That was new: ‘flash mob’ now an offhand part of the news vocabulary. A month ago that would have been ‘so-called’. He watched the images for a while: kids in Peckham in hoods or with scarves over their faces, running, in the sunshine, which looked odd, to see all that energy while it was still light. Cut to a mass of kids who looked much more middle class, bushy beards and skinny shirts, rushing into the foyer of some big corporation. Spatley watched the protestors; many of them were holding their phone cameras in the air, like crosses to repel evil, as they upended a vat of what looked like blood but was surely some sort of dye onto the PA’s chair. That imagery wouldn’t play well for them: a scared black PA, chubby, nice, furious at them. The problem was that you couldn’t see their faces, with the front row of the protestors wearing those aristocrat masks with top hats, some of them sporting the little capes.

To him, those masks just looked like giving in. As if revealing who you were these days was not just dangerous, as they wanted to imply, but actually impossible. Face coverings weren’t allowed at certain protests now; he’d voted for that legislation. He’d thought of Muslim women as he did it, and hoped for some care to be taken in the specifics, but, well, the debate just hadn’t gone in that direction.

He noted that there was long brunette hair spilling out of the back of one of the masks in the news clip, small, youthful breasts filling out the crisp white shirt. No silver-topped walking canes this time, though, not since the first of these protests, when the police had classed the canes as weapons and charged right in, and several of the protestors had suddenly understood what they’d got into. ‘Protestors’ – was that the right word, even? I mean, come on, they talked about being against ‘the cuts’ – that was all he ever heard from them, ‘cut cut cut’ – but could many of them even sum up the economic case against? ‘What do we want?’ ‘It’s complicated!’ That had got a laugh and a groan of annoyance at the same time from the audience on Have I Got News for You the other night, as if a satirical show should only have a go at the government and not at a bunch of bloody students. He wished he could sit them down and try to persuade them that he and his colleagues on the Liberal Democrat side of the Coalition were actually doing their best to hold the fucking Tories back.