Society

Thursday

8 Sep 2016

Local heroes | 8 September 2016

In one village after another across the country, pubs are closing, as many as 25 a week by some counts, and this is accepted with English fatalism. But the people of South Stoke, near Bath, chose not to accept the loss of the Packhorse mutely; the locals decided to save their local. And in the process they may have demonstrated that ‘community’ and indeed ‘local’ or localism are not merely empty rhetoric. Part of the charm of Bath is its setting, lying in a valley ringed by hills, a town surrounded by villages. Some of them, Widcombe or Weston, have been absorbed into the town, like those former villages called

Patrick Allitt

Death of an anti-feminist

Phyllis Schlafly could have been America’s number one feminist. She graduated from good universities, wrote important books on serious topics, was an outspoken orator and political organiser, didn’t let her life be defined by her husband’s career, and stood up to bitter abuse from her opponents. In reality, however, she was America’s leading anti-feminist. Her death this week, at the age of 92, marks the passing of an organisational and publicity genius who did all she could to fight against the spirit of the age. When passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the US constitution seemed imminent and inevitable in the mid-1970s, she created a democratic grassroots pressure group,

Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 10 September

After three and a quarter centuries in the business, Berry Bros. & Rudd is certainly trad, but it’s also reassuringly innovative. So it is that we have here a classic claret but also a Chardonnay from a part of France that doesn’t grow it, a blended single varietal from Chile (don’t worry, all is explained below) and a wine from Greece which is all but extinct. Best of all, Berrys’ buying director, Mark Pardoe MW, has knocked up to 26 per cent off the list price. Hooray! The 2013 Domaine de Lansac ‘Les Quatres Reines’ (1) is a deliciously uncomplicated, unblended, unoaked Chardonnay from the tiny region of Les Alpilles

Lucy Vickery

No idea

In Competition No. 2964 you were invited to suggest a really bad idea for one, or several, of the following: a children’s book; an Olympic sport; a television sitcom; a reality TV series. Reading the entry brought back fond if painful memories of Alan Partridge’s Inner-City Sumo — ‘We take fat people from inner cities, put them in big nappies…’ — and monkey tennis. V. Ernest Cox’s proposed children’s book, A Pop-Up Book of Sexting, vied with John Samson’s Dignitas show-jumping (don’t ask) for the bad-taste award, while Douglas G. Brown’s Poop Scoopin’ Fetishists scooped the gong for grossness. Top marks to Tracy Davidson’s pitch for the one-size-fits-all reality TV

Camilla Swift

Editor’s Letter

In August the papers were full of smiling pupils clutching their exam results. Now we’re in September, when children and teenagers across the country are taking the next steps in their academic lives, be that starting school, switching to a new one, or moving on to university or college. Navigating today’s education system can be mind-bogglingly complex for parents, so I hope this magazine will help to stimulate debate and shed light on new developments. For this issue we have given Spectator Schools a light facelift, introducing some new columns. In Talking Heads we meet Keith Budge, headmaster of Bedales. And in My School Trip Katy Balls tells of her

Ross Clark

Out but not down

No group of the population voted to remain in the EU more enthusiastically than students. According to the polling organisation YouthSight, 85 per cent of them voted to remain, and among the 15 per cent who voted leave, 17 per cent say they now regret it. Moreover, the idea that students were too lazy or drunk to turn out to vote is a gross calumny on the young, according to the survey. It found that 87 per cent of eligible students turned out to vote — compared with 72 per cent of the general population. What it didn’t reveal is how many students voted more than once. My biggest shock

Rhiannon Williams

Tongue-tied

Picture the scene: an Englishman loudly-ordering food in a Parisian restaurant. The waiter rolls his eyes at the customer’s stubborn commitment to soldiering on in English, and everyone in the-vicinity has the good grace to look suitably embarrassed. This may sound like a tired 1970s stereotype. Except, tragically, it’s just as likely to serve as a prophecy for our future. Three quarters of the UK’s residents are unable to hold a conversation in any language other than English. This reluctance — or lack of interest — is echoed in this summer’s academic results. This year the number of entries to French GCSE exams fell by 8.1 per cent compared to 2015,

