A couple of friends and I were discussing the Labour leadership fight. Diane Abbot came up. Diane is a Labour MP, on the left wing of the party. She's black and represents and lives in a Labour run, poor district in London. She sent her son to a private school rather than using the local state run schools.

The Labour left opposes private education; Labour, what ever the wing, considers state run schools a way of leveling the playing field between the elite and the non-elite, offering equal opportunity. Abbot is open to attack: If the schools in the area your party controls aren't good enough for your son, why should we trust you to run the schools for our children?

One friend, who is opposed to private fee paying schools, said she couldn't blame Abbot. A black single parent living in a poor part of London would not want her son exposed to the gang and drug culture that are part of the educational experience of young black males in some parts of London. Abbot had a responsibility to do what was best for her son and that was more important than making a political statement or maintaining political consistency.

Other Labour MPs, including ex-Cabinet members, send their children to private schools. Others, including Blair, send their children to selective state schools - good academic standards, hard to get in, predominately middle-class children. Sometimes, in avoiding the local school, they jump queues to do so. But Abbot is one of two candidates on the left wing of the Party and is more susceptible to such an attack than a New Labour candidate.

In thinking of US politics, I remember Ted Kennedy. He consistently worked for the powerless; supporting causes that were unpopular, year in, year out. In his personal life, he appeared to be rather hedonistic; too much food, alcohol, women. He supported his family right or wrong, most notably in the trial of his nephew accused of rape. I wouldn't want my daughter to marry Ted Kennedy, but I'd vote for him any day of the week. The United States was a better place because he was in the Senate.

A few day ago, the results of an investigation into the Social Services here was televised.

A nine year old girl disappeared. Her mother was on welfare, with seven children by four different fathers. Police and volunteers looked everywhere for the child. Her mother, swollen red eyes, supported by the neighbors, made the usual appeals. There was a large demonstration, demanding the authorities find the child. Then the child was found, in a boarding house, in the room of a male relative, hiding under the bed. Mother and Male Relative had a plan: not a good plan. The child would be found wandering in a local market, tell a tale of being abducted and male relative would collect the reward on offer for the return of the child.

The mother was tried and sentenced to eight years in prison; the male relative got two. The children were taken into care. A commission was convened: lessons to be learned, social workers to be blamed.

So I watched the results of the commission. The journalists were looking for blood; social worker blood.

First objection: only the summary, a long summary, of the commission's reports were distributed. They wanted it all.

Social worker response: Children's privacy needs to be protected. There's a great deal in the report that involves the seven children and there is no public interest argument in making this material available to everyone.

Second objection: Why didn't social services predict this would happen?

Response: This is the first time this has ever happened. It may well be the last. How could we predict it?

Third objection: Why weren't the children taken into care much earlier? It was discussed at social worker meetings. The family has been involved with social services from very early on. The journalist asking the question quoted the report, and I paraphrase: The mother is more concerned with her relationships with the men in her life and put her own self interest above the interests of her children.

Response, from the independent convener of the commission: The mother felt affection for her children; the children felt affection for their mother. Social work involvement and concern centered on things like children being inadequately supervised, dirty, poor nutrition. These do not justify taking children from their homes.

Journalist; But it was discussed, taking them into care.

Response: Social worker meetings discuss a range of possibilities. Everyone at this meeting agreed that taking the children into care was not necessary.

Overall the press interview, there was the general journalist demand, spoken and unspoken, to name, shame, blame and probably fire a social worker.

Social workers hung tough: No way. It was not our fault.

Back to the topic heading, private v professional selves.

The social workers were very professional - short answers, social work speak. The journalists were, themselves, very professional: hectoring and aggressive. Both parties played their roles in this.

I imagine the personal reaction of one of the social workers: Oh for heavens sake. This is a feckless, rather stupid woman. She's unhappy and thinks a True Love will fix it - for her and her kids. She's desperate for money - the State's not very generous in its support. But she loves her kids and her kids love her. Do you really think taking the kids into care, to be shifted every couple of years, with some good foster parents, some bad, is in their interest? The State does not have a very record as an absentee parent...

