The Silly Season

Horoscope: You'll meet a Tory MP so deluded he thinks astrology cures illness

My teenage daughter is hoping to meet someone wearing a pink vest. No other colour will do.

This peculiar notion has been put into her head by the BBC, in the form of Top Of The Pops magazine, which is produced under licence to the corporation and carries its logo on the front cover.

She follows the 'your stars' column in this publication designed for young teenagers, and this month all its Gemini readers have been told: 'Look out for a grinning girl in a pink vest - she's the perfect mate for a summer of fun.' The face over this bizarre piece of advice is that of a male pop star, John Newman, born on June 16, 1990: so presumably this was meant as guidance for 'Gemini' boys looking for female company.

The Top Of The Pops horoscope column is greatly concerned with advice on relationships, as are so many of its adult equivalents. The mystery is why millions of grown-ups are so credulous as to put the slightest faith in advice which lumps together a twelfth of the world's population for exactly the same piece of rudimentary assessment as to their prospects.

One of those most convinced of its efficacy is the Conservative MP David Tredinnick. Last week he told the BBC that astrology had 'a proven track record at helping people recover from illness'. Mr Tredinnick is in a privileged position to pursue this insight (or delusion, as I would see it): he is a member both of the Commons health committee and - incredibly - its science and technology committee.

The MP for Bosworth went on to say that 'I am absolutely convinced that those who look at the map of the sky for the day that they were born and receive some professional guidance will find out a lot about themselves and it will make their lives easier'.

Actually, Mr Tredinnick has put your money where his mouth is: in 2009 he attempted to claim the £125 cost of attending a course on 'intimate relationships' and also used parliamentary expenses to buy an astrology software package.

Further back, he was one of the MPs whose mixture of gullibility and venality wrecked the Tories' reputation in the Major years: Mr Tredinnick took £1,000 from an undercover reporter in return for asking parliamentary questions about a fictitious drug. It was unfortunate for Mr Tredinnick that his horoscope for that month did not say: 'Be careful of a stranger offering you money - he may not be all that he seems.'

But then horoscopes as a rule do not offer specific advice, because their compilers are required to make their forecasts apposite for millions of people they have never met and do not know - and because the more imprecise their assessments the more believable they seem.

Try this, for example: 'You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.

'Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.

'At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.'

This, in fact, was what the psychology professor Benjamin Forer gave a class of students back in 1948. He told each of them that he or she was being handed a tailored and individual assessment, although the truth was that they had all been given an identical jumbled series of extracts from current horoscopes for all the star signs.

Yet when he asked his students what they felt about these 'personal' assessments, and to give them a mark out of five for accuracy, the average mark accorded was 4.25 - or 85 per cent. And who would dare rubbish a star sign assessment that was '85 per cent accurate'?

This trick of producing deliberately ambivalent 'analysis' which seems uncannily accurate about you, is one reason why horoscope columns are so much enjoyed by readers. Almost all of what one reads in newspapers and magazines is about other people, famous or otherwise. Yet here the reader is himself (or, more usually, herself) the subject - and typically in a flattering way: he or she is generally 'misunderstood' or 'not fully appreciated'. To be blunt, it appeals to the narcissist in us.

That is why I probably was not being very commercially minded when, as editor of The Sunday Telegraph, I refused to run such a column. Instead, I ran a satirical version, called Psychic Psmith, whose very precise 'forecasts' were designed to underline the spuriousness of the whole business.

My favourite of Psychic's entries was this, for 'Scorpio', one week in 1998: 'My apologies to all Scorpios for last week's misprint, the result of a transcription error. The entry should have read "fantastic luck ahead" and not as it appeared. Thank you for all those who wrote in. Both the offended and the disappointed.'

But for many this is no laughing matter. There are two groups, not usually associated with each other, for whom the national addiction to horoscopes is seriously disturbing. Scientists are appalled by the idea that Mr Tredinnick's faith in star signs might have the slightest influence on official policy in the field of medicine (though fortunately it doesn't).

And serious Christians also find the whole practice repellent, evoking as it does the pre-monotheistic era of paganism. They can quote the Old Testament: 'There shall not be found among you . . . anyone who practises divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens . . . for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord.'

The catechism of the Catholic Church to this day warns that 'Consulting horoscopes, astrology . . . and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history and, in the last analysis, over other human beings'.

Presumably that is why it is so popular. Meanwhile, to any 'grinning girl in a pink vest': please do not be alarmed if my daughter accosts you and demands to be your best friend.