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MEANWHILE, Dame Shirley has been uncharacteristically shy since she was tracked down to her Pounds 1.5 million Park Lane flat. The Londoner knows of only one reporter, Ed Howker, who has been able to speak to her since her arrival.

Not all celebro-students derive their status from their parents. Take the case of Oxford classics undergraduate Phil Harvey. When he started organising club nights at the Park End nightclub, few thought he was destined for great things. However, he was soon managing a friend's band and sold their first single in Trinity College bar. The band is Coldplay. His ex-girlfriend is Natalie Imbruglia. As in life, so at university, not all celebrities can be on the A- list. James Ginley, a student at Durham, has some useful advice: \"Refresh your memory of those C-list Eighties celebrities before you start. This should help avoid any humiliating conversational gaffes during freshers' week. I was at St Hild and St Bede College with Nick Owen's son Timmy - it is quite an interesting conversation point, but you do have to explain who Nick Owen is.\" Ginley adds: \"He was Anne Diamond's co-host on TV-AM.\"

Using many terrifying tables and graphs to back up their argument, Ed Howker and Shiv Malik show just how awful things have become for anyone born after September 1979.

[Ed Howker]: One of the dangerous things about this debate is that it's easy to reduce it to an old-versus-young battle. There are two points - why do young people feel they're in such a weak position in British society? I would argue that we've been colossally bad at planning Britain's long-term future. The second point is about if and how we transfer wealth. I don't want to go back to the 80s and before, when pensioner poverty was grotesque, but there are a lot of asset-rich pensioners who argue for the extension of their benefits, and I don't feel that's responsible when big chunks of our society, particularly young people - one million unemployed, a third of under-30s living with their parents - really need help at this point, not pensioners. GB: No parent or grandparent feels it's us against them. People are worried about youth unemployment, not least because it affects our kids and grandchildren. Housing is in a terrible state and politicians are unable to do anything about it because it would detrimentally affect everyone who is an owner-occupier. My generation doesn't want to sell its houses because we haven't got proper pensions, we haven't got anywhere else to put the money without its value declining, and we face the possibility of having to pay for care. There are a lot of great stresses that are tied up in the housing market that affect my generation. It's about policy, and also about Britain's national decline. If you are a young person in Brazil or China, things probably look pretty good. Since Thatcher, politicians have found few ways to talk to us other than in terms of \"freedom\", and what we need to rediscover are more old-fashioned values - care, compassion, fairness.

This generational slanging match is the wrong political argument to be having. I'm suspicious of how neatly it flows into the Osborne narrative of brutal deficit cutting; he uses the generation rhetoric lavishly. I'm even more nervous of where it could go next; [Ed Howker] and [Shiv Malik] line up pensions as a target alongside the deficit. Osborne will appreciate a few allies in making the case of cutting public sector pensions. And it could get even nastier; in a disturbing paragraph, they point out that 16- to 44-year-olds cost pounds 350 a head in NHS spending; the figure for the retired is pounds 2,700, because so many more sick people are living longer. Rallying resentment against the sick and the elderly is pernicious politics. This collective political failure is mirrored in individual lives in another kind of failure. They quote [Richard Sennett]'s plaint, \"how can long-term purposes be pursued in a short-term society . . . how can a human being develop a narrative of identity and life history in a society composed of episodes and fragments\". Much of what I think underlies Howker and Malik's argument is how globalisation has generated insecurity - no jobs for life, constant reskilling - and how that is now a condition of life even for the young, educated middle class. What hit the industrial working class hard in the 80s and 90s has now percolated to privileged, high-status elements of the middle class.

There's a new and noisy book just out which you must read to discover why the young and the old are shouting at each other over the supper table in a way I've not heard since those great divides over drugs'n'rock'n'roll or even the Iraq invasion. It's Jilted Generation: How Britain has Bankrupted its Youth by journalists Ed Howker and Shiv Malik, who blame the baby boomers for making such a mess of this country over the past 30 years that the next generation is saddled with student debt, can't find work, can't afford to buy homes or rent, and has little hope of doing so for years. It's fascinating to see Sir [Bob Geldof] switching from African philanthropist to capitalist, with the news that he's raising $750m to set up the biggest private equity fund in Africa. Apparently, he's launching the fund, to be called 8 Miles, as he's been persuaded the continent can best be helped through direct investment rather than aid. With him at 8 Miles is the private equity doyen and Tory donor Mark Florman of Spayne Lindsay & Co. They hope to close the first tranche soon. So far, backers include the African Development Bank and NL EVD International, part of the Dutch ministry of economic affairs. Geldof is taking his role seriously: He will chair the fund and help hunt down new investments in agribusiness, financial services and telecommunications where, over time, he has built up many contacts. Hopefully, first aid will prove even more effective than Live Aid.