Such a response would have been a public relations disaster. Much better to put on the public face and give as few hostages to the enemy as possible.

Now the BP business. If Tony what’s-his-name had cried over a pelican and pressed the flesh of a shrimp fisherman and said I feel your pain, would he have come off better? Maybe. Americans are a lot less reserved in the public selves than Brits. Or maybe not. Despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary, Americans are not more stupid than the rest of the world. Crocodile tears are a concept the citizens of the US understand, too.

But British reserve does not play well in the American media, especially tv.

In appearing before at a Congressional hearing, he came across as unwilling to answer the questions. That was probably the case rather than any cultural differences in public v private selves.

Here, there's an objection to the US, especially Obama, and its use of British Petroleum rather than BP. Brit blaming, they see it as. There are frequent references to all those poor American and British pensioners who will be badly affected if BP share prices go down.

Somehow, in the US, Obama was expected to do more. When he did do more, insist BP have an independently administered fund to clean up the oil spill and pay damages to those affected, PLUS not give out dividends this year, since the damages are apparently open ended spatially and temporally, he's attacked as 'socialist'. He's also criticized for a moratorium on off shore drilling while new safety measures are put into place and for insisting the US consider its reliance on oil.

The public position of politicians involves symbolic manipulation of language, the words used to describe events. You make speeches. You offer sound bites. You spin. If you're a social worker or engineer, you're dealing with an actual configuration of events and people and contexts. Words won't fix it. Words can increase the damage.

During the campaign, Obama pointed out that inflating tires to the proper pressure would save more oil than a proposed Alaskan offshore drill would produce. He was laughed at. NASCAR said of course Obama was right. Jimmy Carter lowered the speed limit to 55 miles an hour and saved both oil and lives.

Lovelock, Gaia proponent, says that catastrophe in terms of global warming is inevitable. People are too stupid to deal with the consequences. I think part of this involves our great adaptation as a species: forget opposable thumbs for the moment; we got language, symbolic manipulation of real events, we can LIE!!! We can have public and private selves.

Even when we don't lie, actively, we can persuade ourselves that what we want is the case. The Con-Dem Alliance has announced cuts this morning to assorted schemes to guarantee employment. Thatcher all over - trash manufacturing and assume the financial services will take up the slack. With Thatcher, what took up the slack and paid for all those unemployed was North Sea oil. Income from the oil, as well as the oil, was wasted.

Cameron argues that the private sector will take up the slack, hire all those public sector employees he's causing to be fired. (I know I've droned on and on about this: it's important, damn it, it's considerably increasing human misery as well as destroying the economy.) Cameron is also opposing EU attempts to regulate the financial services. Thatcher looms yet again. She came to tea at Number 10 last week.

So, either Cameron is as dumb and feckless as that welfare mom OR he's decided as long as he and his mates get theirs and have gated communities for the grandchildren they don't care about the rest of the country.

If the first is true, private and public selves coincide. Ethically, perhaps, good but terrifying. We only send in the social workers when they’re poor.

If the second is true, and this is straightforward manipulation of the economy and media for personal and class advantage, and they deserve a lot longer than eight years in prison. Won’t happen; you can always find an economist to say something is/was  justifiable.

An interesting problem for the LIberal Democrats: just how far can their public positions of support for the Coalition differ from their earlier, electioneering positions? Public selves in competition; I suppose it depends on those private selves in the back benches. How long will they tell themselves they are preventing the worst excesses of a Thatcherite Britain? Will the Conservatives actually deliver on an electoral system that more nearly reflects the popular vote? How much can the LibDems actually stomach for some political power?  Minimal concessions from the Tories: but even that is too much for some. (We won, they say. Not really, let me point out. You got the most MPs. There was no overwhelming mandate for your position.)

Too much, Europe, banking regulation, heart of the party stuff, the public faces of the LibDems and that of the Tories are incompatible. In the next year, we’ll see how much the private selves of the Tory and LibDem back benchers are willing to ignore to keep the coalition together. Unless both sides are actually more whorish than I think, I predict a new election in about a year.