Imagine popular rage, therefore, when it was discovered that he escaped aboard lifeboat No 1 with the women and children — and it was whispered that he and his wife had even bribed the crew not to rescue victims in the water, in case the boat should be swamped. As it was, this hateful calumny was later disproved; and Duff Gordon’s defenders made an important point about his basically wretched behaviour. It was true that he was one of a small percentage of men to survive, and it was true that lifeboat No 1 carried — incredibly — just 12 people, when later boats were full to bursting of terrified human beings. But the reason his lifeboat was so comparatively empty was that when it was launched, so many people on board Titanic still shared the optimism of the Costa Concordia waiters.

They believed the newspaper claims that Titanic was unsinkable, and you can see their point. It must have seemed utterly incredible that a gigantic steel vessel, in a flat calm, on a well-known route, could come a cropper on a piece of frozen water. And to the cruise ship waiters this weekend, it must have seemed even more incredible that their floating village — twice as populous as Titanic — could just flop on its side within sight of Tuscany.

Millions of people take these cruises every year, including 1.7 million Britons, and the boats are one of the safest means of transport on earth; and as they felt that first crunch and tremor in the hull, it is no surprise that they defied the evidence of their senses and continued to scoop up the olives and the breadsticks as they rained off the tables. They were in the grip of denial, a denial based on the fallacious and complacent inductive logic that because things have been all right so far, they are going to continue to be all right — and as with the good ship Concordia, so with the ship of state.

It is now more than 300 years since that saucy and magnificent vessel, HMS Great Britain, has sailed the seven seas, and for those of us who have been aboard all our lives, it still seems out of the question that she could really hit the rocks and break up. Britain is a giant fact, one of the world’s most successful political unions, that has produced everything from an empire to a broadcasting corporation to a particularly nasty type of sherry. I am like the Concordia waiters, in that I can’t really believe, somehow, that we can be set on a course for destruction.

But look at the facts, my friends. Look at that submerged reef marked “devo max”, or fiscal independence for Scotland. If you can unpick the fiscal union, what is there to maintain the monetary union? And if you unpick monetary union — as George Osborne rightly points out — then political union is dead. The Coalition Government is like the chap in the crow’s nest of the Titanic (his name was Frederick Fleet) who strained his eyes into the night at 11.40pm and then cried, in a stammering howl: “Iceberg, right ahead!” I don’t know if there is time to avoid a rupture.

As things stand, the polls suggest the people of Scotland are too wise to go for full independence; and, as I say, no one currently believes in their bones that it will really happen. But then, the waiters of the Costa Concordia couldn’t understand how their colossal ship — the biggest ever built in Italy — could founder in such humiliating circumstances, and the unsinkable Titanic lies broken in two at the bottom of the sea. That is the nature of slo-mo disasters: they can change very quickly, from being an outlandish theoretical possibility to a predestined inevitability.

But if the film takes liberties, it is poetically truthful. It is true to the essence of Thatcher, and above all Meryl Streep is amazing. She enters into her; she becomes her: the ruby lips, the flashing eyes, the pineapple hair, the pale skin transpiring at every pore with the fire of pure certainty. Somehow this God-gifted, 62-year-old American actress has re-explained to the world what it was like to see, meet and be the West’s first female prime minister.

Somewhere the film’s director has said that it is a King Lear story, an examination of a tragic loss of power, a meditation on the sorrow of old age. That may have been the intention of the writer and director (neither of whom, I guess, would call themselves ardent Thatcherites) – and yet it is the younger, stronger Thatcher/Streep who seizes the film and takes it over. I watched the matinee in Putney, and most of us agreed afterwards that the dementia stuff was actually quite tastefully done – a sensitive treatment of an important reality for millions of families. We just felt that there was too much of it.

Yes, she is eventually felled by the men in grey suits, but by the end Streep has effectively reminded us of what Thatcher was really all about. It wasn’t just me-first, get-rich-quick, Devil-take-the-hindmost exaltation of the values of Essex Man. That was the caricature. Thatcher herself emerges from this film as a far more revolutionary and inspiring figure – because she was a woman. From the very beginning and at all the critical moments you can see that what really actuated Thatcher was a feminine impatience with the cosy, clubby, complacent politics of the post-war consensus – a consensus that was held overwhelmingly between men of a certain age and class. Of course she believed in thrift and hard work and rewards for merit – but a proper understanding of what Thatcher really stood for is vital today.

To take the issue of the hour, I believe she would have strongly disapproved of boardroom greed. She never really much liked the City – she thought that on the whole the bankers liked interest rates to be too high for the good of her vision of a property-owning democracy. Insider traders were prosecuted on her watch, after years in which such tip-offs had been treated as a “victimless crime” that was traditionally conducted over a vinous, nose-tapping lunch. She got rid of automatic commissions for stockbrokers.

