I was disappointed to hear Andy Burnham on Marr last Sunday declare his opposition to free schools. He put plenty of distance between himself and Ed Miliband, even admitting Labour spent too much in the run-up to the recession, which is quite something given that he was the Chief Secretary to the Treasury at the time. But Miliband was spot on, apparently, when it came to free schools. He then reeled off all the usual guff about ‘experimenting with children’s education’, ‘surplus places’, ‘unqualified teachers’, etc.

It’s tempting to take Burnham to task over this, since he’s the favourite to become the next Labour leader. What could be clearer evidence that he’s in the pocket of Len McCluskey than siding with the teaching unions? But I’m going to rise above it. Burnham is like one of those Japanese soldiers who emerges from the Burmese jungle, bayonet at the ready, after the war has ended. Newsflash Andy: your side lost. David Cameron has pledged to open 500 new free schools. If you add those to the 250 or so that have opened already, that brings the total to 750. Like it or not, free schools are now a permanent feature of England’s educational landscape. If and when Labour ever gets back in, they won’t be able to do anything about them.

It doesn’t come naturally to me to be magnanimous in victory, particularly when I think about the misery Labour would have inflicted on the parents and teachers who’ve devoted their lives to setting up new schools over the past five years. But magnanimous our side must be. To quote my father, the author of Labour’s 1945 manifesto, we’ve won the war and now we must win the peace. We need to disabuse our opponents of the notion that we are softening up England’s public education system so it can be sold off to billionaire robber barons, and persuade them that we are in the same business as them, namely, creating good local schools so all children can realise their potential, particularly the least well-off.

A good opening salvo in this campaign has been fired by Robert Peal, head of history at the West London Free School. He’s just edited a collection of essays for John Catt called Changing Schools: Perspectives on Five Years of Education Reform. It includes contributions from some of the most important voices in the reform movement, including James O’Shaugh-nessy, Katharine Birbalsingh, Daisy Christodoulou, Andrew Old, Jonathan Simons and Tom Bennett. In the introduction, Peal argues that the main impact of increased school autonomy has been to empower teachers, handing them more control over what’s taught in their classrooms and, just as importantly, how it’s taught. This revolution is far from complete — politicians and bureaucrats still hold too much power — but it’s likely to continue under Nicky Morgan. That’s a good argument for why all teachers should embrace the government’s reform programme, not just shy Tories lurking at the back of the staff room.

But the really striking thing about Changing Schools is not the substance of the essays, but the tone. Flicking through its pages, it’s clear that most of the contributors believed we were heading for a period of Labour government and they do their best to make a bipartisan case for the improvements they’ve made over the past five years. Gone is the shrill, embattled note of the warrior in full cry — my own preferred register — and in its place is a calm, measured voice. Imagine the curator of a museum in Iraq trying to reason with the local Isis commander, surrounded by troglodytes clutching hammers and power drills, and you have the general idea.

Had the barbarian horde actually made it as far as Downing Street on 8 May, I have no doubt these pleas would have fallen on deaf ears. Tristram Hunt would not have been entrusted with the task of dismantling free schools and academies — too soft. No, it would have been given to some knuckle-dragging Brownite. Within months, people like James O’Shaughnessy, Katherine Birbal-singh and Jonathan Simons would have been hauled before some quasi-judicial House of Commons committee, where the show trials would have begun. I shudder to think about it.

But given that Labour and its allies in the teaching unions have been vanquished, the contributors to this excellent collection of essays have, almost by accident, hit upon exactly the right note. Henceforth, I will try my best to mimic their reasonable, consensual tone. The insurgents have won and we must do our best to treat our former masters with dignity and respect.

The post Freedom for free schools appeared first on The Spectator.

I couldn’t believe it when Nicola Sturgeon called for the resignation of Alistair Carmichael, the former Scottish Secretary, over his role in the leaked memo affair.

As readers will recall, the Daily Telegraph published a confidential document during the election campaign that purported to be an account of a conversation between Sturgeon and Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador, in which Sturgeon said she’d prefer David Cameron to Ed Miliband as Prime Minister. Carmichael has now owned up to leaking the document, which originated in the Scottish Office, but this isn’t the cause of Sturgeon’s outrage. No, Carmichael’s sin was denying all knowledge of the leak when asked about it at the time. For this, apparently, he should ‘consider his position’.

