when word broke that Xu Wenli, a courageous and admirable dissident, had been detained by police. We China-based hacks informed our travelling colleagues from London that this had taken place. We also told our colleagues that it was normal for high-profile dissidents to be picked up while visiting foreign leaders were in town, before being released after a few hours.

The travelling press pack flew into a flurry of excitement. Things were a bit confused for a while, as they pressed Mr Blair's aides for a reaction to this detention. Word then spread among the Beijing press pack that Mr Xu had been released after spending six hours answering questions from police. Had Mr Blair raised Mr Xu's case with Chinese officials? Conflicting accounts started to circulate. One version had him raising the detention with President Jiang Zemin. In another, the news of Mr Xu's detention only came to him after the meeting with Mr Jiang, but the prime minister had asked British officials to look into it. In another, Mr Blair had spoken to the Chinese ambassador to Britain, who was accompanying his delegation. Whether Mr Xu had been released early or simply let go was distinctly unclear.

Whatever the truth, what counted for Westminster lobby reporters was a briefing at their Beijing hotel from Mr Blair's fearsome press spokesman Alastair Campbell. He told them in no uncertain terms that Mr Blair had intervened to secure Mr Xu's release, and the success of this intervention was a tribute to the way Mr Blair had already improved British relations with China, especially in the field of human rights.

We China-based reporters were not invited to this briefing, and I still remember arguing with Westminster colleagues afterwards that the real story seemed to be a bit more fiddly and possibly less glorious. No matter, I was told. This was a nice strong story, it came from Alastair Campbell and they were running with it. The following day, British dailies ran stories with headlines like "Blair acts to free Chinese dissident".

This was not a unique incident. A well-informed sort once told me about a meeting in London between Mr Blair and the current Chinese president, Hu Jintao. The British prime minister was under pressure to ask about Chinese repression in Tibet, and call for dialogue with the Dalai Lama. It looked like being a ticklish moment for Mr Blair. Then, I am told, Mr Blair began asking Mr Hu (a former party secretary in Tibet) about infrastructure projects China was building in that region: a railway line to Lhasa, lots of new power lines to bring electricity to some rural areas for the first time. This line of questioning was a bit confusing for some in the room: just why was the prime minister so fascinated in Tibetan infrastructure?

The mystery was solved a few hours later once the Downing Street spin machine had done its work. There were the British newspaper headlines, proudly declaring: "Blair raises Tibet with visiting Chinese leader".

IN THE print column this week, I ponder the headache that any British government faces when it comes to weighing up the competing demands of hard power (ie, defence spending) and a generous welfare state. The British, it seems to me, want both (while paying rather low taxes, ideally) and that makes them rather unusual for their neighbourhood. The British have a taste for European levels of welfare, but still mind very much that their armed forces should be respected (and visible) around the world. Guns and butter, please, and not too high a bill.

This, I suggest, explains the Government's odd, multi-track presentation of public spending cuts this week: a National Security Strategy unveiled on Monday, defence spending unveiled by David Cameron in person on Tuesday (and explicitly defended by the prime minister as a package that still left Britain as a global player). Then, and only then, the rest of the spending cuts on Wednesday, unveiled by George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Tellingly, when the prime minister admitted that defence spending had been cut, he explained this entirely in terms of the previous Labour government's mismanagement of the Ministry of Defence. At no point did he suggest that defence spending might be traded off against civilian spending: in other words, he went to some lengths to avoid forcing the British public to choose between guns and butter.

None of that, of course, answers a bigger question that I also tried to touch on this in column: is this a second "east of Suez" moment, in line with the 1968 decision by the cash-strapped government of Harold Wilson to withdraw British forces from South-East Asia and the Persian Gulf?

One wise and senior official, pondering all the cuts, made the good point that the British public did not want another "east of Suez" moment, but that it could not be ruled out that in a few years we would all look back and realise that was what happened this week. The combined effects of the defence cuts, a 26% cut to the Foreign Office budget, and mucking about with the budget of the BBC World Service are all pretty unpredictable.