The Spectator

School portraits | 8 September 2016

Rugby When Rugby School first allowed girls into its sixth form in 1976, just ten joined. In 1995 it went fully co-ed and today there are 373 female pupils. The ankle-length skirts that form part of the uniform look old-fashioned, but the school’s co-educational aproach is far more progressive. The transition wasn’t all smooth, though. When the first head girl was appointed, some boys hung protest banners in the Warwickshire school’s chapel and boycotted a service marking the bicentenary of former headmaster Thomas Arnold. These days the head girl and head boy work seamlessly together and Rugby performs solidly in the league tables, with IGCSEs in most subjects and 29

Mark Palmer

A home from home at school

The Earl of March, who owns the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, said recently that he ‘hated’ Eton and ‘couldn’t wait to leave’. This came as a surprise to the interviewer, who immediately asked Charles March why on earth he then packed his own three sons off to his horrible alma mater. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ came the reply. ‘It’s completely different now to how it was in my day. Fathers and sons have a completely different relationship — warmer, loving. People I was at school with often barely had relationships with their fathers. Mine was different; my parents have always been modern, liberal thinkers.’ It didn’t make much sense. So

Laura Freeman

Room for inspiration

The curious thing about an art room is that you never remember the look of the place. Each summer, a school art room sloughs its skin: life drawings are unpinned from the walls, maquettes carried home for the holidays, canvases taken off easels, portfolios collected by school leavers, the whole place stripped of colour and finery. The room is white and empty again, a canvas primed for September. What stays from year to year and what lingers in the senses of former pupils is the smell. Chalk and charcoal, oils and turpentine, wet clay and slip mix, Swarfega jelly and Pritt Stick, sugar paper (a smell like damp hymn-books) and

Katy Balls

My school trip

As the 16 of us huddled in the back of an open-air truck teetering off the Andes, I closed my eyes and thought of my mother. The joke email I had sent days before, with the subject line: ‘Urgent: your child is in hospital’, didn’t seem so funny now we were taking tight corners along a mountain edge. Even if we did survive our Peruvian trucker’s alarming driving down steep winding roads, there was every chance the police would stop the vehicle and find a bunch of Scottish teens in the cargo container where there should have been animal feed. It wasn’t supposed to have turned out like this. My

William Cook

From bored to boarding

Thirty-five years ago, shortly after my 16th birthday, my parents finally got fed up with me and packed me off to boarding school. Now, half a lifetime later, my 16-year-old son is about to follow in my footsteps. The two scenarios aren’t quite the same (back then, it was my parents’ idea — this time, it’s my son who can’t wait to get away), but as I pack his trunk and think how much I’ll miss my one true pal, I can’t help wondering — am I doing the right thing? Naturally, I have no idea — like most of life’s big decisions, it’s a roll of the dice. Yes, I can

The Spectator

School report

Teaching maths the Asian way English primary schools have received funding of £41 million to embrace the ‘Asian style’ of teaching maths. The method, used in Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong — all of which are at the top of Pisa’s study into the school performance of 15-year-olds — is more visual than the ‘normal’ British style of maths teaching, and focuses on children being taught in a mixed-ability group, rather than being divided into streams. The funding, announced in July, will allow 700 teachers to be trained in the Asian method, in addition to the 140 who have already completed their training. At the moment, the UK sits in

Wednesday

7 Sep 2016

Mohammed Ashfaq

A rent boy’s guide to politicians and other clients

This article is an excerpt from the latest issue of The Spectator, out tomorrow. I am not surprised that Keith Vaz has been caught sleeping with male hookers. I’m one myself and so I know that overweight married Asians are our staple. We often joke that without Indians and-Middle Eastern guys, we’d all be broke. They are always married. I’ve always been sickened by the way they betray their wives, but they aren’t paying me for my judgment. There are different types of rent boy. Some are very young, slim and smooth. They are called twinks. I am dark, hairy and muscled, which appeals to certain clients who want a