She believed in competition, and allowing the market to work – not stitch-ups. Ask yourself what Margaret Thatcher would have thought of a system where directors sit on each other’s “remcoms” – remuneration committees – and defend each other’s expanding awards, even when the directors in question have presided over commercial disaster of one kind or another. She would have thought it was absurd. Thatcher wasn’t against money, and she wasn’t against pay as an incentive to real exertion and real talent. But – and I have taken the trouble to consult her biographer, Charles Moore, who supports the point – she would have been totally opposed to all that now whiffs of a male-dominated cartel, a you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours conspiracy against the shareholders and the wider interests of the company.

Thatcher was brought up a Methodist, with a deep attachment to the values of the Protestant work ethic. She would have been against any kind of crony capitalism, and as for the solution – well, she would not have wanted pay set by politicians, and she would not have gone for any kind of continental-style socialism. But I reckon she would certainly have gone for any kind of poujadiste revolt that gave shareholders a simple way of voting down pay awards they thought were excessive.

In tackling boardroom greed, David Cameron is not bucking the market. He is acting in the true Thatcherite tradition of the Conservative Party, because male clubbiness, jobbery, idleness and complacency were the very things Margaret Thatcher fought against all her political career.

“This is quite unacceptable,” the Liberal Democrat leader is supposed to have fumed at the French government.

I don’t know if the French have been chastened by this rebuke, but I think we should urge Nick to relax. Look at the polls. Anyone would think that Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron began that summit with a secret meeting, at which they agreed to help boost the other’s domestic ratings. “I’ll bash you if you’ll bash me,” they said. “Our voters will love it!” And hey presto. The Prime Minister takes a principled opposition to plans for a Fiscal Union (FU), and shoots ahead of poor old Ed Miliband in the polls.

Sarkozy bolsters his own election hopes as he launches an ever-popular tirade against les rosbifs and their appalling belief in free markets. It’s win-win. That is the point about the pantomime xenophobia between the French and the British: it is essentially innocent — or more innocent than almost any other form of xenophobia; because in our hearts, au fond, neither side really believes it. We have to admit there are times when we enjoy a good old orgy of gratuitous Frog-bashing. There are times when we are all prepared to read how our continental cousins are a bunch of garlic-breathing Strauss-Kahns with a deeply suspect interest in structuralism and gloomy films. In this stereotypical world, their women fail to shave their armpits, they have a weird obsession with suppositories and a fanatical lust to eat our children’s ponies.

As for the French view of the British, I am afraid that there are times when they can be heard to say that we have terrible food, that we prefer hot water bottles to sexual intercourse and that most of the men in our ruling class (this was a tart observation by former prime minister Edith Cresson) were not the marrying kind. This is the kind of cheerful abuse that we have been directing at each other for generations, and ever since the battle of Waterloo it has not been meant very seriously.

Deep down, all reasonable English people know that the French have an extraordinary culture, that their understanding of cheese-making is god-given, that they have high-speed trains of a kind we are still trying to imitate and that it is a shame that we (and our children) are so feeble in our mastery of their beautiful language. You can tell that the British secretly love and admire the French by the sheer numbers who go to France for their holidays, and who make their homes in the Dordogne.

As for the French, they know in their hearts that for all the 20th-century misunderstandings between us — Verdun, Mers-el-Kebir, Suez, de Gaulle’s “non” — we remain indispensable allies; and all civilised French people understand that we also have our good points: humour, gardens, custard, pubs, democracy, the theatre and everything else that makes this country great. That is why so many hundreds of thousands of French people have moved to England in the past 20 years, and that is why London is now the sixth or seventh biggest French city on Earth. In fact, there are now so many talented French people living in the English capital that a special MP has just been appointed for outre-manche.

Victor Hugo said something about how the French and the English needed each other, because they both did well from the competition — and he was right. And the final reason to be cool about the gall of Gaul is, of course, that we are not the real object of French wrath. It isn’t Britain whose dithering is causing the continuing and growing uncertainty over the euro. Downing Street is not responsible for the failure to reassure the markets with a credible plan to guarantee the sovereign debt of the peripheral euro nations.

The French are really disappointed with Germany; and it is a golden rule of European politics that when France is angry with Germany, Britain gets the blame. That is because a rant against Germany is a very different thing, with a much heavier charge. Sixty-seven years after the war, the French are facing up to the reality that the European experiment has failed to contain German economic might, and that the Germans are unwilling and unable to help other countries cope with the agony of the euro.

That is what is really making them angry — but that is taboo. Much better to chuck a cow at les anglais.

