Old romantics should applaud online dating

Irecently went to a Tinder wedding. If you had told me, a few years ago, that thoughtful young people of the professional classes would use this means to find their lifelong partners, I would have laughed in your face. Now I see its logic.

All successful new technology makes the previous systems seem clunky. As great novelists such as Jane Austen have often described, nothing was clunkier than finding the right mate. It was circumscribed by distance, parents, religious denomination, whether you were invited to the right party etc. Even if your marriage was not, in a formal sense, “arranged”, your life – especially if you were a woman – was controlled. Your choice was often more apparent than real.

In more recent times, these restrictions weakened, but it did not necessarily become much easier to meet suitable people. Dating services, pre-internet, were seedy and cumbersome. Now that people are used to making important choices online – selecting a mortgage provider, for example, or a house – it is not such a great step to finding someone you might love.

Obviously (as with the house), you are a fool if you “buy” without inspecting, but that is not what happens. Services like Tinder don’t get rid of the need to get to know the other person directly: they simply cut out a huge amount of wasted time on both sides. They can protect you from maniacs and bores, because you can check their friends on Facebook, and sometimes find someone you already know as a reference.

Tinder does reduce the pure romance of serendipity – the chance encounter on public transport, the eyes-meet-across-a-crowded-room effect. There is real romance, all the same, in the thought that two people have navigated the ether and discovered – amid the millions of people theoretically available – the one they seek. This process was comically but touchingly described by the groom in his speech at the wedding. Clearly, love remained just as much an adventure for him and his bride as it was for past generations.

Appearing on the BBC’S Question Time last Thursday, I was the only Leave supporter on a panel of five. This imbalance is, of course, attributable to the BBC’S well-known bias.

I need not dwell on this point. What interested me more was the attitude towards the subject of the four Remainers I was sitting with. Not one of them said they still support the position they voted for two years ago.

Claire Perry, a government minister, said she was working for Britain to leave. Barry Gardiner, Labour’s trade spokesman, said, somewhat less clearly, the same thing, thus demonstrating that the shadow Cabinet is well-named. Gina Miller, the famed Remain campaigner, was remarkably opaque: any viewer not knowing her past could not have worked out what her real view was. Piers Morgan said directly that he had voted Remain, but that he now believed in the full Brexit.

Why this shift? With the possible exception of Morgan, who seemed genuinely to have changed his mind, I felt my co-panellists were taking tactical positions. Ms Perry was following Theresa May (being a minister, she has to), and sounding more Leave-ish to conceal the fact that the actual policy has just become much more Remain-ish. Mr Gardiner was shadowing her. Ms Miller, I think, was trying to appear open-minded, so that she can call for a second referendum (though she has violently attacked the principle of the first) as an unprejudiced supporter of democracy.

My conclusion, based on this cross-section, is that the popularity of a no-deal Brexit is rising (hence Morgan’s hard Leave stance), that the out-and-out Remainers (represented by Ms Miller) are wearing camouflage and that the two main parties prefer a state of utter confusion to a showdown within their own ranks.

Shortly after the referendum, I argued that Vote Leave should not have disbanded, since the battle had only just begun. They should simply reform as the 17.4 Million Committee, I suggested. Two years on, since there is no other leadership available, this becomes even more necessary. The programme was in Dartford, which has a great many commuters. The warm-up question – the one that doesn’t go on air – was about Mark Boon, the boss of Govia/ Thameslink’s network operations. Last week, Mr Boon herded second-class passengers standing on a crowded train out of first class and then took two seats for himself. Judging by the attitudes of the audience, who were restrained and courteous on all other subjects, I would say that railways will cause almost as much trouble for this Government at the next election as a botched Brexit.

The question reminded me of a brilliant piece by the late Auberon Waugh, written about 40 years ago. He described travelling in one of those old first-class carriages with a corridor outside them, on a bank holiday. He was alone in a carriage for six. The train was otherwise very crowded. Secondclass passengers spilled into the corridor and started debating among themselves whether they should storm Waugh’s almost empty carriage and sit down. Waugh glared horribly at them through the glass. They dared not enter. This led him to conclude “there will never be a revolution in England”. If the Dartford mood is anything to go by, I doubt if his conclusion still holds.

I should mention, by the way, that the pay-off line of Waugh’s story was that he was secretly travelling on a second-class ticket.