I’m hugely in favour of this Roman Catholic raid on Church of England clergy and laity. It’s always best if people emerge in their true colours, and I am (for instance) forever trying to persuade foaming-at-the-mouth Europhobes that they really ought to leave the Conservative Party and join Ukip.

Were I an Anglican I would feel spiritually uncomfortable with anyone who passionately believed that God hated the idea of women priests; and the more reactionaries Pope Benedict can gather around himself and his Church, the faster the whole thing will sink under the weight of its own weirdness.

There’s a world of difference between those who, born and bred in a religion, accept its weirder precepts with an embarrassed shrug, and change the subject, and those whose enthusiasm for the weirder precepts so takes them over that they feel driven by conscience to abandon one Church for another.

Beware the zeal of the converts. “As a Papist-in-the-pew,” a Catholic friend of a friend remarked to her yesterday, “I do hope we won’t now face an influx of misogynistic homophobes who like dressing up.”

Londoners walk it

Amazing — the discovery, reported in yesterday’s Times, that there’s an historic reason why those who want to stand still on London Underground escalators are supposed to confound the rules of the road and stand on the right. This fascinates me, not least because I’ve been pondering escalator behaviour for years. Londoners might be surprised to know that walking up a moving escalator is, in fact, in most places and at most times, exceptional behaviour: our metropolis, where for many it’s the norm, is unusual. Unless a fair proportion of the public are insistent on keeping the “passing lane” moving freely by walking, then the option is quickly lost because everybody starts standing all over the place, and one knot of recalcitrants fouls up the whole flow.

Manchester thinks itself a world city, but on the escalator at Piccadilly station they stand; as they do in the West End of London at Bond Street Tube station, which emerges into a shopping mall. Shoppers are not entirely serious people. People in hats almost never walk; and off-peak walking is less common. In neither Barcelona nor Madrid do people walk much, if at all, and it’s not often seen on the Continent.

Walker-quotient is a measure of the seriousness of an urban population and the importance of a city. The proportion of the travelling public who don’t think they have the time to stand around is a key indicator of the extent to which a place is peopled with serious players. On this measure — both within the United Kingdom and as compared with abroad — London wins hands-down.

Promises, promises

Re-reading party leaders’ conference speeches almost before the prose has gone cold, you do encounter the most appalling tosh. Is it all, I ask myself, meaningless? Well, I’ve combed through the Prime Minister’s Brighton speech and extracted 20 passages containing clear undertakings, many of an immediate nature. Gordon Brown promised:

• A ban on unwise bankers’ bonuses and disqualification of negligent directors

• A new £1bn national investment corporation

• Low carbon zones designated around the regions

• 10,000 extra skilled internships

• 10,000 extra green jobs partnered with green organisations

• A fiscal responsibility act

• Education/training for all until the age of 18

• A patient’s right to see GPs at evenings or weekends

• Placement of 16 and 17-year-old parents in a network of supervised homes

• Intervention in “every one” of Britain’s “50,000 most chaotic families”

• A requirement that parents pay for children's broken ASBOs

• Local powers to ban 24-hour drinking

• Making pubs pay for local nuisance

• A citizen’s right to timely responses from the police

• Action squads in council estates before Christmas

• A law obliging all British governments to spend 0.17 per cent of GDP on overseas aid

• Patients’ rights to one-week cancer-screening results

• Free personal care at home to the neediest elderly

• A power for constituents to sack offending MPs

• Removal of hereditaries from the Lords within a year

Already argument rages about Home Office moves to dilute, rather than beef up, bans on 24-hour drinking, while Downing Street insists new, different legislation is planned. Verdict? A tangle. My target? At least a third of them (7) in a tangle or abandoned by Christmas, One down, 6 to go. More news later.

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