That solid anti-European block that John Major evidently believes in - or else why does he palliate

That solid anti-European block that John Major evidently believes in - or else why does he palliate the sceptics so - is in reality a mush of half-formed sentiments which do not stop people buying Europe in their consumption decisions nor which will stop their voting for Europe if it comes to the ballot. Public opinion is a construct that, in the light of what is happening to people's tastes and life-choices, seems more and more anachronistic. People have prejudices and beliefs, yes, but they fold in upon one another, they move backwards and forwards. Struggling prime ministers writhe in unceasing effort to please the nameless thing out there that they fear is the public mind. Like automatic writing performed by a charlatan medium, members of the Cabinet do policy at the behest of The People.But no such thing exists. Tabloid prophecies are allowed to become self-confirming or suspended in credulity on the slimmest of phone surveys. With faint evidence and no reliable model that explains the translation of tabloid editorialising into voting behaviour, politicians have created a hall of mirrors in which even those mid-market newspapers rapidly losing readers become the arbiters of policy and ministerial destiny.

Craven secretaries of state act for the sake of headlines that they take as a proxy for what the public believe. Are the latter the explanation for the conceit that there is a single and usually reactionary public opinion?Ministers, and their shadows, believe the public believes this or that because newspapers tell them it is so. Public opinion is our reward, our sanction and our legitimacy.Can the same people - you - who are so admirably mobile, sophisticated, unexpected in cultural choices be so easily bound in gross political categories that are all supposed to be moving in a single direction? Or is this thing that Mr Howard claims is driving him headlong into a public policy assailed on all sides as wrong-headed and worse (far worse) doomed to costly failure a malign artifice? Once, a long time ago, a wise Tory (how oxymoronic has that coupling become in recent times) shook his fist at public opinion, calling it a compound of ignorance, folly, wrong feeling, right feeling and newspaper paragraphs. On sentencing, Michael Howard justified himself, with the Prime Minister and the Tory claque joining in, saying: it was not me, guv, public opinion required us to beard the judges. Esoteric and "difficult" work has no less chance of finding a following than the familiar and easy. Old ideas about mass audiences being led by the nose just do not apply In this crossover culture people choose for themselves. Sorting those choices by conventional labels such as class or income no longer tells us much.

No one with any sense can any longer talk about knowing what the country wants - there is no "country" as such for much cultural output. Why then does the idea of a single, solid, predictable public opinion remain so central in political life? Think of the events of the past few days. People no longer feel themselves bound to define themselves as one thing or another We're magpies and resent being tied to a single tree. Some might deplore this, perhaps mistaking the breakdown of musical and artistic categories for the end of discrimination A lot of tacky material is sucked up, true. But even cultural pessimists would be hard put to deny that modern taste is not only diverse, it's also unpredictable.

Hyperion, we reported yesterday, is about to bring out a CD of Great British Light Music Classics, trying to introduce younger people to the beauties of middlebrow: Eric Coates for a new generation Nor is it just music Cultural mingling is accelerating across the arts. They insist that careless, modern, adolescent humanity has to grow up sometime, and that sooner might be wiser.. Luciano Pavarotti sings Liam Gallagher. At least that's what the promoters of the Three Tenors' forthcoming Wembley concert want. The fat man sings the tiny Mancunian, and why not? Musical forms have always begged, borrowed and stolen from one another Now the pace is increasing. And you have to be a particular kind of spiritual bigot to imagine that humanity can be frightened into a proper condition of mutual regard.

But its terrifying images do chime with contemporary anxieties. The Creation of Adam seen in its whole context insists that the human appropriation of divine love is not a life-style option, at least for Western culture. For immediately below the Creation is a less familiar masterpiece, but it dominates the Sistine Chapel It is Michelangelo's Last Judgement Only the most crabbed reactionary takes this literally. it is not domineering, but shared, it is mutual, or it is nothing. Above all, it is grown-up.Paul's insight helps us to reflect on the interaction between the Spirit of God and human creativity.