My favourite book when I was 12 years old was about a bunch of neocon crypto-fascist rabbits. Almost every book I read until the age of 14 was about right-of-centre British mammals - aristocratic water voles, moles and toads battling legions of ill-mannered proletarian stoats; neo-Nazi otters; complacent bourgeois dalmatians and so on. After that I moved to the left a little and read books about German stormtroopers and skinheads.

It seems almost certain that I would have adored the work of J K Rowling, at least until the age of 15 - largely because Harry Potter is, as the French newspaper Libération puts it, a “sexist neoconservative autocrat”. And, according to Le Monde, “inherently capitalist”, who exists in an environment (they mean Hogwarts, I would guess) where “social sciences are as useless and obsolete as state regulation”.

A few years ago The Guardian alleged that Potter was also racist - a patrician swine to the poor house elves, plus they never celebrate Diwali or Ramadan at Hogwarts - and indeed disablist, there being a total absence of handicapped people playing Quidditch. More recently the writer Andrew Blake criticised Rowling for having reinvented “that apex of class privilege, the English public school, a literary conceit that problematises [sic] Harry Potter’s status as a role model and raises important social questions about the state of Blair’s Britain”. Oh, Lordy.

The old-fashioned left does not much like Rowling, despite her friendship with our new prime minister. The queues in Beijing for yesterday’s launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows may have been visible to the naked eye from space, but Chairman Mao would have sent every child to work in the rice fields for the rest of his or her life for such reactionary affiliations. The left would prefer the heroes of children’s literature to be more consensual, inclusive and democratic and demonstrate their opposition to Guantanamo Bay and homophobia.

Trouble is, that’s not the sort of thing they do - certainly not in those books that appeal to boys. It is hard to think of a more right-wing convocation than Roald Dahl, Richard Adams, Henry Williamson, Captain W E Johns, J R R Tolkien and the blessed Enid Blyton. Strength of character, elitism, common sense conservatism and a healthy dollop of sentimentality appeal to young boys - which is one reason why the ludicrous eco-leftie Woodland Folk never came close to supplanting Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys. And why Rowling herself is such a phenomenal success.

Most of us grow out of such an infantile view of the world - or we should do. Seeing an adult reading Harry Potter on a train is vaguely disquieting. “Get a grip,” flashes through my mind. Think about those poor bloody house elves.

Posh Spice, all things not so nice

Posh Spice - now there’s an interesting soubriquet for someone who is, when it comes down to it, a bland chav - has arrived in her spiritual home, Los Angeles. Last week she appeared on our TV screens looking for a suitably tasteless home for herself, David and their three children, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Malvolio and Hitler. Her stipulations seemed to be a swimming pool, faux marble bidet and a huge bedroom designed by Peter Stringfellow’s educationally subnormal nephew. Television has become a terribly confusing medium. I came across the Posh Spice programme by accident, flicking through the channels looking for one of those shows where working-class people are encouraged to spit and assault one another in front of a live audience. For ages I thought it was a clever parody, maybe the work of Armando Lannucci or Chris Morris; nobody, surely, could simultaneously be so stupid and arrogant? But no, it really was her, insisting she couldn’t be seen eating in public and treating her assistant to the sort of manners you might have shown a recalcitrant servant around the time of the Crusades. I suppose we get the celebrities we deserve - and the Americans even more so.

Cheers - it’s just what the drinking class needed

Extraordinary though it may seem, the advent of 24-hour drinking has not led to British people embracing the “European cafe culture” of sitting around in trattorias discussing important cultural and political issues while sipping sancerre. Instead everyone stays down the pub for the full 24 hours getting rat-arsed, pausing only to wander home to beat up the missus or to visit hospital to have an axe removed from their skulls. Astonishing, no? The figures suggest there’s been a threefold rise in the number of people admitted to accident and emergency units following the government’s relaxation of the licensing laws. This denouement was unforeseen. The problem is, we’re not all “European” - or to put it another way, middle class. That’s why we had fairly stringent licensing laws in the first place. The government’s libertarian impulse was informed by nothing more substantial than wishful thinking. It was a profound misunderstanding of the very people the Labour party was set up to represent.

- The news that almost the entire cabinet is on drugs will have shocked nobody, I suspect. Eleven members of the government, including eight cabinet ministers, have now confessed to having “dabbled” or “experimented” with illicit substances, usually while at university - and with the ubiquitous caveat that it was only “once or twice” and they didn’t like it that much and now know how terribly wrong it was, in a very real sense. It is not clear in every case precisely which drugs were consumed. I am guessing that in the case of Alistair Darling it was one of those very powerful elephant tranquillisers, the effects of which have not yet quite worn off. And God alone knows what Ruth Kelly took to make her the way she is: some appalling cocktail of lysergic acid, magic mushrooms and Catholicism which we need to prevent getting into the hands of our kiddies.

When I was at university - around about the same time as Kelly, as it happens - habitual drug use was divided strictly on party lines. The lefties smoked dope, which was seen as an eminently peaceable and consensual toxin, while the right shovelled sackloads of cocaine up its collective nose. Coke was seen, back then, as an upwardly mobile, aspirational, Thatcherite drug. I think we need to hear a few more specific confessions from Conservative Central Office, don’t you?

- A fat banker - no rhyming slang intended - has sued a florist for a reported £1.5m because he slipped on a petal near the shop. Brian Piccolo had been walking across the concourse of Marylebone station when the petal got him and so, without further ado, he sued. A court has ruled in his favour, with compensation to be decided later. Piccolo says he was temporarily “paralysed from the neck down” by the accident, though the court has not investigated whether the injury was exacerbated by the weight of his huge gut - and I don’t suppose it will. Instead some poor florist will most likely be put out of business because it allowed a petal to go astray. You sort of hope that once Mr Piccolo gets his compensation he will trip up over his wallet and sue himself.

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