Society

Thursday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I’m up on memes and down with the kids

Boy and I have been driving the Fawn mad by singing the ‘Johny Johny Yes Papa’ song. It goes (roughly to the tune Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star): ‘Johny Johny/ Yes, Papa/ Eating Sugar?/ No, Papa/ Telling Lies?/ No, Papa/ Open Your Mouth!/ Ha Ha Ha.’ In the likely event that you don’t know it, you’ll probably find it as irritating as the Fawn does — especially the misspelling of Johnny and the bad Indian accent. But in the unlikely event that you do, you’ll be congratulating yourself on your pop cultural credibility. This is because for a brief period peaking around last weekend — ‘Johny Johny Yes Papa’ was the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Bleak House

It takes seven years to know your way around Parliament. That’s what I was told when I arrived in the Commons press gallery seven years ago, but I am still none the wiser about how to get from the Snake Pit to the North Curtain Corridor, and have only recently discovered the location of the Yellow Submarine. As a building, the Palace of Westminster is a confusing, contradictory rabbit warren of underground corridors, secret briefing rooms at the top of towers and rooms with strange names. The very fabric of the building is dysfunctional, with pieces of masonry falling onto cars, and mice creeping through kitchens. Winston Churchill famously said

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why can’t Britain hang on to its best new companies?

Costa, in my opinion, sells a decent cup of coffee. It employs polite youngsters who seem happy in their work. If you’re desperate for caffeine, even its petrol-station vending machines are not too bad. And unlike the UK operation of Starbucks, whose coffee is vile, it pays tax on its profits at close to the full rate of corporation tax. Founded by two Italian brothers in London’s Vauxhall Bridge Road in 1971, it’s a triumph of brand development — and a credit to its current owner Whitbread, which acquired Costa as a diversification from its own traditional brewing business in 1995. Now Costa has been sold to Coca-Cola for a

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The lunatics have landed

I remember the moon landing very well. I was nine years old. I can remember too my sense of outrage and disillusion. ‘This is a blatant violation of the moon’s dignity and sovereignty,’ I told my parents, as the astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong attempted to secure the US flag to the lunar surface. ‘An act of imperialistic, Zionist barbarism and a statement of intent from the American government that it intends to export its white supremacy throughout the known galaxy. You will note that no people of colour were chosen as astronauts, nor women, nor people with fibromyalgia.’ A day or two later, when I had been let

Lucy Vickery

Living dangerously | 6 September 2018

In Competition No. 3064 you were invited to supply a newspaper leading article exposing the hitherto unsuspected corrupting influence of a seemingly innocuous everyday item. This assignment was inspired by the revelation, in a recent letter to the Times, that patent leather shoes were outlawed at a British girls’ public school as recently as the 1980s, lest they reflect undergarments and ‘excite the gardeners’.   It was a smallish field with a narrow focus. You divided fairly equally between those who consider fruit (bananas, in particular) to be the Devil’s work and those who reckon that the real threat to vulnerable young minds is cutlery. As usual with this type

James Bradley

A whiff of paranoia

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 many writers spoke of feeling immobilised. The scale of the attacks and the world’s shared experience of the media event seemed to demand a response; but simultaneously writers such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Jay McInerney described a sense that the tools at their disposal were inadequate — that the reality of what had taken place exceeded fictional representation. These three all recovered from their shock reasonably quickly, contributing to the flood of 9/11 fiction that poured into bookshops during the 2000s. In recent years this torrent of novels and stories has slowed, but as Christopher Priest’s eerily powerful An American Story demonstrates,

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

The bad boys of Naples

Goodnight, Caecilius. Goodnight, Metella. Farewell, faithful Cerberus the dog. What a fate. Buried under the ash and rock at Pompeii. ‘Eheu,’ as they say in the Cambridge Latin Course. ‘Oh dear, oh no.’ But what’s this? A boat leaving the Bay of Naples… A young man on board… Coughing black dust, but… alive. Yes, it’s Quintus, sailing to safety and Book Two. Here we will learn about Quintus’s further adventures in Roman Britain, trips to the baths at Aquae Sulis and an audience with good King Cogidubnus. What fun we had with Caecilius and Co. What bread, what circuses. What larks with Grumio and Clemens, the two buffoonish slaves. Parents

The Spectator

School portraits | 6 September 2018

    Bath Academy   Based in the beautiful city of Bath, this tutorial college is one of very few in the south-west to offer flexible academic programmes for a wide range of students. As well as being a sixth-form college, Bath Academy also offers GCSE courses, revision courses and resits in a wide range of subjects. The Academy’s University Foundation Programme was the UK’s first independent foundation programme. Equivalent to A-levels or the International Baccalaureate, it is designed primarily for international students who want to study at a British university. The focus is on a personalised approach to learning, with small class sizes and regular meetings between students and

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Rise of the machines

‘There is a profound mismatch between the way we are educating our young and the world we’re educating them for, and what should, and could, be happening.’ So says Sir Anthony Seldon, former headmaster of Wellington College and vice-chancellor of Buckingham University. Seldon is well known for promoting novel ideas when it comes to education. During his time at Wellington he was often in the limelight for his original style of thinking, or ‘visions for education’ as he puts it; for example, his decision to introduce mindfulness into the curriculum there. Seldon isn’t just a teacher, though. He’s also a historian and a political biographer, as well as being a