Politicians pretend to be shocked by each other’s behaviour all the time, but this is a particularly shameless example. There’s more than a smidgen of cold calculation behind the white heat of Sturgeon’s indignation. The reason she singled out Carmichael’s alleged dishonesty, rather than his breach of confidentiality, is because she doesn’t want anyone to focus on the substance of the memo. Why? Because it was almost certainly an accurate account of what she said to the French ambassador. More fundamentally, it’s hypocritical of the SNP leader to complain about duplicity, given her party’s conduct in the run-up to the referendum.

I’m thinking of Alex Salmond in particular. On almost every critical point raised during the debate about Scotland’s future, Salmond was deliberately misleading. I’m not just thinking of his claim that he’d received legal advice reassuring him that an independent Scotland wouldn’t need to reapply for membership of the European Union. When the Information Commissioner ordered the Scottish government to respond to an FOI request to disclose the advice it had received, Salmond’s ministers spent £19,452.92 of public money appealing the decision, only to admit later that the ‘advice’ was a figment of Salmond’s imagination. So the First Minister misled the Scottish people on this point and spent taxpayers’ money to try to conceal the fact.

Then there were the SNP’s fictitious claims about the economic impact of independence — and I’m indebted here to the blogger Kevin Hague, who has devoted years to unpicking the SNP’s rhetoric. For instance, there was the assertion that Scotland sends more money to Westminster than it gets back, thanks to North Sea oil.

If you factor in its share of oil revenue, Scotland has been a net contributor to Britain’s coffers in three of the last 15 years. For the other 12, oil hasn’t been sufficient to offset the fact that the Scottish government spends £1,450 more and raises £250 less per person than the rest of the UK. This makes Salmond’s claim, repeated ad infinitum, that ‘oil is just a bonus’ and Scotland could get along perfectly well without it, even more absurd. If you add the £1,450 and £250 together, you get a per capita gap of £1,700, which means that, without North Sea oil, its deficit would be £9.1 billion higher than it is as part of the UK. It turns out that oil revenue is critical to offsetting the deficit gap, which is presumably why Salmond wildly over-estimated it in the SNP’s white paper on Scotland’s future. In it, he claimed that revenue from North Sea oil in 2016/17 — the first year of Scotland’s independence — would be between £6.8 billion and £7.9 billion. In fact, it’s likely to be around £600 million.

If you deduct the £600 million from the £9.1 billion, that means Scotland would be facing an annual deficit gap of £8.5 billion in its first year of independence and there’s no reason to think that would change over the next ten to 15 years. In order for Scotland to be better off out of the UK, oil revenue would have to increase by several thousand per cent, or the Scottish economy would have to grow by a faster amount than the rest of the UK — around 15 per cent faster. For Scotland to wash its own face would mean massive public spending cuts. Far from imposing austerity on Scotland, the British government is saving Nicola Sturgeon from having to find Greek levels of savings. Who would have thunk it?

The SNP is, by some margin, the most dishonest party in Britain. For its leader to call for Alistair Carmichael’s resignation because he leaked a memo is laughable.

The post Sturgeon doth protest too much, me thinks appeared first on The Spectator.

Should we be surprised that friendship isn’t always mutual? That is one of the findings of a team of researchers at Tel Aviv University who’ve just published a paper in an academic journal. They asked several hundred students to identify which members of their peer group they considered to be ‘friends’. On average, half the people included in this category by each respondent did not feel the same way about them.

According to the researchers, this news would come as a shock to most people. The students in the survey thought that 95 per cent of the people they regarded as ‘friends’ would identify them as ‘friends’ too. But I can’t say I’m surprised. In fact, a 50 per cent reciprocity score strikes me as suspiciously high. The researchers cite another friendship survey in which the score was only 34 per cent. That seems about right to me.