No, they aren’t really angry with us for opposing the new Treaty for Fiscal Union. The reason our brother and sister Europeans are so chronically enraged with the British is that we have been proved completely right about the euro. For more than 20 years, British ministers have been coming out to Brussels and saying that they just love all this single-market stuff, but that they doubt the wisdom of trying to create a monetary union. And for more than 20 years, some of us have been saying that the reason a monetary union won’t work is that you can’t do it without a political union – and that a political union is not democratically possible.

We warned that you would need a kind of central Euro-government to control national budgets and taxation, and that the peoples of Europe wouldn’t wear it. Now look. It wasn’t the Anglo-Saxon bankers who caused the trouble in the eurozone, Sarkozy mon ami. It was the utter failure of the eurozone countries – starting with France, incidentally – to observe the Maastricht rules. It was the refusal of the Greeks to control their spending or to reform their social security systems. In Greece and Italy, the democratic leaders have been effectively deposed in the hope of appeasing the markets and saving the euro; and what makes the leaders of the eurozone countries even more furious is that it doesn’t seem to be working.

They blame David Cameron for “vetoing” a new EU treaty, when really he has done no such thing. It is perfectly open to the other EU countries now to go ahead and form their own new fiscal rules. If they want, they can decide to create an economic government of Europe. They may decide that now is the time – even though electorates are already feeling alienated from the political process – to hand sensitive decisions on tax and spending to unelected bureaucrats. It strikes me that this would be an amazingly dangerous thing to do, since the peoples of this Supra National And Fiscal Union (Snafu) would rapidly discover that they could no longer remove their government from office. I doubt very much that it would work, since there seems no particular reason why national governments should respect a collection of new “binding” rules any more than they respected the “binding” rules of Maastricht – not unless there is some secret proposal to enforce them by violence with a Euro-army.

But even if the Snafu has little prospect of success, there is no reason for David Cameron to commit this country to a project that is intellectually, morally and democratically bankrupt. He was quite right to say that Britain would not participate; and the reason the others are angry with Britain is that the row conceals the real failure of the summit – and that is to come up with a solution for the problems of the euro. The best hope now is for everyone to cool off and look at the things that the citizens of Europe actually want from their institutions. The euro may or may not be saved – though it seems unlikely that it will still exist in exactly its current form a year from now, and the best thing would be if the Greeks (and perhaps others) were allowed an orderly exit from their pain.

But there are still plenty of things that the European Union could provide its struggling peoples. In January, it will be 20 years since the dawn of the “single market”, and yet there are still all kinds of non-tariff barriers to trade. Here we are trying to create an economic government of Europe, and yet we haven’t even passed the services directive, which would allow everyone from opticians to estate agents to insurance brokers to set up more freely in other European jurisdictions. We are telling the Greeks that Brussels must effectively run their economy – and yet we can’t even agree on a common European standard for plugs.

Everyone is now worried that other European countries will “punish” Britain, perhaps with new directives on financial services designed to damage the City of London. Well, in so far as that is a problem, it is not a problem that has been made any worse by this summit; and in so far as we need to assert our European credentials, now is the time to set out a positive vision for a Europe that actually helps individuals and businesses. Next time these leaders have a summit, let’s lock them in until they agree the services directive and come up with a Europlug.

I was standing beneath my car the other day, and as I looked up I felt awe and pride. As I inspected its miraculously unrusted underbelly, I asked myself once again why people are so darned rude. This is a machine that has done about 120,000 miles. It is rained upon and snowed upon and sometimes towed from bogs. It has attained the ripe old age of 16 — and if you reckon that every car year is the equivalent of seven human years, then this vehicle long ago received its telegram from the Queen. And still it goes like a train. It always starts first time. It never misfires and its exhaust is perfectly acceptable — as pale and wispy as the breath of an elderly monk doing physical jerks in the cloisters before Christmas lunch.

It can carry eight adults effortlessly up Highgate Hill; and yes, it is true that it did start to make a noise a bit like a wounded Spitfire, and that was why it was necessary — for the first time in its life — to take it into the garage, winch it up to head height, and inspect its nether regions. You know what the problem turned out to be? A nut had come loose on the exhaust. That was it. After 16 years of blameless service, one nut had come loose. The problem was so trivial the mechanic could hardly bear to charge me.

Amid yells of appreciation from his audience, he bombs them, burns them and fires them off Beachy Head with a trebuchet; and so the country is conditioned to hunger for newer models. With his brilliant meditations on “torque” and “grunt” and “handling”, he invents personalities and virtues for these inanimate objects. He collaborates with the manufacturers to feed the myth, that if we buy these cars then something of their individual style and ethos will rub off on us. He is the mastermind of the entire superstition that persuades people to trade in their indefatigable old bangers and spend their cash on a new car; and he is, of course, indispensable to the economy and to the livelihoods of some of the poorest and hardest-working people in the country.

