The Daily Telegraph’s revelation last Friday that the Financial Conduct Authority was going to arraign companies for 30 years of mis-selling pensions and other products ‘wiped’, as papers like to say, £4 billion off insurance stocks. George Osborne is putting pressure on the chief executive Martin Wheatley to go. The leak was highly embarrassing for the FCA, but the issue itself matters more. It is about how such companies treat longstanding customers. The way they work is through sellers, who hook someone for life in one go, and so the companies do not know or care about their customers. This is a parable of a much wider problem in society, which is that being loyal is considered stupid. It applies strongly to political parties. Traditionally, they have ‘sold’ their policies to individuals and collected membership fees in return. Over the years, it has become ever clearer that those paying the fees are the group in society most disrespected by the parties who take their money. And so, not surprisingly, very few people now join. If a Political Conduct Authority were to investigate how parties have treated their members over the past 30 years, the results would make the insurance companies look pretty good.

Spending a couple of days making speeches in Switzerland recently, I wandered round old Geneva. The city of Calvin has a huge importance in the history of Christianity: his work must have had a liberating effect on people who otherwise lived in fear of priests telling them whether they were saved or damned. His doctrine of predestination is unappealing, but the alternatives are almost equally difficult. Nowadays, most people are nasty about him. I walked into the courtyard of the town hall. A wonderful covered ramp gives off it which is cobbled and without steps, so that horses could ride up it to the higher floors. Above its entrance is carved the Reformation motto ‘Post tenebras lux’ (after the shades, the light). As I contemplated it, the light went off and the cobbled way was plunged into darkness.

Even in Switzerland, the elites are sold on the European Union, though it remains outside. It has a virtually irresistible draw in all European countries for the people that Mr Gladstone disparaged as ‘the Upper Ten Thousand’ (who today probably add up to the Upper One Million). As a result, Switzerland is gradually allowing its exceptionalism — in tax and banking, for example — to be eroded. On the other hand, the Swiss people are stoutly sceptical and have become more so. In February, they voted for a referendum limiting the free movement of EU citizens into their country, and so their EU relationship is now in flux. In this remarkable country, only 5 per cent know the name of their president. This is not because they are indifferent to politics, but because most decisions are still taken at the most local level (the commune), and so the man at the top can be blessedly obscure.

My mentor and friend the late T.E. (‘Peter’) Utley was blind. This gave him a powerful ability to read people’s character from their broadcast voices. He was particularly good at noticing who was ‘sinister’, pinpointing Denis Healey (whom most people considered roughly avuncular). I wonder what Peter would think of the PM presenter Eddie Mair. There is a note of menace in Mair’s voice, particularly when anything right-wing or otherwise ‘inappropriate’ comes up. ‘Hillsborough, Stephen Lawrence, Orgreave…’ he intoned, opening his programme on Monday. Here was the perfect narrative — alleged wrongdoing by supposedly brutal, lying police, all taking place under a Tory government. As I remember it, public confidence in the police rose because they were not defeated by the violent mass pickets at Orgreave, but the first anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s death approaches, so obviously Eddie must miss no chance to have a go at her.

My brother Rowan, the architectural critic of the Observer, has just helped launch a campaign pointing out that 230 skyscrapers are about to be built in London, and that no one, including Boris Johnson, seems to know what is happening. Indeed, Kit Malthouse, the deputy mayor, when presented with the figure, denied it. The Observer mocked up pictures of how bits of south London (where most of the towers are planned) would look. The buildings did not so much scrape the sky as blacken it. It reminded me of a documentary at the time of the Canary Wharf development in which the Reichmann brothers proudly expounded their plans to Prince Charles. ‘Yes,’ he said plaintively, ‘but does it have to be quite so tall?’ I admire many skyscrapers (though not many London ones), but this is one of the right questions to ask. It is never answered. Another question is, ‘Why is it so much easier to get planning permission for a 60-storey block in London than a new three-bedroom house in rural England?’ I suppose the simple answer is: money.

Undoubtedly my most arduous form of journalism is my occasional hunt reporting for Horse and Hound. This is not only because it requires a day in the saddle — which, I must admit, is pure pleasure — but also because one has to cram in an enormous amount of detail about the country covered and the names of the participants. This requires painstaking precision. Things normally pass off smoothly, however, and solidarity prevails. Recently, though, I described one prominente of a well-known pack as having ‘a physical presence worthy of a Leech cartoon’. The gentleman in question is not pleased, and has declared that if such a claim had appeared in Haulage Monthly (he is a haulage contractor), he would have sued it. I am very sorry to have offended, but my defence in law is what is officially called ‘justification’: he does look like a John Leech cartoon from a Surtees novel. My moral, human defence is that my remark was intended as a compliment. I love Leech: I love his characters and the England they stand for: I love this portly haulage contractor like a brother.