I haven’t always been so cynical. Before I got married, I was a fully signed-up member of the friendship cult. Like many young men, I regarded my close friends as a kind of substitute family, with all the accompanying ties and responsibilities. If one of them was in trouble, you did everything in your power to help them and if you were in trouble you could expect the same of them. As far as I was concerned, we had a lot in common with the Mafia, save for the need to do something unspeakable before you were admitted. Loyalty was the supreme virtue, with any other quality coming a distant second.

It was on my stag weekend 15 years ago that the scales fell from my eyes. There were about ten people I placed in the innermost circle — my own personal Cosa Nostra — and I invited them all to Malaga a week before I got married. Or rather my best friend invited them, having volunteered to organise the trip. He promised a whistle-stop tour of the most glamorous nightclubs in Marbella and enlisted the help of a well-connected local DJ to smooth our passage. I didn’t think of this as an opportunity for a final blowout with my nearest and dearest, since it didn’t occur to me that I’d be seeing any less of them after I got married. Innocent that I was, I thought of marriage as adding another person to my intimate circle rather than the substitution of one for the other.

I experienced a brutal reality check when only four of the ten honoured guests appeared at the Spanish hotel on the Friday evening. The no-shows included my best friend, the organiser of the festivities. He left a message on my phone explaining that he’d been held up by an ‘emergency’ and might be a few hours late — needless to say, he never made it — but he’d fully briefed another member of the group and he was more than happy to take the reins. Unfortunately, that ‘friend’ didn’t materialise either. We ended up spending the first night in an ‘English pub’ watching West Ham lose 2-0 to Leeds United.

The low point was the ‘activity’ on the Saturday – a scuba-diving trip to some local caves which my best friend had persuaded me to pay for on the understanding that everyone would pay me back. They might have, too, if they’d bothered to turn up.

In the event, only three of us made the trip, with the other two refusing to get out of bed for the early morning start. It made no odds anyway, because the scuba instructor decided to cancel the dive at the last minute on account of the heavy rain. He gave me a partial refund but kept the deposit, which, if memory serves, was around £500.

As we puttered back to shore in the leaky fishing boat, the rain lashing our wetsuits, I had a moment of clarity. My belief in the unbreakable bonds of friendship was a sentimental illusion. The true test isn’t when you’re in trouble — it’s relatively easy to stand by your friends in their hour of need, although, come to think of it, plenty of my friends have failed that test, too. It’s whether they’re prepared to inconvenience themselves for your benefit, particularly if it involves getting on a plane and shelling out a few hundred quid. Turned out 60 per cent of the people I regarded as my closest friends weren’t.

In retrospect, it was a good lesson to learn just before getting married. After that, whenever there was a conflict between loyalty to Caroline and loyalty to my friends, I was never in any doubt about who came first.

The post Call yourself a friend? appeared first on The Spectator.

If you’re a proper football supporter, getting excited about England on the eve of a major tournament is considered uncool. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to engage people in conversation about England’s chances, only to be greeted with a look of bored condescension. ‘I’m not really interested in international football,’ is the inevitable reply.

Well, sorry, but I’m pretty fired up about the Euros — although, to be fair, I do conform to the stereotype of the inauthentic, prawn-sandwich-eating fan. When people are polite enough to respond to my opening gambits, it isn’t long before I reveal my ignorance about the game. For instance, there was the time I found myself seated across the aisle from Glenn Hoddle on a British Airways flight to Tel Aviv to watch England play Israel in a Euro qualifier in 2007.

‘How come Craig Bellamy’s not in the squad?’ I asked him, referring to the Liverpool striker who’d racked up seven goals that season.

‘Er, because he’s Welsh?’

That match resulted in a dismal 0-0 draw and England failed to qualify for Euro 2008, but my enthusiasm for the national team remained undimmed. Even our failure to get beyond the group stage in the most recent World Cup, Brazil 2014, did nothing to dent it.

My love affair with England began with the 1990 World Cup. I was in the South of France for the knock-out stage and, back then, it was hard to get British TV outside the UK. I had to watch England’s three big games on a 12-inch black-and-white set and listen to the commentary in French.

