I'll start with my boyfriend's verdict: Nick Cohen is an arse and Stephen Marshall looks like Rob Lowe. Then he had to rush off, because he had to go and blog for Just Seventeen.

Ha, I mock him, but really, that's all you needed to know. It took me a bit longer to brush off the sense that Nick Cohen is totally right, about everything. He's an incredibly good speaker; he's engaging but would never compromise a point to be likeable. Like any decent character from an upmarket comic strip - and I really think The Crisis of Modern Liberalism is a graphic novel crying out to be written - he can be beaten, but not by Rob Lowe-alike. He needs to be outwitted.

Cohen's central point will be pretty familiar to a lot of us - the left is in crisis, because the cornerstones of traditional socialism were all fiscal, and they collapsed with the Berlin wall, oh, would there was another wall! That one's turning into such a surveyor's cliche! But anyway, you can tell that socialist ideology has collapsed, because "when you go into the houses of the fabulously rich, they have Noam Chomsky... on their bookshelves." Before you've even noticed Nick Cohen on their poof! Eating their finger food!

In this crisis, the defenders of the great triumphs of the left - people like Ken Livingstone - have lost their way, started hanging out with the Muslim brotherhood and now no longer care about homophobia and misogyny.

I'm as bothered about this spectacle as the next man, but it strikes me as instructive that Livingstone is the best example of it Cohen can come up with. Ken is no barometer of anything. He's a smart local councillor with a keen eye for transport solutions - he'll be remembered for free kids' bus fares in the eighties, the congestion charge in the noughties. He has always shamed the left with the rest of his politics because he's ideologically frivolous, but it shames Cohen equally to hold him up as the distillation of all that's lacking on the left. Cuz he ain't.

Stephen Marshall was from an entirely different school of discourse, a place where "the truest thing I ever heard was from a 17-year old", doesn't make people want to be sick, a land of "a young girl said this to me, on the streets of Basra", this faux-goofy, "everyone I've ever spoken to is much more intelligent than me, even though, to the untrained eye, it looks like I'm the most intelligent" halfspeak...Can't bear it. Unequal to the task of unpicking Cohen's scarf-dance coherence, or as we now call it, Cohenherence. Does look like Rob Lowe, though. Which has to be good for something.

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