One last point, from the National Security Strategy that I wrote about earlier this week. I think that document, when combined with the defence review of Tuesday and other announcements about British soft power and diplomacy, offers the first outlines of a Cameron doctrine on foreign policy, that is both strikingly pragmatic and steers a clever path between mass British public opinion and the views of the foreign policy establishment.

In my column, I quote a fascinating double poll commissioned from YouGov by Chatham House in the summer (I have written about other parts of this poll on this blog before).

Whereas defence is an elite preoccupation in many European countries, in Britain it is the general public that is keen on hard power. Earlier this year, Chatham House, a think-tank, commissioned twin polls of the general public and a group of “elite opinion formers”. Asked to name assets that best served Britain globally, elite respondents named the BBC and British culture. Two-thirds said ethics should at times trump the national interest in British foreign policy. The public put the armed forces joint first with the BBC, called for Britain to remain a “great power” and—by a narrow majority—put national interests ahead of values.

I think Mr Cameron's foreign-policy doctrine combines hard and soft power. The National Security Strategy has stirring things to say about the military and intelligence services, but also vows an intense focus on trade promotion, and such soft power assets as the English language, London as a world city and financial hub, universities and the like.

And the pragmatism? Well, I think the Cameron doctrine steers a path between the hard power tastes of the general public, and that elite focus on values. Thus the government is increasing the overseas development budget, to the disgust of many conservative commentators and newspaper letter writers. But it is also steering much more of that aid to states whose disintegration could spread radicalism and violence to these shores. The strategy also has stern things to say about how British spooks must never work with torturers, but then it has strikingly cautious things to say about countries whose human rights are not in line with British values.

It may seem a small thing, but it jumped out at me as something to watch in the future. Having reported from some pretty nasty dictatorships in my day, I tend to a rather purist line when it comes to these things. I think Britain earns few advantages by forgetting its principles overseas, and sends a dangerous message that our values are a bargaining chip. Here is the section that I would worry about, if I were a dissident or NGO currently enjoying some form of help or moral support from a British Embassy:

Protecting our security requires us to work with countries who do not share our values and standards of criminal justice. In working with them to protect our country from terrorist attacks and other threats we do not compromise on our values. We speak out against abuses and use our own conduct as an example. But we have to strike a balance between public condemnation of any deviation from our values and the need to protect our security through international cooperation.

Translated from Whitehall-speak, I would predict Britain is about to do its championing of human rights behind closed doors, in civilised exchanges between ministers or diplomats. "Talking, not shouting", as various smooth-tongued western envoys used to say in Beijing, when describing their approach on Chinese human rights.

SAY what you like about the British: we manage our decline with style. Your blogger headed to Whitehall this afternoon for the unveiling of Britain's first formal National Security Strategy, first fruit of the National Security Council established by the coalition government in May. From The Economist's offices in St James's I passed streets lined with stucco mansions and the statues of explorers, generals and viceroys, cut through an autumnal park, crunched across the gravel of Horse Guards Parade, took a left on Whitehall, wove my way through the tourists posing next to real, live guards on horses (don't stand too close, they bite) and entered Admiralty House.

It is what you would expect: 18th century mansion, Winston Churchill had an official flat there, high ceilings, hefty marble fireplaces, huge oil paintings of naval battles on the walls. As they locked us grubby hacks into an elegant drawing room to read the embargoed report, a press officer gave us an unusually lengthy list of warnings. No breaking the embargo by email, phone, blog or tweet, he said. No naming the clutch of Whitehall mandarins and knights of the realm about to brief you. But also please be aware that this building is filled with fragile old furniture: please be careful where you sit. He was not making this up, it seemed. The dainty gilt sofa next to me bore its own little warning sign: "In the interests of preserving this delicate antique, please refrain from sitting on or moving this furniture."

To be rude, the scene captured how Britain is seen in a fair number of world capitals nowadays when it comes to strategic oomph. Love the history, love those old victories, love those clever mandarins. But don't put too much weight on Britain as a global hard power, or she might just snap.

