I have just finished reading Other People’s Money, Justin Cartwright’s superb novel. Cartwright is one of our most gifted observers of contemporary life, but he has excelled himself in this story about a venerable British bank over-exposed to sub-prime mortgages. The bank is hiding the losses fraudulently while tipping the wink to a government minister, who doesn’t want to rock the establishment boat. I’m sure that never happens in real life.  Here is Julian Trevelyan-Tubal, scion of the banking dynasty, reflecting on how much he has come to loathe “this insistent belief that this money production is a superior form of activity and that those who deal in it are superior people. More and more he sees that these people have pulled a gigantic con trick on the rest of humanity. And now they believe their own myths.”  Indeed they do. We collaborate with those myths every time a reporter on the TV news explains that it is difficult for the Government to clamp down on City bonuses for fear it will “drive the talent abroad”. If it’s possible to impose a cap of £26,000 on benefits in an attempt to stop public money being wasted, then why is it so hard to impose a cap on bonuses at RBS, which is 83 per cent owned by you and me? Or are the poor just easier to pick on than the rich, Prime Minister?  It is not enough to strip Fred Goodwin of his knighthood, or even of his outrageous £370,000 annual pension. (He should be paying us, by the way.) What is needed now is a prosecution or a public inquisition into the banking catastrophe, exactly like the one being carried out by Lord Leveson into press standards. We need to see people squirming on the stand – the “quants” who came up with the mathematical formulas which created the golden delusion that chickens need never come home to roost. And we need a senior banker or two to be shamed publicly “pour encourager les autres”.  David Cameron says that there should be no more reward for failure at the same time as he is trying to “persuade” Stephen Hester – technically a government employee – to take a reduced bonus of a million pounds. The time for soft-pedalling and persuasion is over. No more Mr Nice Guy, Dave. As Julian Trevelyan-Tubal observes, these people have pulled a gigantic con-trick on the rest of humanity, yet still they tell us this is a crime with no criminals.  “They all seem to have been guilty of a kind of fraud by pretending they knew what they were doing with other people’s money,” says the young heroine of Justin Cartwright’s novel. Indeed, they do, honey. So can somebody please jail a banker?  The box-set treachery that could lead to a killing  I seem to be in a minority, but I am rather enjoying the insights we are gaining into life in the Cameron household. First, the Prime Minister let slip that he put the lights on the Christmas tree, but Samantha made him take them down again and re-did them herself because he hadn’t done it right. Of course he hadn’t. Running a country is poor preparation for being the wife’s domestic elf.  Then Dave disclosed that he and Sam had been arguing over the box set of The Killing 2, the glum but moreish Danish detective series. (When I interviewed the PM, he pointed out that the darkly hypnotic heroine, Sarah Lund, and Samantha look very alike, which they do.)  Funnily enough, we have been having the same fight in our house over the same box set. What happens is that you finally get the kids to bed and settle down to catch up on the DVDs of the must-see TV you never get to see. Wine is poured. You feel happy and even a bit smug. Here we are doing something nice together like adults for a change! Then, one of you is so tired that you fall asleep and the other cannot resist watching into the small hours, maybe even getting two or three episodes ahead. This is fatal.  Even worse, one of you goes out and returns to find that the other has had a sneaky evening alone with the box set. This is a new and wounding kind of infidelity. How could he/she? Your chances of getting back in sync are nil, now your spouse knows that the blonde aide was having an affair with the minister in hospital who hasn’t really had a heart attack after all. Suddenly, your relationship is in crisis. There are issues of trust. One feels resentful, cheated of a shared pleasure. The other is longing to find out what happens on the next disc and hates the fact that a dozy partner makes him/her feel bad about indulging this addiction. I know one woman who sought a divorce after the husband started a box set of House without her. Himself, meanwhile, has never forgiven me for watching the final two episodes of The Killing while he was away. He’d rather I’d spent the night with Johnny Depp.  These are treacherous waters. Relate should set up a box-set helpline. The PM is quite right to take Samantha out for a “date night” to make up. Did he prang the nanny’s car because he was exhausted from spending half the night in thrall to Sarah Lund, his wife’s lookalike? Beware the box-set affair, Prime Minister. In our house, the likely outcome of The Killing 2 is murder, though not necessarily in Denmark.  Miranda Hart is such a blissfully reliable source of laughter; who knew she could do tears? In Call the Midwife, BBC1’s new Sunday-night drama serial, the sitcom star plays Chummy Browne, a great lummox of a posh gel who is so clumsy she could knock herself out brushing her teeth. How on earth was this liability on a bicycle going to turn into a midwife who could help poor women in the East End give birth?  Based on the books by Jennifer Worth, Call The Midwife has been called “cosy and predictable” by certain critics. What were they watching? Here was some of the most moving acting shown on prime time for many years. The labour scenes are so authentic – I actually groaned and prepared to bear down at one point – because the cast, the director and producer had to learn to deliver a baby. On Sunday night, as well as Chummy there was Mary, a homeless Irish girl who had been snared into prostitution. I have rarely seen a young mother’s love for a baby communicated with such skill or such heartbreak. As for Miranda, the scene where she delivered a breech baby was a masterclass in tenderness and restraint.  In a week when there was yet another row about the lack of women on TV, here was a terrific drama which was scripted by a woman (the brilliant Heidi Thomas), directed by a woman (the peerless Philippa Lowthorpe) and acted by glorious actresses from Jenny Agutter to Pam Ferris. So now we know what we need to do to get ahead in telly; all together, ladies: PUSSSSHHHH!  Thanks to everyone who sent in their predictive texting disasters. They brightened these pewter days in East Anglia. Paul Ryan, who works for a sports broadcaster, got a good response to his message trailing a Napoli game, but was a bit dismayed to realise that colleagues were replying with requests for further information about “the Nipple game”.  Alan Cooke’s parents live in Spain so they are known as Madre and Padre. “Typing Madre with predictive text comes up as obese,” reports Alan. Oh dear.  Sheila Hazeldine’s husband Rex sent texts to friends and family from Delhi and all arrived with the sign-off “love sex”. Sue Gewanter texted from outside a friend’s house that she was “At door.” The phone sent the slightly more glamorous, if puzzling, “At Dior.”  Suzanne Wilson’s “catalogues would be nice” was received by her electrician as “fatalities would be nice”. Still, it could be worse. Gerard Parker reports that a grandmother was trying to text her grandchild, but the first word the Predictive Text Genius came up with was “bomb”. In a fluster, the poor woman pressed send three times, not to the child’s mobile, but to his school, thus triggering a full evacuation and search. I understand that the police and the school were very understanding.
Unfortunately we lack a dramatic focus for public rage such as the bankers’    bath-plug or the bankers’ duck-house.