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Stoke Newington, North London

It had been a dispiriting day for Gabriel. She had come home late to find Ray in an equally bad mood. They had sniped at each other over a late supper before Ray sought refuge with a pile of year eleven coursework in the downstairs bedroom they used as a study, leaving Gabriel to watch the TV.

The news reflected Gabriel’s mood. There was more on the PM, who was under attack from his own backbenches for failing to stop the unrest on the streets, and a bombardment of bleak news stories. A teenage boy had been stabbed in a Birmingham park for holding hands with another boy. They had been set upon by a gang of youths. An Asian soldier had been beaten up by three white kids in Grimsby’s shopping centre and was fighting for his life in hospital. An ambulance had been pelted with stones during a skirmish between rival gangs in one of the most deprived estates in Bradford.

What the hell was going on? And then, between the splurges of violence and anger, politicians and commentators from the left and right blaming each other, blaming teachers, blaming parents, blaming immigrants, blaming everyone but themselves.

Lesley Hogarth was urging for calm, while insisting that Britain’s identity was under threat. Harry Drake, the expelled opposition MP who’d made himself a name and a laughing stock dressed as a cowboy on a TV dancing competition, was stirring it too. The news had a clip of him addressing a rally in Tower Hamlets calling for a general election, calling for a new Muslim political party and demanding the streets to be ‘swept clean’ of the enemies of Islam. Whatever that meant.

After thirty minutes, Ray came in and Gabriel switched it off. She wanted a shower badly now.

‘More shit?’ asked Ray.

‘Remember when we used to complain the news was boring? God, I almost miss those days.’

‘You shouldn’t watch it. It brings you down.’

‘This,’ she waved at the TV, her voice a little too loud, ‘doesn’t bring me down, Ray. What brings me down is the fact that the entire world seems to have lost the plot. We’ve gone back to sodding medieval times.’

‘Come on, love, you’re exaggerating. It’s the bubble of your job, it distorts your perspective. You see the worst bits of life, and you focus on the worst people. Step back – it’s not that bad. Most people are good people. Most people don’t go on Twitter to abuse strangers. Most are just getting on with living their lives shopping, laughing, watching TV. Being boring. Being human.’

Gabriel stared at Ray. ‘Don’t give me that. It’s not me living in a bubble, it’s you. I see what’s going on every single day. And of course most people aren’t evil. I’m not saying they are. But it’s worse out there than it was five, ten, twenty years ago. If you can’t see it, you’re deluding yourself.

‘How did this happen – this appeal to the lowest common denominator in politics and this turning of debates about serious issues into shouting matches that means Hogarth and her like turn from rent-a-mouth columnists into supposedly serious political leaders? This rudeness that’s seeped through public life? The abuse heaped upon politicians by the voters and the press? The cynicism?’