Society

Thursday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

You don’t have to be good to do good

I am a regular listener to the Sunday morning service just after eight on BBC Radio 4. It’s a habit owed to my old bedside clock radio. Purchased in 1978, its controls have gone wonky and the radio takes ages to retune; so I just leave it on Radio 4 all the time. Every week, therefore, I awake on Sunday to the sound of hymns. I like hymns. Their melodies and words are often trite, their message sanctimonious, but from a churchgoing boyhood I know them so well, and early on a Sunday morning there’s something comforting in the familiar. Besides I’m not a very fierce kind of atheist. Rationality

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Spot the endangered species: white men grab the chairs while Hogg loses her job

Tesco chairman John Allan provoked feminist fury by telling would-be non-exec directors, ‘If you’re a white male, tough: you’re an endangered species’ — then claimed he was really trying to make the opposite point, that ‘it’s a great time for women’. But to the contrary, this was a week in which tough white males grabbed the corporate prizes, while one high-flying woman from an oppressed minority was hounded out of her job. First, the blokes. HSBC announced, for the first time in its history and to the satisfaction of governance zealots, the appointment of an outside chairman. Incumbent Douglas Flint is to be succeeded by Mark Tucker, a former professional

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 18 March

I’m going to fess up right from the off and say that, yes, you’re right, we’ve offered two of these wines several times before. But they simply shone in our tasting and refused to be ignored. You loved them last time, dear reader, and these vintages are even better. The other four are crackers, too. So get stuck in. And I must add that even though FromVineyardsDirect is noted for its rock-bottom prices and tight margins, FVD’s sainted Esme Johnstone is knocking 50p off every bottle as well as keeping prices at pre–Budget levels. Hooray! So to the 2013 Crémant de Bourgogne Brut Millésimé (1), which we’ve not offered in

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A slashed seat? How terribly oiky

The prep school I went to in the 1970s had changed little since the 1940s. Lumpy mattresses, barely edible food, harsh discipline. It’s why we spent our every day there dreaming of escape; and why we nicknamed it Colditz. Not that I’m complaining. Though no mother now would dream of sending her eight-year old boy to such an establishment, I feel quite privileged to have been there. It was horrible but it was endurable and it was very, very memorable. Experience with a capital ‘E’. One thing you notice under such conditions is how incredibly appreciative you become of every creature comfort. On the rare occasions when they accidentally gave

The Spectator

School portraits | 16 March 2017

Brighton College   As a mixed independent school with pupils aged 3–18, Brighton College covers the full spectrum of students. With such a wide remit, you might expect areas where it falls down, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In 2016, every GCSE exam sat (all 2,082 of them), was passed, with A* the most common grade. The school says it is living proof that ‘co-education works’. Brighton girls do better in their exams than those at local single-sex schools. Sports are a big draw, too: Brighton is one of Britain’s top six schools for rugby with a rugby scholarship and, more surprisingly, a girls’ cricket scholarship. The

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Needle time

The intern stood up from his desk and the button popped off his trousers. He walked over to me and asked what he should do. I suggested he stitch it back on. He said he didn’t know how, so I offered to do it for him – but he declined. Instead, he spent the whole day walking round the office with a paperclip holding his trousers up. The next day he came in and told us he had bought a new pair. Had nobody taught this young man to sew on a button? It’s the sort of simple task that everyone should know how to do. It takes 20 minutes

Constance Watson

Pssst… wanna get your kid into Eton?

