What do you call it when you appear to slander a specific community by attributing qualities to all of them that are less than wildly flattering? A new word is definitely needed. It's certainly not racism. But it's clearly a modern media sin.

When Anne Robinson shared with BBC viewers her feelings about the noble Welsh race, she got it in the neck. When Boris Johnson offered an opinion about the fair city of Portsmouth, another media storm erupted. And last week, when an Antiques Roadshow presenter implied that the uniformly gorgeous women of Shropshire might have had fat ankles he was forced, like all the others, to recant and repent. The message is clear: you generalise at your peril.

The Antiques Roadshow case is particularly piquant because the culprit (or victim) was uttering an unconscious aside. Rupert Maas, on noting the sturdy leg of a maiden in a Talmage masterpiece, muttered that she appeared to have a “Shropshire ankle”. He was pursued without mercy by the sinuously limbed maidens of that great county until he abased himself. The phrase had arisen, he explained, because the hilliness of Shropshire had, historically, given rise to extra muscle tissue around the ankle of its hard-working young women.

I've no idea if its true but the phrase clearly has a history. You don't make something like that up on the spur of the moment. Not least because the whole idea of county distinctions has been eroded in our lifetimes. It used to be the case that county identities were almost the primary identity of most Englishmen and women. The Georgian poet, Edward Thomas, said he wanted to write in the accents of a Surrey peasant, that was a hundred years ago, and George Crabbe is a Suffolk writer before he's anything. But as we know from The Times letters page, traditional county identities and postcodes (anyone for Hants, let alone Salop) are fading from the consciousness of many.

I was struck, for example, when I was in South Lakeland, as its now called, how faint was the memory of Westmorland in the minds of anyone outside its historic boundaries. When I told friends that that was where I was staying, most had never heard of it. I was also surprised to read of Frank Field, the quite wonderful MP for Birkenhead, being described in this paper as a member of the Lancashire mafia. The last time I looked Birkenhead sat where it had always sat, at the top of the Wirral peninsula in the historic county of Cheshire.

People know whom they pay their council tax to and the name of their police force. But in a country where there are local authorities called Three Rivers and police forces called Thames Valley or West Mercia then counties occupy less mental, and emotional, space than ever. I find it sad that we think less and less of Shropshire ankles or Kincardineshire necks (all that sun at harvest) or Westmorland knees (rendered knobbly by the fells) and more and more of Brontë Country or the Borders or the M4 corridor or other manufactured locations. But then I do possess an Aberdeenshire squint - things often seem better when you're looking backwards.

Remember Housman's hills

Shropshire will probably always survive in the wider public memory, and I certainly hope it does because of A.E. Housman's poetry. But how many of us can remember much of The Shropshire Lad? The most famous line - the reference to blue remembered hills - has been immortalised because of Dennis Potter's TV play, not because of Housman's genius. Indeed, the couplet most people are likely to remember is the cruel parody of his tragic/melancholic buttoned-up homoerotic longing:

“What still alive at twenty-two,/ A clean upstanding lad like you?”

Speaking up for Jim

I've been reading one particular book in preparation for my speech at the Labour Party conference today (no, Phil Webster hasn't missed a story - I haven't defected - I'm speaking at a fringe meeting on Broken Britain organised by The Sun. Alongside Cherie Booth as it happens, whose memoirs are much, much, better than most reviewers acknowledged).

But it's not Speaking for Myself that I've been buried in as preparation for my trip, but an even more absorbing inside story. Bernard Donoughue's diaries of his time as political adviser to Jim Callaghan are proving gripping reading. The diaries have attracted a fair amount of media attention because comparisons have been made between Callaghan and Brown. Others have dwelt on them so I shan't. And also it frees to me to emphasise the main impression any reader is left with - the sheer impressiveness of Callaghan's achievement against the odds. Battered by terrible economic news, compared invidiously with his predecessor and belittled by smart, Establishment figures, he brought order to the public finances, stood for sanity in the Labour Party and had the right ideas on education, law and order and personal responsibility. All that, and he consistently outpolled his party and dominated the Commons while taking a nap for half an hour every day just before Prime Minister's Questions. Another time, another time.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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