Obviously, that enhanced the whole experience. First of all, you feel about 20 times more patriotic when watching England abroad. I experienced this again when we played Germany in the semi-finals of the 1996 European Championship, which I watched in a sports bar in New York surrounded by Germans. But my nationalism was off the scale in 1990. The fact that the French commentators were clearly impressed by our players helped. They were particularly fond of Chris Waddle, who played for Marseilles. They also seemed to have a lot of time for Paul Gascoigne, possibly because of his French-sounding name.

But the main thing was the performances. One of the magical things about watching sport is that you find yourself merging with your heroes. You don’t just imagine yourself in their shoes; it’s more visceral than that. A kind of transference takes place which, at particularly dramatic moments, resembles an out-of-body experience. You become them and their failures and triumphs become yours. Weirdly, this feeling is more powerful when watching a team sport like football than an individual sport like tennis, even though, logically, it should be more diluted. You find yourself identifying with one player, then another, switching around according to whoever’s in the thick of the action. It’s as if you’re a mercurial demon in a horror film, flitting from one host to the next. I’ve never experienced this more powerfully than when watching England battle their way to the semi-finals in Italia 90.

Another supernatural thing that happened during that campaign was that the England players seemed to grow as they progressed through the tournament. I mean literally grow in size. Even though they were tiny black-and-white figures on my French television set, no bigger than matchstick men, they loomed before me like giants. And the more heroic their efforts, the greater their stature. No wonder Chris Waddle kicked the ball over the bar during the penalty shoot-out with West Germany. By that time, he was 50 ft tall and, to him, the goal must have seemed no bigger than a postage stamp.

When I told my father about this, he said he’d experienced the same sensation during England’s 1966 World Cup campaign. Needless to say, our victory over West Germany in the final — which he witnessed in person at Wembley — confirmed his love affair with the national team, just as our performance in 1990 cemented mine. I’ll be watching the Euros with my three sons this month and I fervently hope England does well enough to light the same fire in them. Once it has been lit, nothing can extinguish it and, yes, a lifetime of disappointment awaits. But what misery, what pain! There’s nothing quite like it. Whither thou goest, I will go, forever and ever, amen.

The post Confessions of an England fan appeared first on The Spectator.

I’ve never been a great believer in karma. After all, in the absence of some kind of cosmic enforcer of karmic justice what guarantee is there that good deeds will be rewarded or bad deeds punished? Let’s not forget that Joseph Stalin was responsible for between 34 and 49 million deaths, depending on whose estimate you accept, yet died of natural causes in his own bed at the age of 73. Karma? What karma?

But events of the past fortnight have caused me to revise my opinion. It’s all to do with the massive Vote Leave billboard outside my house in Acton, and an incident that occurred 42 years ago during the October 1974 general election.

It’s rather shaming to admit, but back then I was a Labour party supporter. I was only a boy and firmly under the influence of my parents, who were both staunch socialists, but that’s hardly an excuse for what’s coming next. As a ten-year-old Labour ‘activist’ I took it upon myself to tear down a poster of our local MP outside the Conservative party’s HQ in Highgate.

A blue rinse immediately leapt out of the door, caught me by the scruff of the neck and threatened to call the police. Being a typical Labour supporter, I burst into tears and threw myself on her mercy, whereupon she ordered me to cough up my address and then frogmarched me to my house. She told my mother about this act of ‘mindless vandalism’, rightly dismissing my claim that it was a ‘political protest’, and my mother stopped my pocket money for a week.

Fast forward to the beginning of the EU referendum campaign and the delivery of my Brexit billboard. I must have ticked the wrong box on the Vote Leave website, because all I wanted was a simple placard. Instead, I got something that wouldn’t look out of place on the side of a motorway. It’s literally bigger than my VW Transporter. Where on earth was I going to put it? At first, I propped it up against the side of our house, protected from the street by our front garden. But then something strange started happening. Whenever I returned from work it would be lying face down on the grass. Was it the wind? I tried securing it in place with two wheelie bins, but that made no difference. Rain or shine, it would always end up toppling over.

I began to suspect my 12-year-old daughter. Like most young people, Sasha is a bug-eyed Europhile, convinced she’ll have no future in a Britain outside the EU. Both she and my wife cringed with embarrassment when they say my double-decker bus-sized poster — ‘What will the neighbours think?’ — and I wouldn’t put it past either of them to engage in sabotage. To be fair, though, they both denied being responsible.

