I’ve got that Eighties feeling about this election

Last week, I appeared on the BBC’S Question Time, and realised with a shock that it must be at least 30 years since I first did so. What strikes me most is how little it has changed, except that nowadays there are five panellists instead of four. Then, the elderly chairman, Sir Robin Day, kept order with humorous charm. Now, David Dimbleby, well into his seventies, performs the same role with equal aplomb. Then, the studio audience was always more Left-wing than the general population, though the working-class members of the audience were usually more Rightwing than the middle-class ones. The same applies today.

Indeed, what has really happened is that everything has looped back. In my appearances in the intervening years, I was conscious of fighting against prevailing Left-wing assumptions, not only in the studio, but in the country. In the Tony Blair era, the Tories became the pariahs of politics. I remember defending the virtue of the word “conservative” to stony silence.

Now it feels like the Eighties once again. Although the Conservatives remain widely unloved, the Right of centre has the intellectual energy and the political guile. Mrs May, like Mrs Thatcher, dominates the public stage. Jeremy Corbyn, like Michael Foot, seems unaware of what is happening in the world outside his party, and his representatives preach – or rather, shout – to the converted.

In 1987, Linda Bellos, the Left-wing leader of Lambeth council, ranted at me for rejecting her policy of compulsory cervical smears (not long afterwards, I even got offered one myself by Islington’s Labour council). Last week, Angela Rayner, Labour’s schools spokesman, though charming off-stage, shouted so loudly on air that I put on mental ear-muffs and could scarcely take in a word she said.

It is this Groundhog Day feeling, more than any opinion poll, which makes me confident that the Conservatives will win well on June 8.

On the whole, programmes like Question Time reinforce my overall belief that voters in general are good judges. There is, however, one serious reservation. Most of us have an extremely poor grasp of figures. This means that we think terrible things are happening when they aren’t.

On Question Time last week, a woman claimed that the Tories were hitting pensioners so hard that we were returning to the Victorian era. She was exaggerating for rhetorical effect, of course, but you could tell she truly believed the gist of what she said.

Yet it is a fact of modern times, intended by the Tories for electoral reasons, that pensioners have got richer faster than any other large group. By 2020, the incomes of pensioners will have risen, on average, by 85 per cent over 25 years. Those of working-age families will have risen by only 37 per cent. Even with the loss of the pension “triple lock”, the winter fuel allowance for the better-off and the current low return on savings, most old people are richer than their age cohort at any time in the past.

Thanks to the poor understanding of numbers, old people can be quite unnecessarily frightened. It is the young who have much more reason to wake up in the small hours and tremble with financial fear.

Various local authorities are falling over themselves to deny cremation to the Moors Murderer, Ian Brady, even though they have not been asked. Spokesmen for semirelevant bodies vie for who can say the worst thing about the man.

Here, for example, is Chief Inspector Ian Hanson, chairman of the Greater Manchester branch of the Police Federation: “When somebody dies, it is natural in a civilised society that we should show compassion. However, there are exceptions, and this monster is one of them.”

Mr Hanson thinks that Brady “had no right to live and breathe the same air as those decent and dignified relatives whom he tortured for decades”. Brady “now takes his place in hell and he can rot there. As far as I am concerned, Ashworth Hospital can leave him out for the bin men.”

This is an unpleasant way to talk, especially coming from a policeman. In the civilised society to which Mr Hanson refers, any citizen is entitled to certain services. It would have been wrong, and grossly unprofessional, for Brady’s nurses to have ill-treated him because he was evil. They deserve thanks for performing their distasteful task properly for so many years.

For similar reasons, why should Brady’s body be dumped on the poor bin men? That would be unfair on them. For purposes of hygiene and what people now call “closure”, civilisation has certain rules about what must be done with a human body. There is no reason why Brady should not be cremated at a private ceremony and his ashes scattered.

A notable aspect of Brady’s evil was his implacable lack of compassion. No good can come of boasting about feeling none for him.

For the first time ever, I have not heard a cuckoo this spring. Staying with friends recently, I heard one in the early evening, and sprang up with delight, only to find that the sound was coming from their cuckoo clock in the kitchen. It is sad to think that future generations hearing the cuckoo’s call only in such artificial imitations will find it hard to believe that such a sound actually existed in nature.