Eleanor Doughty

Summertime blues

Every year, like clockwork it comes, the traditional concern that the younger generation don’t do summer jobs like they used to. As the school holidays approach a politician is wheeled out to write a nostalgia piece about part-time jobs, and the ‘essential skills’ these offer. Holiday and Saturday jobs, you see, are the foundations of a successful career, with their promise of resilience-building and priority-juggling. Some statistics will be cited about businesses being desperate for applicants with ‘soft skills’, and on cue, media-friendly CEOs are trotted out to support whichever wayward minister has been handed the keys to the Workshy Teenagers wagon. And so it was that in late July,

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Share in the community

The theatre, we are told, is increasingly becoming the domain of the privately educated. The Guardian has even claimed that the working-class actor is ‘a disappearing breed’, and it’s certainly true that public school-educated actors such as Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Damian Lewis (the list goes on) are rarely off our screens. But what’s the reason for it? Why are our independent schools so good at churning out Bafta- (or indeed Oscar)-winning actors and actresses? A large part of it comes down to the teaching and the facilities available. Most public schools offer a school theatre, as well as full-time drama teachers, theatre managers and so on. In

William Cook

The league of gentlemen

Football is a game for gentlemen played by ruffians, and rugby is just the opposite. That’s what I was taught at grammar school, and for 40 years I believed it. Soccer is for oiks, our teachers told us. Posh boys are no good at football. And so football-playing oiks like me were forced to play rugby, in an attempt to turn us into proper gentlemen. Of course this was utter nonsense — a lot of Britain’s top public schools play football, and always have done. Yet this inverted snobbery prevails, which is ironic, because football in independent schools has never been in better shape. Having long been seen as the

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

A model school

It would be a cliché to say that Christian Heinrich fell into his career in education. But really, there isn’t any other way of describing his route into teaching. In his final year of a degree in American literature, he returned home to nurse his sick mother. When she passed away, his old prep school headmaster asked him for a coffee. ‘He played that wonderful trick,’ explains Heinrich. ‘He said, “Oh Christian, I’m taking a Latin class, come along.” Midway through the lesson he had to take a phone call. “Christian, just finish the lesson, and then come and find me.” I duly finished things off, and that was that.

The Spectator

School report | 6 September 2018

    MAKING THE GRADES   When he was education secretary, Michael Gove took it upon himself to reform the GCSE exam system. The A* to G grading system was replaced by a numerical one, with the aim of making it easier to differentiate between the top candidates — A* and A grades were, for example, replaced with three grades: 7, 8 and 9. These new exams were supposed to be harder than the previous ones, with former Harrow headmaster Barnaby Lenon commenting that they ‘contain questions of a level of difficulty that we have not seen since the abolition of O-levels in 1987.’ Despite all of this, GCSE results

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

It’s time to take on the paedophiles

Abusing children is one of the most terrible things men do. We all agree about that. And I think we’re all aware, as Sajid Javid announced on Monday, that it’s a growing problem. The same technology that allows millions to share videos of romping kittens has created an awful, expanding market for images of children — mostly very young girls. There has been a 700 per cent rise in reports of child abuse images since 2012, said Javid: an average of 400 arrests a month. Police think that there are now 80,000 people in the UK who pose a serious threat to kids. Javid is shocked by the scale of

Tuesday

Spectator Money

Best Buys: Buy-to-let mortgages

Buy-to-let property is still a popular investment choice for those who have the money to put down the deposit. Here are the best 5-year fixed rate mortgages available at the moment, according to data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

Rory Geoghegan

The truth about stop and search

Today in Britain, some of our poorest communities are under siege from gangs and violent crime – and it can be stopped. It is near impossible for people to realise their potential when they do not even feel safe in their communities and so it is a social justice issue that the Home Secretary is right to weigh in on. Sajid Javid is said to be planning a significant extension of police stop and search. After years of restricting these powers, it’s about time. Javid is far from alone in believing stop and search is part of the answer to dealing with surging knife crime and serious violence. The Centre for

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Steve Bannon and the sanitisation of public life

Well done, New Yorker, you have just empowered the mob. You have boosted the moral standing and arrogance of those 21st-century offence-takers who believe certain people should not be allowed to speak in public. In disinviting Steve Bannon from your ideas festival at the behest of irate tweeters and arrogant celebs, you have sent a depressing message to society: that it is always worth agitating for censorship because eventually you will succeed. Eventually the targets of your censorious ire will cave in and give you what you want: a sanitised public sphere in which there won’t be so much as a peep from people whose ideas we find difficult or

James Kirkup James Kirkup

How Caroline Lucas fell foul of the transgender thought police | 4 September 2018

Last week, it emerged that Linda Bellos, veteran feminist of the Old Left, faces legal action for having said the wrong thing about transgender people who hit women. This week’s transgender thought-criminal is Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party. Someone who might well be considered impeccably on-message on gender issues is accused of being that most terrible thing, a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and is being punished accordingly. Lucas leads a party that is deeply devoted to the orthodoxy of transgenderism and the unquestionable mantra that “transwomen are women”. So keen are Greens to embrace the right of people born male to be considered women if they say they are women

Monday

Brett Moffatt

Retirement is in crisis and employers, as well as employees, must plan for the future

The idea of working 9-5 until you receive a gold watch at age 60 is dying out fast. Millennials seem to have the biggest millstone around their neck: a survey of under-35s by Prudential found that over a third of millennials believe that, despite saving as much as they can, they are never going to save enough for a comfortable retirement. The cost of living longer in retirement is pushing the average retirement age higher, and millennials’ struggle to fill their pension pot will lead to them postponing retirement even longer. Changing generational trends could be affecting productivity in business too. Companies who look closely at their baby-boomer employees’ retirement plans are