Rob Blackhurst

John Humphrys relishes his status as the most feared interrogator in the busines

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John Humphrys relishes his status as the most feared interrogator in the business. One of nature's awkward squad, he is never happier than when excoriated by Downing Street for one of his "biased interviews" or discussed in grave tones at a BBC board meeting. Famously, Labour's chief Press Officer, David Hill, complained of the "John Humphrys problem" when Harriet Harman was given a basting over single parent benefits. It was a PR gift, sealing Humphys reputation. He emerged from the smoke benighted: the people's champion. Now, in Devil's Advocate, he ruminates on fifty years in journalism and sets out a pessimistic vision of national decline. His critique is a familiar one from the cultural right: Modern Britain has become enfeebled. Though we are immeasurably richer than fifty years ago, we have collectively lost our nerve; we are a Cry-Baby nation that sues over paving stones and cossets our children. We want a guarantee against any kind of "risk" and are only too ready to invoke our "rights" when life doesn't live up to our Ad Agency expectations.

It is a familiar story of national decline, extending to every sphere of life. Humphrys compares the nobility of the old tabloid press (perhaps selectively remembered) - unearthing injustice and corruption – with today's celebrity-driven rags. He sets out the role of the press in exposing the smoothings of the establishment after the Aberfan disaster: "The National Coal Board, who had owned the pit, had tried to claim that the tragedy was an act of God"

Ranging from Cheese to Lap-Dancing, he coins a neologism "Consumer Populism", as a catch-all term for Britain's manifold ills. Enemies are everywhere: in big-business, Brussels bureaucrats and grasping lawyers. He stands up for cheese-makers and small shop-keepers against a tide of regulations and rapacious capitalism.

His arguments are familiar to anyone with a familiarity with the Daily Mail worldview: striking a blow for the "commonsense" of the artisans against the decadent ruling elite. There are moments when all this feels like being buttonholed by a crusty old bore.

His blanket denunciation of the "compensation culture" fails to mention the obvious.

The sting of a million pound settlement forces management to treat malpractice and discrimination seriously. The glacial rate of change in the public sector can make this kind of shock necessary. Of course compensation has become an industry over which gulls circle with an eye for the main chance. Hillsborough, Dunblane police did not deserve multi-million pound settlements. But children who were the victim of shameful clinical negligence and need 24 hour nursing care probably need huge settlements to cover their future bills. Thankfully, we no longer look at health care as gruel for which we should be pathetically grateful. We've paid into the system – and expect services to be delivered properly.

Better than these unfocused rants is Humphrys' analysis of the way in which the media and politicians conspire to infantilize us all. He sees an unholy alliance between a hysterical media that identify possible "risks" to our health and populist politicians who respond to the hue and cry with an armful of regulations He's also right about the unaccountability of television, where now even documentaries on the BBC play fast and loose with the facts:

"Anyone who has ever worked as a researcher on a badly edited investigative programme knows the routine: find a scare, however thinly supported, try to make sure children are involved and, if possible, the odd death. And dig up some academic – to give "respectability to the case"

The sharpest and funniest passages are devoted to changes in our language – the inexorable spread of corporate argot. We are now "consumers" not "people; companies now refuse to use the word "profit" - the language of the public sphere is often characterised by evasion and falsehood. Humphrys is an effective scourge of the culture that clasps you by both hands and asks if you feel comfortable with being fired. He derides the PR values that tells everyone they must have an array of opinions on every subject, however ill-informed. "we must all be fluent and articulate, persuasive and polished, even when we have nothing to say and no need to say it"

This stuff could all come out of Living Marxism as well as the Libertarian Right. The state manufactures moral panics in order to make us feel powerless and in need of protection. The greatest of these threats is the marauding paedophile. Humphrys rightly sees paedophilia as "ranking right down the scale on the myriad of ways in which adults hurt children in modern Britain. This is of course a taboo that is invested with as much suspicion and hatred as witchcraft in the seventeenth century.

He also analyses the cult of the "expert": the New Age Therapists and Councillors whose unaccountable power is rarely questioned. They espouse their own version of the "truth" that is defended with all the dogmatism and inflexibility of the pre-Enlightenment Catholic Church. His chronicling of the emotional incontinence of the Diana age is well observed, if hackneyed. The equating of celebrity grief with private grief; the reaching for our wallet whenever there has been a "disaster"; the shameless confessional of the Daytime TV sofa.

Some of his criticisms are off target. The trend of a population becoming "ever more reliant on medical science" has started to be reversed. Personal preventative health care has become an obsession: people are eating better food, living for longer. The days of patients "demanding something to take" may be on the wane.

His analysis also lacks historicity. It assumes that the post-Victorian triumph of bourgeois domesticity was our historic state – rather than a short aberration. While right that there has been an increase in thoughtlessness and rudeness since the war, modern day London would seem a haven of law and order compared to the corruption of the 18 century. According to Humphrys violence is increasing exponentially. But he fails to ask whether modern Britain is more violent than fifty years ago, or whether there is more reporting. It seems unlikely that the loser of a Friday night pub brawl in the 1950's would diligently report their humiliation to the police.

At best, Humphrys is sane, funny and intelligent. At worse, he descends into Welsh gittism. "Aren't people stupid" seems to underlie much of what he argues. The tirade against commercialism goes nowhere. Yes, we all regret that football has become commercial, that supermarkets have put market towns out of business. But there is precious little we can do about it. And the complaints of the "coarsening of our culture" sound like the chiding of a particularly censorious maiden aunt.