Man must strive and striving he must err”, wrote Goethe. I have striven and I have erred. I now see it. Accept my apologies.

The moment of recognition came when, last Thursday, my local newspaper arrived carrying the following banner headline, “Switch to 4x4 saved my life, says motorist: call for trees to be axed before someone is killed.” A Mr Andrew Lipton had been driving down one of our many leafy streets, when a large maple fell on his car. There were two morals as far as the newspaper report was concerned. First that dangerous trees should be felled. The second was contained in the approving sentence, “Mr Lipton had recently swapped his BMW convertible for the 4x4 and says the much-maligned gas-guzzler probably saved his life.”

Something within me, as they say, died. The logic of this article seemed to be that we would all be safer if only we travelled everywhere in 4x4s. Clearly, schoolchildren, skipping the few yards to the neighbourhood school, and young mums on the Starbucks buggy patrol, are even less well protected from unexpected tree-fall than a man in a BMW convertible. They should all buy Porsche Cayenne Turbos.

Ordinarily and on its own, I would have had no problem dismissing this story. But my difficulty, and one that I acknowledge today, is that so much that is said and written and polled indicates that I am the one who is out on a limb. Well, me and Daniel Finkelstein, also of these pages. When he wrote recently suggesting - very reasonably, I thought - that we take a less punitive and childish attitude towards our MPs, his column managed the almost impossible feat of attracting unanimous hostility from online commenters. To a person they excoriated our representatives as lazy, lying, swindling scumbags, and their defenders as apologists for a decadent elite.

“Is it me?” I thought. Or them? Am I really part of a metropolitan class that has lost touch with the realities of everyday life? Is their perception more valid, in many ways, than what I like to think is my truth? Here, in my shoes, stands the Hampstead columnist thinking that Britain is not in terminal crisis, but over there, in yesterday's comment box, is an articulate woman explaining support for the BNP in terms of how “a lot of little things add up” to rage. In Wellingborough, she explains, one in four of the homes in her road is now occupied by Eastern Europeans, Polish shops are opening up, in local supermarkets people speak to each other in Slav languages. And instead of feeling all sympathetic to her, my instant response is: “Yes, and what's the problem? We take over whole areas of the Spanish Costa, but we don't expect the locals to revive Franco and go marching around Benalmadena yelling 'Arriba Espana!'.”

But if Daniel's defence of the MPs was unpopular, Martin Samuels's piece last week on what we might call white-collar insurgency, was the most appreciated article of the season. You may remember that Martin effortlessly gathered up separate discontents, moulded them into one thunderbolt, and hurled it at the powers that be. The excessive cost of a Starbucks coffee, a friend being fined for failing to pay the congestion charge, the addition of administration charges to a credit card bill for match tickets: all these together represented the ripping off and bullying of ordinary Britons by the new exploiters, a class of extraordinary plasticity. Again the comments overwhelmingly endorsed Martin's view. Every synonym for “fury” was to be found in there, somewhere.

“There are more things in Heav'n and Earth,” Hamlet chided Horatio, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Had I become Horatio, so blinded by rational argument that I failed to spot a perfectly serviceable Ghost when one appeared? When Martin argued that the past 12 years of economic growth have been a sham, and that what is true is people's perception of their circumstances, wasn't it pedantic to say, “Well, no, real disposable incomes have risen for all sections of society”? If people think they're poorer, then they're poorer, aren't they? If they think that crime is rising, and they're afraid of it, what good does it do to argue that, in fact, crime levels are stable or falling?

Perhaps this is what the junior minister, Ivan Lewis, meant at the weekend when he appeared to chide his own Government for being out of touch with the concerns of “ordinary, hard-working people” on issues such as (nudge to the Right) immigration and (nudge to the Left) taxing the fat cats. I previously might have responded that tacking to the winds of prejudice would do nothing to make us richer or safer, but now I realise that I was wrong. Perception is reality and sometimes the most real thing about us is our sense of grievance.

The wise politician and the canny columnist understand this. They don't remind the whinger that he's richer than ever before, the hypochondriac that she's living longer than ever, the misanthropes that they've never taken more or longer holidays, the cabbie that he's never had it (or us) so good, the xenophobe that immigrants take the jobs that we often won't, the indebted that they were the ones who took out the loans, or the livid motorist that the problem is how to ration scarce driving and parking space in a world where everyone wants a car.

Of course, this has implications for policy. “Parking spaces are getting smaller,” a Susan Curhan told The Seattle Times recently. She'd just had a hard job parking her large 4x4 in a small space next to another large 4x4 at a shopping mall “It's crazy,” she went on. In fact the spaces were the same size as they'd ever been, and in my old incarnation I suppose I'd have told her to change her vehicle. But now I see this as a doomed exercise. Better just to increase the sizes of the parking spaces.

So, in my previous world, the one I inhabited up until March 31, I could have sneered at the local newspaper. I might have pointed out that, in terms of risk, 191 people were killed or seriously injured in my borough in road traffic accidents in 2003, most of them pedestrians or cyclists - compared with an annual average of three people killed in the whole of Great Britain by falling trees. Naturally I might have added that gas guzzlers tend to pollute the planet, while maples, elms, beech and other silent killers, act in the opposite way.

But this is April 1, and on All Fools' Day I am forced to admit that whereas before I thought we needed trees to save us from 4x4s, now I realise we need 4x4s to save us from the trees.