THE TROUBLE with elections, says Trevor Phillips, the Commission for Racial Equality’s chairman, is that they prevent people from talking like human beings. Perhaps it is as well, then, that our first encounter is back in February, when the election is merely a black cloud on the horizon. When we meet again, it is almost directly over us and Phillips gives the strong impression of a man who fears that if race becomes an issue it will not so much rain as pour.

But first back to carefree February. Phillips is in Peterborough, fact-finding. I always recall the Bolsover MP Dennis Skinner’s scepticism about fact-finding, that VIPs never go on fact-finding trips to Siberia in February “although there must, assuredly, be facts to find”. Now, Peterborough even in a snowstorm is not quite Siberia, but Skinner himself would be hard put to contend that Phillips is exactly on a jolly. True, we travel the short distance from London first class and, true, when he gets there he is indeed greeted like a VIP, but I think the trip passes the Bolsover test.

In the morning we visit a local comprehensive, where pupils have taken it upon themselves to tackle the racial tensions through extra-curricular drama. Then we drive to the local paper, whose editor heroically resisted using the headline “race riot” over some street action last August. Lunch is sandwiches with the council’s chief executive. In the afternoon, we spend time at a community centre and then move on to a youth project, whose young innits open up to him as much, I guess, as they would to anyone. Despite his thinly vegetated scalp, it is hard to believe this still boyish, self-deprecating bloke whose grasp on the absurd remains strong, is 51. I’m nevertheless amused by his customary response to their contributions. “Thank you. That’s useful,” he will say. Trevor the former student firebrand, best known in the capital as the face of ITV’s The London Programme, is turning before my eyes into My Lord Hutton.

I see the two sides of the man, the spontaneous and the pompous, when we end up back in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where there has been a fracas over the Jewish Society’s invitation to an Israeli Embassy speaker. Although the student union’s ban has been lifted, when we arrive a fire alarm has been let off in the meeting hall and everyone is locked out. Amid the placards, Phillips looks animated and admits to feeling nostalgia for student politics. When we are let in, however, he does not take much persuading to treat the meeting to a rambling, statesmanlike defence of free speech.

The speech makes me feel good and liberal. Only afterwards do I begin to worry. For one thing, although Peterborough’s efforts towards better race relations seem praiseworthy, I am not sure how much credit the CRE can claim for them, given that its annual funding for the area adds up to a mere £50,400. But I am more alarmed by the fact that Phillips is in subsequent days silent about the Government’s plans for the detention of terrorist suspects, and I recall that during our last engagement in Peterborough the Home Secretary had called him on the mobile, presumably to square him.

The CRE’s HQ is in Borough High Street, a part of London that has been poor at least since the days when Charles Dickens’s father was detained in its debtors' jail. Phillips’s own office, however, is as glossy as a television executive’s. Hi-fi equipment gleams metallically and, at one point, bursts fortissimo into life. A flat plasma screen hangs on the wall. As he circles around the points he makes, the CRE’s lively press officer, Colleen Harris, formerly the Prince of Wales’s spokeswoman, takes notes. Her chore must seem endless.

I remind him of some concerns we heard from Peterborough council’s chief executive, about race becoming a factor in the election campaign in her city. Is he as worried as she was?

“I’m more worried than she is,” he says. “I’m probably the most worried person in the country at the moment. I can’t give you survey evidence but we know what’s happening in schools. We know what’s happening in factories and so on. And I am worried that some of the atmosphere is sour and it is fractious and it is brittle.”

And the pre-election debates have made it worse? “We’re beginning to see the signs of it. I don’t like what I’m hearing. I think it is becoming ugly and I think it is because people are having debates about perfectly legitimate subjects but maybe doing it in ways which create tensions and conflicts which are not legitimate.”

He cites, without quite condemning, the Labour poster that people thought made Michael Howard look like Fagin and the Tory poster that maintained it was not racist to talk about immigration.

“I don’t for one moment believe that to Alan Milburn or Tony Blair or anybody else it would even remotely occur to try to use Michael Howard’s ethnicity as an election issue. I don’t believe that Michael Howard is trying to whip up a race storm against gypsies and travellers. However, what they’ve all got to understand is what they intend and what they think they are saying is not necessarily what other people are hearing.”

Phillips reveals — if what follows earns such a dramatic verb — what he has done about it. The first thing is to have written to interested parties around the country asking them to report to him inflammatory campaign remarks or literature. The CRE will then approach the national parties directly. He says the procedure has already prevented a couple of local issues from making it into “the big deal political arena”.

His second step has been to tell the party leaders directly: “Don’t be tempted to be the first to racialise issues that don’t need to be racialised. Whether that’s planning issues, education or whatever it is. Just don’t get into it.”