Stop shouting at Hilary Mantel – there are real outrages to address

It started the other week, when David Cameron was in India. Although it started like a bout of malaria starts, so I suppose the more precise term would be ‘recurred’. There he is in Amritsar, touring the site of a massacre, possibly in that hat. And all Britain wants to know is what he thinks about what Hilary Mantel thinks about the Duchess of Cambridge. What, I thought to myself, the hell is wrong with us?

It’s a pretty expansive ‘us’, this, and it includes Cameron himself. ‘Actually, I haven’t read it,’ he should have said when asked, thousands of miles away, about an essay in the London Review of Books, ‘because I’m here on a trade mission in the second largest country in the world, perhaps you’ve noticed, where the right sequence of negotiations could earn actual hundreds of billions for our fading little country with its spiralling basket case of an economy. And that seems more pressing, really. But pop it over on an email, there’s a love, and I’ll take a peek on the flight back and try to come up with some soundbitey outrage for your news bulletin. If you still care by then. Which you won’t.’

But he didn’t say that, did he? He dived in for the same reason everybody else dived in, which is that we can get our heads around this one. It’s not vast, scary and awful. It’s neat and easy.

Now we have this week’s fuss, which is the Lord Rennard fuss. Me, I’m sitting this one out. I don’t have the energy. Although I do sometimes suspect that there was a small, unnoticed sexual revolution in about 1992 or so, which is why men of my generation and younger know that the way to have sex is to find somebody who is a dead cert to want to have sex with you, and then get drunk and try to kiss them.