Mrs Thatcher regarded her popularity as working capital, to be invested, often overdrawn, and even put in hazard. Mr Blair treats his as a miser treats his gold; it is to be polished, hoarded, constantly counted, but never exposed to risk.This explains the PM’s tense air even when everything seems to be going well. Though the public may be beguiled, he is aware of his own cynicism, and wonders how long the act can work. Mr Blair is like a burglar who has broken into a big house, bumped into the owner – and promptly been mistaken for an invited guest He now has an honoured place at table, but he cannot relax.

He is afraid that, at any moment, they will rumble him and send for the police.Flattery can never achieve a long-term hold on public opinion. Left to itself, that opinion is inchoate, fickle and anarchic. Representative democracy helps to give it an artificial air of coherence, but political leadership is also essential Good leaders do not follow public opinion; they create it. That is what Margaret Thatcher did, and what Tony Blair is incapable of doing. He had the opportunities, electoral and economic, to be a major leader; he has not taken them.Mr Blair sometimes consults one of his former schoolmasters, Eric Anderson. He should have listened to Mr Anderson on the hazards of courting popularity. Like any old-fashioned schoolmaster, his former teacher would have told the Prime Minister that young colleagues who try to be popular always end up held in contempt.But the problem highlighted by September’s fuel mutiny goes deeper than Tony Blair’s weaknesses.

Any political system must rely on some deference from the governed to their governors. If that disappears altogether, instability will follow.In retrospect, it might seem odd that the basic question in political philosophy – by what right the state can compel obedience from its citizens – has taken so long to find its way from the lecture hall to the streets. But once it has escaped from academic confinement, it will not be easy to recapture. September’s protesters may not have known it, but that was the question which they were asking.

It will be asked again if the Government tries to ban hunting – and after September, we now know that there are previously unsuspected limits on government’s tax-raising powers.There used to be an answer to the question of the rights of government: “the social contract”. This bore no relation to Harold Wilson’s bogus usage, which merely referred to a stitch-up between him and the TUC, and which accelerated the decline in politicians’ standing. The proper social contract was the one our ancestors were supposed to have signed, agreeing to circumscribe their rights and freedoms in exchange for protection from the state. Although no such event ever occurred, the original concept could at least claim – unlike the Wilsonian version – to be a pious fraud. As Coleridge put it, though the social contract was never signed, the idea of the social contract underlies every civilised society.So it still does, and it would be absurd to claim that Britain has become ungovernable. A strong political leader would still be able to marginalise questions of legitimacy and consent.

But in the absence of strong leadership, it is not inconceivable that the British people will gradually assert their right to renegotiate the social contract.
More from Bruce Anderson. A chance remark I made at lunch last week ended up on the front page of one the Sunday newspapers yesterday: “Film censor wants sex shop in every town”. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t surprised to see it, for the author had rung me up afterwards to discuss my views; the headline and the article were an accurate reflection of what I believe. A chance remark I made at lunch last week ended up on the front page of one the Sunday newspapers yesterday: “Film censor wants sex shop in every town”. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t surprised to see it, for the author had rung me up afterwards to discuss my views; the headline and the article were an accurate reflection of what I believe.
Parliament has decreed, through the Video Recordings Act passed in 1984, that there shall be a system for licensing pornographic videos, the Restricted-18 category, and this is part of the work of the British Board of Film Classification. The legislation also enjoins that such material shall be sold only through sex shops that have a local-authority permit.