What's a book about economics got that Jeffrey Archer hasn't?

AN EVENT billed as a debate between John Redwood and Will Hutton took place on Wednesday at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, opposite Parliament. The subject was the British economy, but it wasn't really a debate at all. Hutton read from his book, The State We're In, and Redwood replied with some routine stuff about Britain's marvellous entrepreneurial spirit before he was summoned back to the Commons for a vote, crying as he ran up the aisle: "The Government mustn't fall tonight!"

More interesting was the size of the queue in the foyer waiting to buy the new paperback version of Hutton's book, which has become a publishing phenomenon. Last week it headed the best-seller lists, above authors as variously gripping as Dick Francis and Alan Bennett. The hardback edition has already sold about 50,000 since it came out a year ago; the paperback sale may go beyond 100,000. This for a book by an economist - Hutton writes on economics for the Guardian - which has at its heart a political and economic analysis of Tory failure, in a country where "state of the nation" polemics have not been genuinely popular since the pre-war Left Book Club. Nobody expected it. Neil Belton, who was Hutton's editor at Jonathan Cape (and who is now a colleague of mine at Granta), says that he had to struggle to persuade his sales executives that it would sell more than 2,000 copies.

How to account for its success? The way it was published certainly helped. It has a good title. Its jacket has a literary rather than a hard-edged ranting feel - Westminster in soft focus against a background of what seems to be old wallpaper - and it isn't an accident that its front-cover plug ("passionately sane, rich in ideas") is from a writer, Ian McEwan, rather than a politician or economist. But above all those reasons is what the book says, and the emotions with which it says it. Hutton is angry, but he also offers hope. The Blairites have already borrowed some of his ideas, including their famous (but still, to me, opaque) "stake- holder society". On Wednesday Redwood addressed Hutton as Blair's "organ- grinder" and called his book "a prospectus for ruin". The Blairites, however, might do well to ignore this and borrow even more, in particular the anger and the hope.

HERE are some interesting figures culled from the annual report of the Railway [safety] Inspectorate via the pages of Modern Railways magazine. In 1983, the number of passengers and railway staff who were casualties in accidents was 9,336. In 1993-94, the number had risen to 10,904, despite a reduction in route miles and new, theoretically safer, rolling stock and signalling which had been introduced in the years between. A few members of the Tory Party would no doubt argue that the rise makes the case for privatisation even stronger. What it suggests to the rest of us, surely, is under-investment, cost-cutting and staff demoralisation. Statistics are tricky items, and the link - often forged - between Thatcherism and disasters such as the Herald of Free Enterprise, Clapham and the King's Cross fire is easier to proclaim than establish. But it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that a social and economic culture which despises public service has, as one of its by-products, made our lives less safe.

WHENEVER I see pictures of the Duchess of York in the newspapers, which last week was all the time, I think of Andreas Whittam Smith, the Independent's co-founder and first editor, and one of the most liberal and open-minded journalists one could ever hope to work with or for. He issued few diktats; he would see the other point of view; pieces about any subject could be argued into the newspaper on their intrinsic merit. Or on almost any subject, because Andreas had an iron rule that on no account were the doings of the Royal Family to be reported, unless the monarch or the heir to the throne made a speech of "constitutional importance". So far as I could discover, this rule had more or less come about by accident. When the infant Beatrice was born to the Duchess of York in 1988, the Independent's night staff had confined the report to one paragraph near the foot of page two. This proved a popular decision among the Independent's readership: progressives thought the newspaper was showing republican courage,royalists thought it was behaving in a restrained and unintrusive way. For several years after that the Queen went on foreign tours, Prince Charles met young people in Tower Hamlets, Prince Edward appeared on It's a Knock Out, Princess Anne fell off her horse - and, oh joy! not one line or picture appeared in the daily Independent.

By the early summer of 1992, however, rumours of the heir's broken marriage were becoming ever more believable. As the editor of this paper at the time, I put it to Andreas that our non-coverage could be misinterpreted as the same kind of craven editorial behaviour that kept the British public in ignorance of Wallis Simpson. He struggled with his emotions for a moment, and then his face turned a dangerous shade of purple. "Yes, yes, I can see all that," he said, and then closed the discussion with words it was impossible to contradict. "But the fact is that the Duchess of York makes me feel physically sick."

AT LUNCH on Tuesday, Rosie Boycott, the editor of Esquire, told me that she was reading a fascinating new French novel about ants. I regarded this information warily. Ants as a metaphor? Very large sci-fi ants which could swallow men whole? An interior monologue by an ant? All of these sounded likely, and unenticing. But no, Ms Boycott meant a novel in which ordinary ants appear in the third person as the protoganists. Insects, she said, just might be the new thing in fiction. And they might - the same afternoon I picked up a novel by a young American writer, Brian Kiteley, in which beetles - the Dainty Tiger Beetle, the Horseshoe Beetle, the Cow Dung Beetle - play a starring role.

The hour of the entomological novel may have come; snow, after all, was last year's fashion, and who could have foreseen that? Empire of the Ants by Bernard Werber ("over 120,000 hardback copies sold in France alone"), is about to be published in English by Bantam and from a proof copy I have obtained the following chastening thought: that in the few seconds it will take you to read the next lines, starting now

- 40 human beings and 700 million ants will have been born on earth

- 30 human beings and 500 million ants will have died.