Britain's relative decline was a known fact even before the credit crunch left the country's public finances looking so cruelly exposed. Every strategic survey published in the last few years has revolved around fixed landmarks like the decline of the west and the rise of the rest, the ending of America's moment as the undisputed superpower in a monopolar post Cold War world, soaring defence spending by emerging powers like China, the growing pacifism on display in much of Europe, the quest to find a new role for NATO (which duly led that alliance into Afghanistan), the strains and agonies faced by Britain in equipping military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is all familiar stuff, wearily so in fact.

It is certainly familiar terrain for senior American officials, who have been nagging other members of NATO to pull their weight for years. Last week, with press reports flying about public spending cuts to be unveiled in Britain this Wednesday on October 20th, the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered unusually blatant support to British military commanders lobbying to preserve their firepower.

Asked by the BBC whether the defence spending cuts planned by countries like Britain "worried" Washington, Mrs Clinton replied:

"It does, and the reason it does is because I think we do have to have an alliance where there is a commitment to the common defence. Nato has been the most successful alliance for defensive purposes in the history of the world, I guess, but it has to be maintained."

We will not learn for sure what cuts have been imposed on Britain's defence budget until tomorrow, but leaks have suggested one over-arching conclusion will be drawn by Britain's allies once the dust settles: this country will be one that contributes to alliances, rather than one that can mount major autonomous operations. Falklands Britain will be no more, in short. And how could it be otherwise?

This being so, you might expect the new National Security Strategy to be a document steeped in talk of shifting global alliances, assessments of how to co-operate with European or western partners and the need for Britain to leverage its increasingly limited resources in smart, nimble ways. You might expect a bracing introduction about the harsh, fast-moving world of today, in which Britain can no longer expect to be listened to by right.

But no. The strategy is a serious and interesting piece of work. It has newsworthy things to say about the most urgent threats facing Britain over the next 20 years, starting with international terrorism but also including hostile cyber attacks by states and cyber criminals as well as civil disasters like coastal flooding or an influenza pandemic. But overall, it comes across as well, just amazingly complacent and domestic in tone.

True, a preface signed by the coalition leaders, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, concedes that as the balance of global power shifts, it will become "harder" for Britain to project its influence abroad. The prime minister and his deputy take a swipe at the last Labour government, accusing them of leaving behind "scandalous" defence procurement decisions "which have racked up vast and unfunded liabilities, without delivering the type of equipment our forces actually need to fight modern wars."

So far, so modest. But when it comes to proposing solutions to the threats Britain faces, an extraordinary tone of confidence suffuses the document. Again and again, the impression is given that Britain will be safe as long as the government identifies threats and responds with a clever mixture of military power, development aid and soft power.

But nowhere, really literally nowhere that I can find in the 38 page strategy, do the authors discuss another risk that seems to me just as pertinent: that Britain will identify a major threat and not be able to do very much about it.

Early on, the strategy proclaims baldly:

"The UK is well placed to benefit from the world of the future. The National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom is: to use all our national capabilities to build Britain's prosperity, extend our nation's influence in the world and strengthen our security... The National Security Council has reached a clear conclusion that Britain's national interest requires us to reject any notion of the shrinkage of our influence."

Maybe it is just my melancholy nature. But I read this declaration and my jaw dropped. Does anybody in Britain, even under the chandeliers of Whitehall, expect Britain's relative influence and prosperity to grow in the future? The National Security Council can conclude what it likes, but I have a nasty feeling the world has a vote too. And the 21st century is not looking very friendly to mid-sized ex-colonial powers with an ageing population and a dumbed-down education system.

The most boosterish section is headed: "Britain's Distinctive Role", and trust me, I would love to believe it. The Britain described there is a "world renowned financial and business hub," and a "global leader" in science, technology, medicine, creative industries, media and sport. Economic growth in coming decades will be driven by the "world knowledge economy" and booming domestic consumption in places like China and India. With its leading financial, professional, creative and media services, our "world class universities and think tanks", Britain will be "well placed to benefit".