Tom Goodenough

‘Serene’ Mark Carney tries to take credit for Brexit bounceback

How does Mark Carney feel about his ‘Project Fear’ warnings in the run-up to the referendum? His mild-mannered nemesis Jacob Rees-Mogg probably wouldn’t have been prepared for the Bank of England Governor’s choice of words to describe his mood. Carney was ‘serene’ about how he handled himself before Brexit, he told the Treasury Select Committee this afternoon. But Carney didn’t stop there: he also did his best to bait Rees-Mogg, who has clashed with Carney several times before at these hearings, suggesting the session was being wasted ‘going through counterfactuals’. He then went on to slap down any suggestion from the Tory MP that his warnings had been ‘dire’. Yet

Alec Marsh

Why fashionable baby names are impossible to avoid

The latest official lists of the 100 most popular boys and girls’ names in England and Wales confirm the dominance of the Old Testament as well as the Edwardian ascendancy in the hearts of our nation’s newest parents. With the Calebs, Jacobs, Noahs, Samuels, Alfies and Freddies, the names given to boys in 2015 read like a rustic mash-up of Moby Dick and The Importance of Being Earnest. I have no objection to the Old Testament, nor late Victorian or Edwardian names – indeed to borrow the Telegraph’s gag, it’s super to see Doris getting her day again – but I do wonder why people choose names that so frequently lead the

Charlotte Gill

Bureaucracy is destroying the fabric of London’s nightlife

London’s nightlife is under attack. That became obvious this morning with the news that the popular club Fabric has closed for good. After a series of drug-related deaths at the venue, Islington Borough Council has decided the risk of keeping it open is too great. It’s come as a shock to many that Fabric is finished. Indeed, a petition to keep it alive reached over 148,000 signatures – and many celebrity backers, such as Annie Mac and the Chemical Brothers pleaded with the public: save the rave. But it was too little, too late. Another London nightclub has been forced to close. Fabric is just a small part of a much bigger problem; our party

Emma Simon

The Archers, financial abuse and THAT storyline

Millions of us will be tuning in to The Archers this week to see if Helen is found guilty of the attempted murder of her abusive husband, Rob Titchener. For more than a year his bullying and controlling behaviour has made for compulsive, if unsettling, listening for many regular fans like myself. It is interesting that this storyline has also shone a light on issues of financial control, and the part it plays in many cases of domestic abuse. Two years ago, Citizens Advice published one of the first reports into this phenomenon. At the time it said that this form of control and abuse remained ‘relatively hidden’ and was

Helen Nugent

House prices, hired help, debt and inheritance tax

House price growth slowed in August but buying a property was still 6.9 per cent more expensive than a year ago, new figures show. The Halifax, part of Lloyds Banking Group, said that the average home in the UK cost £213,930. Prices in the three months to the end of August were 0.7 per cent higher than the previous quarter – marking a slowdown in the pace of growth. Property values fell by 0.2 per cent in August compared with July, the lender added. Responding to the figures, Ian Thomas, co-founder and director at online mortgage lender LendInvest, said: ‘There have been a number of external factors that have chipped away

Steerpike

Sadiq Khan takes a swipe at George Osborne at GQ awards

To GQ‘s Men of the Year awards at the Tate Modern. With Russell Brand not around to make Nazi jokes at the expense of a sponsor this year, Amy Schumer did her best to unsettle the champagne-fuelled crowd. Accepting the ‘woman of the year’ gong, the American comedian said she was relieved an awards ceremony ‘finally celebrated men’. However it was Sadiq Khan’s ‘politician of the year’ gong that caught Mr S’s attention. Accepting the award, the Mayor of London made sure to mention his predecessor George Osborne — who triumphed in the category just last year. Given that the former Chancellor of the Exchequer has since returned to the backbench, Khan said that he was nervous Osborne’s