This Phoenix should be raising merry hell, not charity funds

There we were on Saturday night, at the Phoenix Common Room, my old dining club – one of the oldest dining clubs in England. We sat at high table under the portraits of our college grandees (but where was General Haig? Are we now ashamed of our greatest, stupidest alumnus?) Our ancestral silver twinkled in the low light. Young hounds in their special velvet-collared tailcoats lounged in front of their glamorous women, the fondest prize of elitism. And where was our president, "our old friend", as we call him? Absent, as ever. Well, we assume he was absent.

Our founding legend has it that in about 1780, the Phoenix rose from the ashes of Sir Francis Dashwood's Hell Fire Club (or, the Order of the Knights of St Francis, or the Monks of Medmenham, as he called it). This group of littérateurs, aristocrats, artists and agitators were said to worship the devil and celebrate the black mass on the naked body of a well-born woman. Its early members included Lady Mary Wortley Montague, William Hogarth and Benjamin Franklin.

Sir Francis's reputation for hell-fire rakery was established when he disguised himself as a dead Swedish king and shagged the Empress of Russia (it may not have been as hard as it sounds, if Horace Walpole is to be believed). Dashwood had a various mind, but it largely ran on one track. The landscaping of his park included two mounds from which flowed milk above a triangular copse of trees, which concealed the entrance to his grotto. It all became obvious from the upstairs of the big house.

A book published in 1766 relates, with what accuracy we can't say, how the great parliamentarian John Wilkes dressed a large baboon in the clothes of the devil and hid him in a chest in the chapel.

At a critical point in the ceremony, Wilkes sprang the lock by means of a secret pulley and the ape leapt out of the box to land on the shoulders of Lord Sandwich who, believing himself to be in the grip of the club's president, cried: "Spare me gracious devil; spare a wretch who was never sincerely your servant. I sinned only from the vanity of being in the fashion!" And so forth. It doesn't sound very plausible now the text is there, but it's important to believe it anyway.

Of course, we are keen to maintain our links with such a tradition. There is much in there to furnish a modern education. On Wilkes's account: "They plucked every luxurious idea from the ancients and enriched their own modern pleasures with the tradition of ancient luxury."

When the Hell Fire was banned, or Sir Francis lost interest (he took on a day job as Chancellor of the Exchequer), we now believe that his nephew started up the Phoenix in Brazenose College, as it was then spelt. It rapidly became one of the crack university clubs, with the motto Uno avulso non deficit alta. It was never as glamorous or as violent as Christchurch's dining club. One tea time 30 years ago, W H Auden told me that following one Bullingdon dinner, members broke every pane of glass in Peck Quad. After another, they shot out every traffic light on the Great West Road with shotguns. Auden's tone wasn't disapproving.

But in spite of its more reasonable demeanour, the Phoenix has recently fallen out of favour with the college, so members believe. They were blamed for breaking a flowerpot. They've had rooms denied them. Their legitimacy is being questioned. Their outreach programme derided. Things had come to such a pass that Saturday's £50-a-head dinner was held to provide funds to the junior common room to be spent on the charity of their choice.

I can't think this is a responsible use of Phoenix funds. If our president gets to hear of it, there'll be hell to pay.

Get your pitchforks – it's time for a revolt

Public spending is on its way to doubling. Were you aware of that? The Government inherited spending at about £300bn and in two years' time its plan is to be spending about £500bn. It'll be nearly half the national output, one pound out of every two spent in Britain will be spent by the Government. Where's it all going? Why aren't things any better?

Undermining the idea that things are getting better may be an essential Tory strategy but that doesn't discredit the question. The £33bn earmarked to upgrade the railways has been all but spent, but services are being cut. Hospital spending has gone up 20 per cent but operations have only gone up 1 per cent. The Prime Minister was asked why you couldn't get a public dentist in the Isle of Wight. His answer was one of his "precisely whys". That is precisely why, he said, that £700,000 had been provided for the constituency in question, so that poor people could have access to dentists. But, note, it hasn't worked. You can't get on to an NHS dentist list in Andrew Turner's constituency.

In the same session, the Liberal Democrat Vincent Cable asked a question that sounded bloody funny. "Is the Prime Minister aware that when members of the public ring the NHS help line, they are greeted by an answering machine which tells them because of staff shortages the service is no longer manned? They are then connected to the Department of Health's inquiry service, which puts them on to a deputy patch manager who connects them with a security guard in a disused NHS building in Birmingham?"

The Prime Minister told him he was acting the role of useful idiot to the Tory strategy. Maybe some law will be passed to make such treachery illegal.

No, we need a Follow The Money agency. A group of researchers, accountants and financial analysts that tracks money as it leaves the Treasury and finds out where it disappears before it reaches the front line. This, if nothing else, would help to dent the confidence of politicians who want to "make a difference" with their insane spending plans. It doesn't seem to be a party matter either, but a function of the political class. The Tories seem to be happy to accept that public spending must rise to provide public services.

This theory has been tested already, but now we're in the middle of another experiment. They tax us. When that fails to provide a better service they demand "co-payments". When that doesn't work they foster the voluntary sector so we not only have to pay twice, we have to do the work ourselves.

Eventually and inevitably there is a taxpayers' revolt, but who knows how far away it is.

We all may be wolves in humans' clothing

A recent book on feral children, the ones brought up by wolves, tells the story of a couple of girls in 1920s India, found in a cavern underneath a disused anthill. They were about seven years old, ran around on all fours, had superb night vision and pronounced canine teeth.

That was odd.Why would a wolfy upbringing develop your teeth? That sounds dangerously like Lamarckism, the theory that giraffes have long necks because they stretch for treetop food. Evolution tells us that giraffes have long necks because the taller animals were, the better their chance of survival and propagation of their long-neck gene. Cows born in stables aren't horses; children brought up by wolves aren't dogs. But how do we account for the pronounced incisors?

My bet is that evolution is working differently from the way it used to when life was a simpler, smaller affair. We have multitudes inside us now. I'm not sure when the evolutionary paths of different species diverged, but we know that genes are more or less eternal. Our common ancestors include ur-rats, monkeys, dogs, some fish. We have their genes inside us. They aren't expressed any more so we grow up as human. But if some unusual rush of hormones or some other evolutionary chemical were to wash our chromosomes in the right way, maybe teeth would be told to grow in a certain wolfish way. Hormones have psychological effects and psychological forces have hormonal effects. Perhaps we could, at a science fiction extreme, think our way into altered states of being.

Maybe we will all be superheroes in the future, when the genome has been entirely decoded. We drink the Jekyll Juice, sink behind the desk and emerge as Monkey Man! Or Rat Man! Or more traditionally, Wolf Man! Maybe there is more to myth than we have cared to think.