We are the heart of "many global networks", the strategy notes. We have an "outward-looking disposition". We are in a handy time-zone between America and Asia, we are in the European single market, the G8, the G20, NATO, the European Union and the Commonwealth and have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. London is second home to the decision-makers of many countries, and "this provides an unrivalled opportunity for informal influence of the kind that matters in the networked world." The English language gives us the ability to share ideas with billions of people. We have a diverse population, and we are home to 400,000 foreign students. We are good friends with America, the most powerful nation on earth.

My melancholy side notes that our outward-looking disposition has not stopped the coalition government calling for a fixed cap on non-EU immigration, to the horror of British business, while ministers grumble and brief that foreign students are a menace responsible for most of the growth in net inward migration in recent years. I note that Britons are not the only English speakers on the planet, though we are quite likely to speak only English. I note that Switzerland is also a second home to decision-makers and plutocrats from all manner of countries, but this has not automatically translated into Swiss diplomatic welly.

The pinnacle of self-confidence, though, comes in the section called "Risks to our Security." Forgive me for quoting at some length:

Most national security threats arise from actions by others: states or non-state actors, who are hostile to our interests. There is much we can do to reduce the likelihood of such risks occurring, on our own or with partners. We will directly disrupt adversaries such as terrorists; we will promote cooperation to reduce the motivation of states to be hostile to us; we will build alliances that make hostile acts against us more risky to their perpetrators; we will act to control the spread of advanced technology systems and the development of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; and we will promote development and combat poverty to reduce the causes of potential hostility. In many cases, we aim to tackle problems at root overseas, to reduce the likelihood of risks turning into actual attacks on us at home. But we cannot prevent every risk as they are inherently unpredictable.

I can think of another reason why Britain cannot prevent every risk. Even if we pursue all the perfectly sensible aims listed above, they may not work. They may not work because we are a middling-sized country, but frankly they may not work because even superpowers struggle with this stuff.

It is all very well to talk of acting to control the spread of nuclear weapons, for example. Britain is a member of the small club of countries that talks to Iran about its nuclear programme. British intelligence is all over Pakistan, and I suspect knows a fair old amount about what AQ Khan got up to in his day. But you know what? Countries that really, really want the Bomb have a habit of getting one.

It sounds equally smart to talk about using development aid to reduce potential hostility. But where is the evidence that it works? America has poured aid into Pakistan (ok, a lot of it straight to the military), and is not exactly loved on the Pakistani street. We have long-established development networks in Pakistan and we are about to increase aid spending in some flashpoints in Africa. That may well be a sensible thing to try.

But it is surely too glib to talk about promoting development and combating poverty as if it lies in the hands of Britain to bring that happy result about. Does aid help combat poverty? The evidence is mixed. Can Britain compete with new aid super-donors like China? Does it lie in our hands to tackle conflict at its roots? In Somalia? In Sudan? In Iran? I would like to think so. But I have my doubts.

Assuming that at least some of those doubts also lurk in the breasts of the experienced, thoughtful officials who work on British national security, why the boosterish suggestion in this strategy that the biggest risk faced by smart, connected, networked Britain is failing to predict a new threat?

A cynical answer to that question is that this National Security Strategy is as much about domestic politics as it is about global security. With the Conservative-led coalition about to announce whopping cuts to public spending, including some painful cuts to Britain's armed forces, there is a clear advantage to suggesting that Britannia is not about to be a humbled, diminished power.

Is that unfair? Well, I refer readers to page 14 of what purports to be a policy document about geopolitics. At the end of a long and thoughtful list of threats to British security comes paragraph 1.9. It begins:

However, the largest single challenge facing the Government affects both national security and all other areas of public policy. Our most urgent task is to return our nation's finances to a sustainable footing and bring sense to the profligacy and lack of planning that we inherited. We cannot have effective foreign policy or strong defence without a sound economy and a sound fiscal position to support them.

That statement, I would suggest, is both an accurate statement of fact, and a slightly cheap piece of party politics. The end result is something not quite worthy of the name National Security Strategy.