British education has never been so competitive. Our system, particularly the private sector, is a constant source of fascination and is renowned the world over — even though it educates only 7 per cent of UK children. But the current competition for places has borne a new industry, usually labelled ‘education consultancy.’ Consider education consultants the Robin to the private sector’s Batman. The Yoko to Eton’s John or the Sonny to Cheltenham Ladies’ Cher. Are you keen for your son or daughter to get into one of the best prep schools in the land? Do you toss and turn in torment each night at the infinite options? If so, you

Henry Jeffreys

Flunking the interview

I still get a hot flush of embarrassment when I recall my first interview. It was for a summer job at Selfridges in London when I was 17. The lady from personnel asked me how my friends would describe me. Maybe it was the heat or nerves but all I could think of was the funeral oration by John Hannah’s character in Four Weddings and a Funeral where he describes his deceased partner, played by Simon Callow, as ‘so very fat and very rude’. So I did something you should never ever do in an interview: I tried to be funny. ‘Rude — my friends would describe me as rude,’

Mark Palmer

They can’t handle the truth

Every now and again I ask my daughter, who is a primary school teacher, if she is free for a curry after work. And almost always she replies that she can’t, as she has a ‘parents’ night’. Now, either she has become lazy in her excuses for not wanting to see me, or her school organises a great number of parents’ nights. Hoping it might be the latter, I consulted a friend called Lucy, a teacher at a primary near Guildford in Surrey. She said it was quite normal to have at least one parents’ night per term, plus two or even three ‘parents’ workshops’. These workshops are dedicated to

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

You’ve got to have faith

Of all the reasons for choosing to live in a ground-floor flat rather than a first-floor one, it might not occur to you that your choice could be the game-changing clincher in your child’s educational prospects — but so it is. In the terrifying admissions criteria for Britain’s oversubscribed faith and church primary schools, you will often find these words: ‘If applicants share the same address point (for example, if they live in the same block of flats), priority will be given to those who live closest to the ground floor and then by ascending flat-number order.’ That detail gives a hint of the desperation of these schools to seem

Eleanor Doughty

Talking heads: The best of schools, the worst of schools

As careers for Oxford Union-debating PPE graduates go, Shaun Fenton’s has not been wholly orthodox. Leaving Keble College in 1992, he took up a job with what is now Deloitte and trained as a chartered accountant. So far, so ordinary. But it was on a trip back to his old school, Haberdashers’ Askes’ in Elstree, to see his former mentor David Lindsay that he had his epiphany: ‘I told him that I felt I was helping companies, but I wasn’t being me.’ He thought of teaching as an option, and decided to move from a job about ‘effective economics’ to one about ‘authentic relationships’. He adds: ‘I loved it, and

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Editor’s letter | 16 March 2017

One of the huge benefits of the British education system is the sheer number of alternatives on offer. But when it comes to choosing a school for your child, the choice can be overwhelming. In our cover piece on page 8, Ysenda Maxtone Graham looks at Britain’s faith primary schools, which could be a sensible option for the undecided parent. And for those who truly need expert help in deciding, on page 25 Constance Watson examines the world of ‘educational consultants’, who do all the work for you. We all hear constantly about how public school turns out smooth-talking, confident creatures (like David Cameron, for example). But on page 18

Wednesday

Sophie Miskiw

My dad: the phone hacker

This isn’t a redemption story.  I’m not trying to prove my dad’s just a man who made some bad choices, or that he was, ironically, vilified by the press.  Chances are you’ve already made up your own mind about what kind of person Greg Miskiw is, or more than likely you’ve never heard of him at all. It was pantomime villain Rebekah Brooks who stole the News of the World phone hacking limelight.  Along with David Cameron’s ex-spin doctor Andy Coulson, the high profile pair would deflect the media’s gaze away from the eight other journalists on trial.  Brooks and Coulson may have played starring roles, but it was my

The Spectator

If the Tories can mess up a Budget, how will they handle Brexit?

After Philip Hammond delivered his Budget last week, he went to speak to a meeting of Conservative backbench MPs. Several were deeply alarmed about his tearing up of their manifesto pledge not to raise National Insurance. One asked him how sure he was about all this. Might they find themselves going out to defend this tax rise to their constituents, only to find him abandoning the policy later? No, the Chancellor replied, he would not change his mind. This tax rise was centrepiece of Budget, so could not be scrapped. He was not for turning. For a Chancellor to abandon his main Budget policy within a week is nothing more

Ed West Ed West

Classical architecture makes us happy. So why not build more of it?