I decided the solution was to somehow attach the thing to our magnolia tree. It’s in our front garden, so technically our property, but overhangs the street. A couple of weekends ago, I spent the best part of a Saturday morning trying to wrestle this monster up the tree. Eventually, I managed to wedge it between two branches and then, for good measure, secured it with half a coil of garden wire. The result was perfect. The giant billboard hung over our quiet residential street like one of the alien spacecraft in Independence Day, visible from every direction. And with the amount of garden wire I’d used, not even a force ten gale, i.e. Caroline in a fit of pique, could tear it down.

Then, about two days later, the first Remainer struck. But this was no common-or-garden vandal. He (or she) was more creative than that. They got some white paint and carefully added the letter ‘S’ to the word ‘Leave’ so that my magnolia tree urged people to ‘Vote Leaves’. Not hugely witty, but enough to render the poster ridiculous. Luckily, after attacking it for the best part of an hour with a bottle of paint stripper, I managed to restore it to something like its original state.

But on Sunday the second Remainer struck. Or maybe it was the first launching a second attack. Or maybe it was my daughter. In any event, they carefully unwound the garden wire securing the billboard to the tree and tucked it out of sight behind the front wall.

Needless to say, I have not conceded defeat. It’s going up again this weekend, this time using a hammer and nails. The battle of Shaa Road has been joined and on 23 June I expect to be victorious.

The post Who’s sabotaging my Leave campaign? appeared first on The Spectator.

On the eve of last year’s general election result, many pundits predicted the demise of Britain’s two-party system. The likeliest outcome was another hung parliament in which a smaller party — the Lib Dems or the SNP — held the balance of power. These same pundits pointed to the steady decline in membership of the two main parties, as well as the success of insurgent parties in the European and regional elections, as evidence of this sea change.

In the event, the pundits were ridiculed for getting it wrong. Yet is it possible they were just a year too early? At the time of writing, I don’t know the outcome of the EU referendum, but some kind of political realignment looks likely, whatever the result.

First, let’s deal with the impact on Labour, which — contrary to expectation — I think will be worse than on the Conservatives. Roughly half of Labour voters are Euro-sceptics, but, unlike their Tory counterparts, they had no one at the top of their party to speak for them. In addition, Labour MPs are nearly all pro-EU. When you bear in mind that the vast majority of Labour’s Eurosceptic voters are C2DEs, a demographic the party has been struggling to hang on to, the consequences could be disastrous.

Traditionally, the Labour party has been an alliance between middle-class liberals — the fruit-juice drinkers, nudists, sandal-wearers, sex-maniacs, Quakers, ‘Nature Cure’ quacks, pacifists and feminists identified by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier — and working-class traditionalists. One of the themes of postwar politics has been the slow collapse of that coalition. In 1966, 69 per cent of manual workers voted Labour; by 1987, it was only 45 per cent. Support for Labour among ABC1 voters barely changed between 2005 and 2015, but among C2 voters it fell from 40 per cent to 30 per cent and among DE voters from 48 per cent to 37 per cent.

Interestingly, Corbyn’s election as leader has done little to alienate Labour’s more affluent supporters. In the local elections last month, the party did well in London, Swindon, Milton Keynes, Reading and Crawley, but fared badly in its working-class heartlands. In the north, its vote declined by 1.8 per cent compared with the general election. Labour’s C2DE voters are unimpressed by a leader who failed to sing the national anthem at a Battle of Britain service, wants to return the Falklands to Argentina and is weak on defence. That same demographic is likely to feel even more at odds with Labour following its almost unanimous support for the EU.

So where will these voters go? In Wales, some will drift off to the nationalists, and in some parts of England (seaside towns, South Yorkshire, Derbyshire) they’ll join the exodus to Ukip. But many of them will end up politically homeless, and that creates an opportunity for the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party. One of the oddities of the referendum campaign was the emergence on the centre-right of an anti-Establishment alliance between a middle-class, educated elite (Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Priti Patel, Chris Grayling, Andrea Leadsom, Liam Fox) and C2DEs. Could this alliance survive?

