Elsewhere

According to Monday's Media Guardian, Mark Damazer, the new controller of Radio 4, "remains evasive on his plans for lagship shows". I thought at first that "lagship" might be a blip, and someone had left the "f" off the front of "flagship". There's certainly no such word as "lagship" in any of my dictionaries. Yet it's always best in these matters not to be precipitate in one's judgments. As time went on, I began to think that a lagship might not be such a bad concept. Since when I've thought a bit more, and now I feel that it may be a necessity.

The flagship is not normally the boat at the front of the fleet. That's because the flagship has the admiral on it, and he doesn't want to be the first to get sunk. He is probably in the middle. A lagship, in contrast, must surely come at the end, the final boat in the convoy. A lag is somewhere defined as "the amount by which one phenomenon is delayed behind another". Delay is a lagship's essence. Its motto is "hasten slowly" - or even " festina lente ", for lagship thinking suggests that we have been much too quick to ditch the teaching of Latin.

The lagship politician is the one who says: hang on, I know there's a problem with rottweilers and possibly with some breeds of bull terrier, but do we really want to run up a bill in a couple of hours and push it through the Commons in 25 minutes? Doesn't rushed legislation frequently end in tears?

A lagship looks at a solid Victorian terrace, threatened with demolition, and asks: do we really know what we are doing here? People have lived in these places for most of their lives, been married out of them, had their children in them, brought them up, waved them off to school and perhaps university, and finally ushered them out into the great wide world. That's because a lagship knows an essential truth that some politicians don't: the art of government, and other trades (including the running of newspapers), is to engineer needful change while preserving some sense of continuity, since without that, people feel insecure.

A lagship will have noted years ago when football yobbery was it its peak how many of the offenders came from rootless communities, especially new towns. In the high street or shopping mall, the lagship is the one who can look at enticing merchandise and see the attraction without necessarily feeling it has to be bought. Such nowadays inescapable notions as "must-have", "to kill for" or "to die for" have no place in the language of lagships. Why wish to kill for a purchase, the lagship tediously asks, when for years you've done pretty well without even knowing such products existed? A lagship can see a trend without feeling the need to jump on to it. When a lagship is at the wheel, the driving is often at speeds that would break the heart of Jeremy Clarkson, not just because there are Gatsos lurking around the corner, but because the lagship has pondered the question that Matthew Arnold asked when told a new railway was planned from Islington to Camberwell: where's the benefit, he said, of doing this journey in less time than before if it's taking you from a dull, illiberal Islington to a dull, illiberal Camberwell?

When a group of friends are out for a stirring walk, a lagship is dawdling behind - not out of idleness, but because there's so much to see and marvel at, and nobody else seems to notice. The rest of the convoy are set on getting back to the Miners' Arms 10 minutes before it opens, not just because they have thirsts to quench, but because they will then be able to boast that they've done the whole circuit in under three hours. But the lagship has seen a leaf, a tree, an eddy across still water, a dragonfly, the track of a fox. "Just look," the lagship cries. "Is this not wonderful?" "Oh, do come on, lagship," the lagship's companions cry. "We're going to be late if you keep making us stop."

I know that the Guardian has a residual reputation for misprints, but I have started to hope that this wasn't one. Maybe, unfashionably in a media person, Mark Damazer has the interests of lagships at heart. Maybe he's a bit of a lagship himself, and thus temperamentally resistant to the dictates of fashion. Maybe, if he's evasive about his plans for lagship shows, that's because he knows that his competitors all read Media Guardian and he doesn't want them pinching his best ideas. Maybe he even thinks that lagshipism will soon be the governing trend, the must-have media fashion. In a way, I hope he is right; though if that happens, true lagships will, of course, have nothing at all to do with it.

· David McKie's Jabez: the Rise and Fall of a Victorian Rogue (Atlantic Books) is now available in paperback.