We are going through a soul-searching time, when capitalism is deemed to have “failed”, or at least to have been gravely deficient. Around St Paul’s and elsewhere there are good people – many of them too young to remember the command socialism of the Soviet bloc – who wonder about an alternative. They hope for a different world, in which we are not all addicted to “growth” and “profit”, and in which we might be happy with things we need rather than things we want. They imagine a society in which brands no longer have their awful cachet, and in which one family no longer imagines that they are somehow superior to another because they have a swankier house or a flashier car.

I can see why they feel this, can’t you? In these tough times I reckon many of us have a generalised horror of the waste and profligacy – public and private – of the bubble years. There is something deep within us that responds to the idea of restraint and simplicity – and on that theme, quite frankly, I am going to run my old car until it dies beneath me. But we must accept that if everyone acted in that way then we would simply be compounding the present economic problems. If people failed to heed the gospel of Clarkson, and failed to buy shiny new cars, then tens of thousands of people in manufacturing and other businesses would be at risk of losing their jobs.

Of course no one really needs a new Jaguar or Range Rover Evoque. People buy these machines because they want to say something about themselves – that something usually being “I am jolly important” or “I am considerably richer than yow”. But if they didn’t take part in this capitalist conspiracy, then we would be taking bread off the tables of families across Britain – a country that is now making more cars than ever before, and which has more independent car manufacturers than any other country on earth. At a time when we are being warned to expect six years of stagnation, we need to get the economy moving: by investing more in infrastructure, by helping young people into work, and by giving businesses and consumers the confidence to spend money when they can.

Until we come up with a better idea, it is the consumerist free-market economy that offers the best hope of generating the taxes that enable us to pay for pensions, welfare and everything else. In that respect Clarkson is not only the king of automotive consumerism; he is helping to pay for the public sector. By goading the nation to lust after new machines, he helps to keep the motor of the economy turning, and if he didn’t exist I am afraid we would have to invent him.

Of course it is easy in one sense to see why the potential strikers have allowed themselves to become so fired up. Ever since John Hutton produced his report, it has been clear that many people will effectively have to pay more and work longer to get the same sort of pension – and it is quite understandable that unions should want to represent this sense of grievance. And yet there has been one statistic that is eloquent of the underlying reality in the dispute.

Only about a third of union members even took part in the ballot. Of the 1.1 million members of Unison, just 29 per cent could be bothered to vote at all – and since only 78 per cent voted in favour, we have a strike triggered by less than a quarter of union membership.

Why such apparent apathy? The issue has been well publicised, surely, and though union membership has greatly diminished, you would expect feeling to be more intense among the dedicated folk who continue to belong. The answer is that many hard-working trade union members have thought about this argument, and they accept in their hearts that there is a case for reform. The Government has already made important clarifications. No one earning under £15,000 per year will have to pay more for his or her pension; and no one will have to work longer to get a pension if they are already within 10 years of retirement.

But, as the Hutton report makes clear, we are all living longer, and the Government’s pensions bill has risen by a third in the last 10 years. Yes, I suppose we could just whack more taxes on the “bankers”, and there will doubtless be something of the kind in the Autumn Statement. In the end, though, the system needs reform, and by that I mean we must address the fundamental injustice that modestly paid people in the private sector are paying in their taxes for state pensions on a scale that most private sector pensioners can only dream of.

The old argument used to be that it was acceptable for public sector salaries to lag behind salaries in the private sector, partly because public sector workers had the consolation of more generous pension packages. The position has now been reversed, in the sense that the average public sector worker now receives £28,500 per year, and a final salary pension, while the average private sector worker receives £25,000 per year and greatly inferior pension arrangements.

Some people argue that these comparisons are not fair or relevant, and that the figures for average private sector pay are being pulled down by the many people on very low pay who work as cleaners or in other jobs that used to be within the state sector. That may be true, but it is still surely wrong that these low-paid taxpayers should be asked to pay for public sector workers to have final salary pension schemes that have been wiped out in the rest of the economy.

The TUC’s Brendan Barber has made an excellent point, that the Government should be focusing resources on getting young people into work, by supporting apprenticeships, work placements and training on the job. I completely agree – and I would point out to Brendan that this strike is being mounted, at a very tough time, by people who have jobs, and who want to protect a lop-sided pensions system; and that the logical consequence of their actions is that there would be less for investment in infrastructure, apprenticeships, and the creation of new employment for young people.

We are told that this strike is just the first, and that the union leaderships are planning a long and miserable Seventies-style “winter of discontent.” I very much hope that is not so – and so, to judge by their reluctance even to take part in the ballot, do many thousands of sensible union members.

It is time the Labour Party stopped prevaricating, and came out against the strike. They are the political arm of the unions, and it is from the unions that they receive 86 per cent of their funding. They could call it off tomorrow.

As Ed Miliband would surely recognise, it may be exciting for kids to go to the office, but they are better off being taught in school.