The key to a happy life, it’s been discovered, is living near to Georgian architecture and a Waitrose. Bath, York, Chichester, Stamford, Skipton, Harrogate, Oxford and Cambridge are among the towns listed in the Sunday Times 20 nicest places to live in Britain survey. Almost all these areas have one thing in common: they all feature a great deal of Georgian housing. And they’re all mostly unaffordable. There is a fair amount of research suggesting that traditional architecture, such as Georgian and Victorian terraces and mansion blocks, contributes to our wellbeing. Beauty makes people happy. This can be measured through house prices, which consistently show bigger increases for more traditional

Rose Asani

How Erdogan used the Dutch as political pawns

Rotterdam What started as a minor disagreement between Turkey and the Netherlands has now expanded into an unprecedented diplomatic spat. Turkish attempts to hold rallies in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands have been blocked – and President Erdogan is now using this to his advantage. In April, Erdogan will hold a referendum on changes to constitutional powers in Turkey. This has been his goal for a long time. Even the slight possibility of losing terrifies him. In Turkey the electorate has effectively been told they are ‘terrorists’ if they vote against the motion. Yet despite that, polls showed until recently that the vote was still split. That’s why Turkish ministers were on a campaign across Europe

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

James Forsyth nominated for UK political journalist of the year

It’s the Press Awards tonight and a first for The Spectator – we’re nominated for the first time. James Forsyth is up for political journalist of the year, and he and I are heading to out to the awards now (after taking out a small mortgage for the £250-a-piece tickets) to hope for the best. Since the Press Awards opened to magazines, they’re one of the few awards The Spectator enters (we tend to avoid the the Editorial Intelligence awards, which are judged by corporate lobbyists) so it was great to make tonight’s shortlist. James is up against some pretty tough competition, but that’s true every week – and every

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Is ‘post-theocratic Islam’ a contradiction in terms?

Omar Saif Ghobash, who is the United Arab Emirates ambassador to Russia, has written a good Muslim-reformist tract called Letters to a Young Muslim. There is plenty of passionate rhetoric denouncing rigidity, praising open-mindedness. There are plenty of insights that give the outsider a glimpse of his difficult inheritance (as a half-Arab, half-Russian boy educated in Britain). But is the bullet bit? A bit. While his liberal sympathies are not in doubt, Ghobash does not quite focus on the core issue with adequate determination. For me, the essence of the Muslim-reformist task is the repudiation of theocracy. This entails more than denunciations of terrorism, religious police, blasphemy laws and so

Emma Lunn

The new era of pension freedom is a boon to the Treasury

Savers cashing in their pension pots has led to the government raking in almost twice the tax it estimated the new pensions freedoms would generate. Experts expected that people withdrawing cash from their pensions would spread the withdrawals – but savers have taken bigger amounts in one go, leading to more cash in the Treasury’s coffers. Since April 2015 pension savers have had much more freedom about what they do with their defined contribution pension savings. From the age of 55 they can take the money as cash, buy an annuity, use income drawdown, or combine two or more of the options. Savers can withdraw 25 per cent of their

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: ‘This day is called the Feast of Tony Blair…’

The invitation for poems making the case for a national commemoration day for a person or thing of your choice brought in a varied and entertaining entry. While Alanna Blake championed the dandelion, there were also impassioned calls for days that high-five Thomas Crapper, Doris Day and the tent. I, for one, would happily celebrate a Tom Waits day with Adrian Fry. The winners below take £25 each. Bill Greenwell pockets £30. Bill Greenwell Bring us the day of the dodo, The day of the passenger pigeon, That their memories never corrode, oh Let’s cheer them, and more than a smidgen: Let’s praise those whose very long luck Receded to