true blue

I will always remember where I was when I learned that Mrs. Thatcher was dead. I was at the Ashridge Business School near Berkhamsted, on an awayday with work, and a member of the Senior Management Team had just sat down next to me and said, in his drily camp way: 'So: Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher.'

I was bewildered: was this some kind of test? What did Margaret Thatcher have to do with anything? I suppose I said something like: 'Uh?', and then it was explained to me. Next day, she was still dead, and her condition has remained stable throughout the week. Not so the country - half are celebrating her death with street parties and the other half are expressing their outrage on the Jeremy Vine show. One listener said of the partygoers: 'These dinosaurs are acting like low-lifes.' But if dinosaurs can't act like low-lifes, then I'd like to know who can.

Meanwhile the Daily Mail is serialising the memoirs of one of her aides - memoirs it describes as 'intimate yet explosive.' Which doesn't sound like a very auspicious combination.

Some are even questioning whether Mrs. Thatcher was a woman. I would go further - I don't think she was a real person. She was a performance. If she had really been as formidable as her legend dictates, then wouldn't she have made more of a nuisance of herself after she stopped being PM? Instead, she crumbled. She had been given a role to play, and she played it enthusiastically enough, and when it was taken away from her she didn't know what to do with herself. She was no Meryl Streep.

But back to the Ashridge Business School. No agenda had been circulated for this, which filled me with dread. Last time we went to a meeting with no agenda we were blindfolded and forced to feel oddly-shaped pieces of plastic as a test of our communication skills - a test we failed with flying colours. This time round I was anticipating a 'short sharp shock'. We'd be sleeping in a dormitory and made to stand by our beds while a man shouted at us: 'Call yourselves a Comms team? I've had better Comms teams crawling out of my arse!' And so on. Then we would be forced to do an assault course dressed as pantomime horses.

I was wrong. No wine with dinner was the worst of it. There were a few fun and games presided over by a guy called Larry, but nothing too serious. I drew an owl. We were encouraged to relate our character traits to a four colour quadrant, to find out which colour predominated – I was blue ('cautious, formal, questioning') but with streaks of yellow and green. I have to say, I was initially inclined to dismiss this as bullshit, but as we were leaving I was surprised to hear people freely discussing their colleagues in these terms - 'I don't think she's yellow.' 'He's blue but he thinks he's green.' It was like a bizarre outbreak of psychedelic racism. But everyone noted Larry's peculiarly intense stare – maybe we'd all been hypnotised. Just as well he hadn't described our traits in terms of farm animals or we'd have been mooing and clucking all the way home.

downward mobility

Apparently they've relaunched the British class system. There was a test you could take on the BBC news website – two minutes and five questions later I learned that I was a member of the 'precariat'. What? What the hell? My thoughts exactly. I had started out thinking in a vague comfortable kind of way that I was probably lower middle-class, something in the middle anyway, nothing to get too worked up about, but then it turns out I'm something I've never even heard of. I have now. The precariat are the dispossessed. People on the edge of society. The bottom of the heap – or maybe not even in the heap. That, apparently, is what you get for living in rented accommodation and socialising with shop assistants.

The precariat, so I read, are characterised by lacking a stable identity (well yes, I can identify with that) and are likely to be attracted to far right political organisations - a tendency I must admit I haven't noticed in myself, though it might explain my strange obsession with the Daily Mail.

VILE PRODUCT OF WELFARE UK, blared its headline on Wednesday, describing 'Shameless' Mick Philpott, a serial benefit claimant who, along with his wife and a friend, plotted to burn down his own house (partly in a quest for a new and bigger one) while taking care to rescue his six children from the blaze. They managed the first part but unfortunately not the second. Thus they have been charged with manslaughter, though in the article which followed it was difficult to separate hard facts from fevered adjectives. Poor Mick could hardly have sex on a snooker table without it being described as 'sordid' - the sex, that is, not the snooker table, the snooker table was blameless. Well, maybe not, as it was a defining feature (along with 'two giant TV's) of what the paper was calling The House Of Depravity. The House Of Depravity! Sounds like it should be burned to the ground. Oh right, they've tried that.

Mick had previously featured on a programme with Anne Widdecombe and on The Jeremy Kyle Show, another thing for the Mail to sneer about, though his appearance in the paper only seemed like a continuation of his antics in the entertainment industry. Beneath the article's characteristic Daily Mail tone of voice (perhaps best described as 'ostensibly outraged yet secretly aroused') you could sense the journalists' excitement at so much good stuff coming their way. But it wasn't all fun and games. They were not unafraid to make a political point out of this tragedy, namely that the Welfare State was responsible. And you thought it was just liberals who blamed society.

Now, seemingly taking his cue from the Mail, George Osborne is saying that 'questions should be asked' about whether 'people like Mick Philpott' (Narcissistic psychopaths? Snooker enthusiasts? All benefit claimants?) should be entitled to state funding. The idea that the government is taking its cue from the Daily Mail is worrying, though as a member of the precariat, the idea of a swing to the right leaves me secretly aroused.

The absolute worst thing about the precariat – I speak as someone who has only just joined, or only just become aware of having joined – is their name. It isn't something you can speak with pride. Or even shame. It's just awkward. Perhaps its time to rally the faithful under the banner of a new name. Scum? Dregs? The future is ours. All we need is a charismatic leader. Mick Philpott is sadly unavailable.

my celebrity lifestyle

It has always seemed to me that being a celebrity must give rise to a kind of semi-benign paranoia in which you think everyone is staring at you - and this is experienced as a good thing, by and large. I was thinking of this while watching Matteo Garrone's excellent film Reality, in which a Neopolitan fishmonger has an audition for the Italian Big Brother and is so convinced he's going to get in that he sells his shop and gives away his possessions, certain that people from the show are studying his behaviour with a view to finding out if he's worthy of being in the house - at one point, he even suspects a cricket in his living room of being an employee of the TV company, sent to spy on him.

No such concerns trouble me, since I live in Brentwood, home of TOWIE, and am thus effectively already in the Big Brother house. The Zeitgeist is all about me. Across from where I live – according to their internet connection – is 'the Brentwood OC', or, to give it its full name, Brentwood Osteopathic Centre, where all the cool kids go to get their back problems sorted, and beneath me is Skin Solutions, a salon in which, so I imagine, young women have their skin removed and replaced with tough orange exoskeletons. One sees the results of this terrifying process in the streets every day.

Further into town I have witnessed (the other Saturday, in the daytime) an enormous queue stretching right down Crown Street and into the High Street. 'So it's true!', I gasped. 'The only way is Essex!' I had to resort to national television to find out what was going on in my own neighbourhood, but Sunday's episode of TOWIE made everything clear: Joey Essex had opened a new shop!

The Brentwood Gazette, however, was less than thrilled. Nightmare On Crown Street was its headline, with Joey presumably cast as Brentwood's own Freddy Krueger, a strangely-dressed man creeping into the dreams of young girls and boys. Well, they have a point there, but it was a surprise to learn that what I saw as a sedate queue (or 'que' as Joey, on Twitter, would have it) was in fact a hysterical mob. But not everyone loves TOWIE. Even ITV2, which shows it, has taken to putting the word 'Plebs' in the corner of the screen while Gemma, Bobby et al are chatting away beneath it. I think that this is an ad for the comedy series that follows it, but I can't help but suspect a little editorialising.