High house prices are certainly one of those and it's not just that we haven't been building enough house prices, it's also that a lot of people have decided, older people have decided that they haven't actually got the revenue they expected to get from their pensions and so have started investing in buy-to-let speculation and that's certainly going on in Australia right, where huge numbers of people are buying up houses to let out, and turning a generation who can afford not to live with their parents into a kind of renter-class really who have no chance of being able to buy somewhere but who are forced to pay this kind of tariff to the older generation which is peculiar. So that's one. Of course old people say well no, that's absolutely outrageous and rightly so, this is my home. So what do you want to do about it really? That's the question, you know, because you can't have it always and we can't be worried about everything and yet do nothing for young adults. [MARK COLVIN]: The Guardian's [Shiv Malik] and The Spectator's [Ed Howker]. And you can hear the full version of that longer and very vigorous interview on this week's edition of Friday Late.

Fees are but the start of it, according to Ed Howker and Shiv Malik, authors of The Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth, who argue that \"Thatcher's children\" - the ones born after 1979 - have been left a poisoned chalice. It is a bleak perspective. Nearly a third of men and 18 per cent of women aged 20 to 34 in Britain are still living with their parents. Dubbed Kippers (kids in parents' pockets eroding retirement savings), iPods (infantile posse of over-indulged drunks) or one of a host of other unflattering acronyms, some are at home because it is more comfortable, but for most it's because they cannot afford places of their own. Howker and Malik's figures show that first-time buyers between 1970 and 1997 paid 2.4 times their annual income to buy a house; between 1997 and 2007 it jumped to 3.4 times. Today it is 4 times. And the ratio is still rising. The generational time bomb was first looked at by the UK's treasury only in 2002, when officials warned that the ageing of Britain will have \"profound effects\" - a mandarin's code for \"Houston, we have a problem\" - on its society and economy. \"I think we are in danger of losing a generation of first-time voters, who have lost complete faith in the political process and will simply disengage from it. And there is a danger that some of them will drift to more radical movements. The majority don't want that - they don't want violence - but some could drift away,\" [Susan Nash] warns.

With houses going so dear, the \"jilted generation\" are having to spend more of their income on rent than at any time in the past 30 years. And in terms of employment, things aren't much better. Even during the boom years, young people's wages stagnated. Many couldn't even find a stable job in the first place: among those aged between 18 and 24, the jobless rate is nearly one in five. [Ed Howker] and [Shiv Malik] cite the case of Vicky Harrison, a graduate from Blackburn with a good academic record, who killed herself earlier this year after being turned down for more than 200 jobs. Human nature being what it is, the young will look for a scapegoat. And they will find it in the nearest Waterstone's, where there will be an entire section marked \"Blame the Boomers\". While Howker and Malik are nuanced in their critique - focusing on political culture rather than vulgar abuse - other prophets of inter-generational warfare reach for the steel-tapped boots: It's All Their Fault, by Neil Boorman, and What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us?, by Francis Beckett, seem to lay almost every problem in society on the Boomers' sunkissed heads. Their targets have, inevitably, used their grip on the commanding heights to launch a counter-attack (after all, at a time when every income is being squeezed, there's not a lot of generosity to go round). The Jilted Generation, they declare, are selfish layabouts - not Ipods (\"Insecure, Pressurised, Overtaxed and Debt-Ridden\") but Kippers (\"Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings\"). What with their cheap holidays, shiny phones and hedonistic lifestyles, the Ipods, says Giles Hattersley, are more an \"Infantile Posse of Over-indulged Drunks\".

[Brighouse] council added to the collection until, by 1970, 593 paintings were listed, including five by James Whistler, two each by Samuel Prout and Atkinson Grimshaw, an oil attributed to Constable, eleven Hogarth engravings and a large canvas by David Hockney's teacher, Carel Weight. But since Brighouse was absorbed into Calderdale by the 1974 local government re-organisation, all but 45 of the pictures have disappeared from view. Calderdale claims that some were sold by Brighouse council before it was abolished, while most others are in store, although it will not allow them to be seen. Last June, under the council's \"Best Value Review\", a confidential memo from Rosie Crook, Calderdale's assistant director of museums and libraries, recommended as top of her list the \"closing and disposing\" of the [Alderman William Smith] gallery.