The deadline for bids falls on Monday and represents the city's final chance to get Millennium Commission funding for the spas

The deadline for bids falls on Monday, and represents the city's final chance to get Millennium Commission funding for the spas. A previous bid for lottery money had failed, but this time council officers are hopeful they have got it right ...Both stories, quite by accident, illustrate the kind of complacent inertia that typifies Bath more than most similar cities. When I first came to live near Bath 10 years ago, I was told by an inhabitant that I should beware most of all of falling prey to inertia. "Bath sits in a saucer between high hills," he told me, "and the air sinks down and sits heavy at the bottom of the saucer - it affects everyone in Bath, and it seems very difficult to get enough energy going to do anything ..." He would have said more, but he sank into a soporific silence.This seemed rather fanciful to me at the time, but I have come to feel he may have been right I have since discovered it is not a new idea. Princess Anne's visit had been greeted by Bath with a lack of deference that one can only call apathy. The other story was headed "Last-ditch bid to restore spas". Bath is making a last-ditch pounds 5m bid, said the text, to restore Bath's famous spas to their former glory.

The Princess Royal might as well have been getting out in the middle of the country to stretch her legs for all the attention it provoked. "Dozens of police had been brought in to line her route and keep security tight," the story ran They had done their job rather too well, it seems. It was clear from the photograph that not only were there no crowds to see Princess Anne, but there were no onlookers either. Not even a policeman was in sight lining the route, except for the plainclothes man holding the royal car door open The rest of the street scene was innocent of humanity.

One said "Princess Anne visits Bath" and, as if to prove it, there was a photograph of her getting out of a car and shaking hands with some silvery-haired local dignitary, prior to entering the Guildhall to address a meeting. But the attempt is worthwhile, because if Labour wins, the new Establishment will impinge on all our lives.Tomorrow: the plutocrats. As Sampson says today, "It operates with a mystique and a mystery that is not understood at large." To describe the Establishment is, on the one hand, to attempt a lightning sketch of the state of the nation; on the other, it is to make a stab at assessing the state of friendships, alliances, and blood feuds, most of which flourish or expire or explode behind closed doors.It is an impossible venture One can but fail. There were two stories on the front of the Bath Chronicle, Bath's daily paper, last Thursday. Figures able to move in this fashion will be of critical importance to Blair, and plotting their peregrinations, their landings and departures, will be one of the most useful tools for drawing a map of the new Establishment.It is in the nature of the Establishment that it is hard to comprehend. In Harold Wilson's administrations and beyond, the ubiquitous Lord Goodman was the best example of such a figure, running the Arts Council and half a dozen other quangos while rushing off to negotiate with Ian Smith about the Rhodesian problem.