LET me tell you what I did in last week's London riot. I went up to Oxford Street where thousands of police were trying to control the great crowd of anti-capitalist protestors.

In nearby Tottenham Court Road, 20 shop windows were smashed including those of several banks, furniture stores and a coffee shop. In a side street a car had been overturned. A Jaguar car (was it one of Mr Prescott's?) was damaged and an anarchist symbol daubed on its side. The mob was throwing bottles and rubbish bins and tried to attack diners in an Italian restaurant. About 80 people were injured in the affray, including several policemen and the cost to London businesses has been put at £20m. For all this trouble, the riot may be said to have been successfully controlled - which is only to say that, had not the police been there in huge force, it would have been a damn sight worse.

I was there as a reporter so that I would be able to tell you what actually went on. But suppose I hadn't merely observed the fracas; suppose I had egged them on - "Go on, smash that window, hit the coppers with paving stones" - I think the editor of The Northern Echo would have told me in no uncertain terms where to get off. I wonder whether another editor has had similar words with Libby Purves who, on the morning of the riot, wrote these inflammatory words in The Times: "I feel strangely drawn to this mob. Of course they are a nuisance, childishly irrational and easily infiltrated by thugs and looters, but once every year or so we need the awkward squad, the anti-globalisation protestors make us uncomfortable in a good way, as well as several bad ones." Well, let me choose words of great moderation: I think it is undeniable to say that Ms Purves' febrile prose condoned the destructive behaviour which went on last week in the heart of London.

And then she has a funny idea of how most of us spend our mornings. "We hurry to work, buy our morning latte, without specifying Fairtrade, turn our eyes away from the street homeless and flick through a shopping supplement for fleeting gratification." So that's how she gets her gratification, is it? We know how Libby -"sun-dried tomatoes" - Purves spends her mornings because sometimes on a Wednesday, if we are too slow to reach the off button, we might hear a snatch of Midweek on Radio Four where febrile prose is not regarded as a handicap and where she charms her listeners with phrases such as "May blossom is garlanded all over Christina's livingroom" and a studio guest's position can be described as "Not a profiterole's throw away". She packs the studio with Morris dancers, chefs and Peruvian nose flute players who keep the giggling going for 50 minutes by saying: "The instrument excites a column of air". The fact that reference to "a side-blown trumpet that looks like a paper clip" can produce hysteria demonstrates that she has not, for all her dalliance with higher things, neglected her natural constituency.

Her philosophical excursions in The Times do not seem to have been written so much as compiled, assembled - the word she herself would use is researched - with the aid of dictionaries of quotations, press cuttings and the thesaurus. They leap like the deus ex machina out of a comprehensive database. She may be in The Times these days, but she had not shed all her former skins. She still knows her way around the glossy magazines and the colour supplements but she feels superior to the Why Oh Why? School of journalism - despite frequent lapses.

Her ability in her columns and on Midweek to raise inconsequentiality to an art form would make Harold Pinter blush with envy. But for all her opinions and excitements, she is not fundamentally political. She is not of the marching sort, by the left or the right. She is a bourgeous.

Published: Tuesday, May 8, 2001