✒I bumped into a Tory MP who has been in parliament long enough to serve under six leaders. I asked him what the party's mood was. He seemed gloomy. "Divided between despair and ignorance," he said.

Next day we had George Osborne's gung-ho autumn statement greeted with loud and prolonged cheers from the Tories. But that's not the real story. They're terrified. Membership of the party has halved since Cameron became prime minister. (It's now roughly a 30th of what it was after the war, but that was because there wasn't much else to do in post-war Britain and because middle-class people were afraid Attlee was going to bring in a red revolution. Nobody imagines that Ed Miliband will do that. And we have cable TV.)

And Ukip! So far as most voters know, that entire party consists of one amusing boozer and a few loonies. The ignorant wing of the Tories might not fear them, but the despairing wing are terrified. If the upturn doesn't filter through, and if Farage's Crazy Gang do well in the Euro elections next year, we could see a very entertaining panic.

✒Our daughter has a delightful friend who has trained as a social worker and is now doing exactly that. He's a brave fellow who must want to help people very much. Social workers get kicked from here to breakfast any time something goes wrong.

Take a case like Baby P; everyone wants to know why they didn't take the boy to safety. By contrast, this week there has been a furore about the Italian woman who happened to be in Essex when she was about to give birth. Social workers whisked her baby away after she was obliged to have a caesarean. Both extreme cases, but so impossible to get all those in between right. And there are few other jobs which, when you get it wrong, the media will leap down your throat with vengeful relish.

✒I didn't agree with Boris Johnson about IQ and wealth making you a better member of society, but subjecting him to pub quiz questions on the radio proves nothing. Try these:

1 What is 10 in London and 1 in Warsaw?

2 Into which ocean does the western end of the Panama canal flow?

3 Someone who lives on the 26th floor of a tower block presses 19 in the lift every evening when he comes home. In the morning he presses G. He doesn't need the exercise, so why get off so low?

Answers: 1 The letter Z in Scrabble. 2 The Atlantic. The canal runs north-south, with the Pacific end slightly to the east. 3 He's a schoolboy and can't reach the top button.

Amusing enough, but you wouldn't want the country to be run by people on the basis that they can solve them.

✒I was always grateful to Gabriele Annan, the widow of Lord Annan, who has died this week. Back in 1963 I was nothing but a lad, being driven somewhere by my dad. He had to swing by King's College Cambridge to see Annan about something, and I was taken over with kindness and gusto by his wife. It was the height of the Profumo affair, and the papers were full of little else. Or rather, the redtops were. The Observer, the only Sunday we had at home, covered it discreetly and without most of the thrilling details. But the Annans had all the papers spread out in the drawing room, including many which are no longer published, and she left me with a cup of tea and a feast of eye-popping reading. She knew exactly what a teenage boy wanted and it wasn't the scholarly books that lined the walls.

✒Speaking of my dad, there's a biography of him just out, by the academic Fred Inglis. (Richard Hoggart, Polity Press, £25.) I rather doubt that it will trouble the Christmas best-sellers, containing no recipes or football anecdotes, and it is more a record of his work than his life. Still, it is far from being a hagiography, and at times is quite sharply critical, as it should be.

I haven't mentioned this before, except to the extraordinary number of people who still contact me and my siblings to say how grateful they were for dad's writing and teaching, and most of all for his 1957 book The Uses Of Literacy, which told the story of his and so many other people's lives.

He and my mother are still alive, but as my brother Paul points out in his introduction, both are suffering from advanced dementia. They're in the same room in the same home. Dad sits under shelves of books he has written, and is mostly asleep, though sometimes he can at least begin a conversation. Mum too sleeps almost all the time, though has strange moments of near clarity.

Very occasionally she will wake and sing a snatch of a song her father sang to her, nine decades ago. Once she spoke entirely in French, as if to children; my brother pointed out that she had been an au pair in Bordeaux 75 years ago.

It's not a life, but an existence. Dad enjoyed hearing bits of the new book, or appeared to, but he'll never read the whole thing. When I tell him that I've come to see them, he'll say with pleasure: "Oh, Simon's coming. When will he be here?" It is of course heartbreaking.

✒Presents you don't want this Christmas: several readers have sent in a gift that appears in one or two catalogues. It's a mug disguised as a telephoto lens, "ideal for the keen photographer!" Yes, right up to the moment where you get confused and pour half a pint of Thai green chicken curry into your new £995 Nikon.

• This article was amended on 8 December 2013. An earlier version said social workers had obliged an Italian woman to have a caesarean. It was the local health trust which sought permission for the baby to be delivered by caesarean section, not social services.