A tiny stretch of time when the dart seems to hover at the dart board and beer remains suspended between tap and glass - just long enough so that everyone notices, but short enough that anyone could claim you were imagining it. Not hostile stares, for good-natured conversation soon follows, but the overlong glances from people not used to strangers and for whom a non-white face denotes not just ethnicity but geography. It means "You are not from here."

Deep down a government as poll conscious and image-obsessed as this one must have always known that. But when it expressed its determination to keep the pension index-linked it was more than just a mathematical calculation. There was political arithmetic there too. Labour figured that a sizeable number of pensioners would not vote for it anyway and the rest would have little choice but to continue doing so, because the alternatives are worse.