Glen Newey

In words that the secretary of state for education has caused to be placed in every school in the land, ‘He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord’ (Deuteronomy 23.1, King James Version). Like the rest of the good book, this instils a useful lesson for life: it never rains but it pours. You get kneed in the nuts behind the bike shed, only to learn you’re not going to heaven either.

Why do people love the queen? Or, to put a slightly different question: what do people love when they love the queen? Whatever it is, this week’s Guardian/ICM poll suggests that a lot of people still do. Sixty-nine per cent of respondents thought Britain would be worse off, and only 22 per cent better off, without her. As politicians sink ever deeper in public esteem, so the queen rises. Over the coming weekend the country’s usually scabrous public sphere will turn, as it did when Diana croaked, as deferential as Zimbabwe’s.

Facebook’s $106 billion flotation last week offered a punt at $38 a share on a firm that databases consumer identities. Nobody knows, and some doubt, whether Facebook can convert that into dividends. But Google’s tussles with pseudonymous users like Identity Woman and BotGirl Questi show that ‘identity’ is big business both as cognomen and bundles of individuating data.

Yesterday evening I had nothing better on, so I went round to some friends’ for a catch-up. Nothing too fancy, just a kitchen supper with some old muckers. Phipps the footman – no doubt a professional alias – met me at the front door of the flat and put me through the in-house baggage scanner before escorting me straight into the kitchen. It was the usual scene familiar from descriptions of London labouring-class homes. Plasma screen the length of the Bayeux Tapestry, blaring away over the Aga. Fair-trade bush-meat in the Smeg. Enamelled jerrycans brimful with bio-diesel.

According to classical Garbage Can theory, set out in a landmark 1972 article by Marshall Cohen, James March and Johan Olsen, bureaucracies are essentially chaotic systems. In the public policy soup, policy entrepreneurs vie to find problems to which they can offer a solution. With an ad hoc cast of contributors, policy-making is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for a decision situation in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision-makers looking for work. George Osborne makes an unlikely Garbageman.