Betrayal in blue pinstripe?

摘要

Not long after Labour's first landslide victory, I attended a lecture by someone from the Department of Health. It was a rather odd experience. The DoH apparatchik had the appearance one would expect from superimposing all the features of an identikit box: a sort of homogenised Warren Beatty. His prose had the same sort of ramer amorphous allure. Both speaker and speech would not have looked out of place in the colour supplements, between an in depth profile of Liz Hurley and a full page advertisement for Haeagen-Dazs ice cream. And yet after I had listened to the speech I felt oddly better, in the same way one does after listening to Alastair Cooke on the radio: a wiser person, a confidante. It took some years for the sense of betrayal to be complete.