What becomes of the Tories will, in part, depend on what happens in the referendum and how David Cameron responds, but it’s conceivable that a new, radical, anti-EU grouping could emerge, preserving many of the positions of Vote Leave’s cross-party coalition on issues like immigration and the NHS. This group might capture the Conservative party, in which case you can imagine the pro-European, more cosmopolitan faction breaking away. Or it could find itself at odds with the leadership, whereupon it might strike out on its own and join forces with Labour renegades such as Kate Hoey, John Mann and Gisela Stuart.

Writing in the Times in 2013, Tim Montgomerie imagined a new political order with four new parties: the one I’ve described above (Nationals), an Establishment group combining the metropolitan wing of the Tories with the rump of New Labour (Liberals), a libertarian-consortium (Freedom) and a left-wing party like Podemos in Spain (Solidarity).

‘I’m not sure if they would win many elections,’ Montgomerie said of the Nationals, ‘or even many votes.’ I beg to differ. Judging from how well Vote Leave has done in this referendum, a new political grouping that re-assembled Labour’s coalition between middle-class intellectuals and manual workers could sweep all before it.

The post A new home for Old Labour appeared first on The Spectator.

A few weeks ago, I took part in a debate at the Cambridge Union about the future of the Labour party. I argued that a combination of factors, such as the decline of Labour’s working-class support, the election of Jeremy Corbyn and the party’s near-universal backing for the EU, meant that Labour would struggle to survive in its present form. But I thought the crisis point would come after the next general election, not after the referendum. It didn’t occur to me that the party would be in its death throes by the end of the month.

I suppose I have to accept a small amount of responsibility for this. During Labour’s leadership election last year, when Corbyn was still a rank outsider, I helped to launch a Tories4Corbyn campaign, urging fellow Conservatives to take advantage of the party’s new membership rules whereby you could become a registered supporter for just £3 and vote for the 67-year-old old communist. I don’t know how many did and my own efforts to join were foiled by a party hack. It probably had something to do with the reason I gave on the official application form: ‘To consign Labour to electoral oblivion.’

One of my co-conspirators —Paul Staines, the man behind Guido Fawkes — has suggested we resurrect Tories4Corbyn, but I’m not sure it’ll be necessary. At the time of writing, it’s not clear whether there’ll be another Labour leadership election, but the polls suggest he’d win about 60 per cent of the vote, just as he did last year. Several left-of-centre journalists have urged people to shell out £3 so they can save the party from Corbyn — it seems to be connected with their despair over losing the referendum – but I doubt they’ll beat the Trots at their own game. For every Financial Times reader that becomes a registered supporter, at least three SWP activists will sign up.

Part of Labour’s problem is the party’s dearth of talent. At the moment, the two leading Corbyn challengers are Tom Watson and Angela Eagle. Can it really be true that the hopes of a political movement dating back to the 19th century rest on the shoulders of a man who believes Edward Heath operated a paedophile ring out of 10 Downing Street and a woman who came fourth in Labour’s deputy leadership election last year?

The best hope for Labour MPs, 80 per cent of whom rejected Corbyn in a confidence vote on Tuesday, is if the party’s national executive rules that the current leader doesn’t automatically have to be included on the ballot. If that happens, Corbyn would have to persuade 35 MPs to nominate him and he might struggle. In the confidence vote on Tuesday he was able to muster 40 loyalists, but some might be prised away if the unions decide to back Watson. Trouble is, there will be uproar among the party members if Corbyn isn’t on the ballot, just as there would be among Conservatives if Boris is kept off theirs.

In a sense, the crisis engulfing Labour is a microcosm of what occurred last Thursday in the referendum. Both reflect a loss of confidence in our elected representatives and a decline in the authority of Parliament. The revolt against the Parliamentary Labour Party that occurred last September, with hundreds of thousands of activists imposing a leader on them that few MPs had any faith in, was a precursor of the revolt that took place last week, with the electorate imposing a decision on Parliament that two-thirds of MPs profoundly disagree with. It feels like a sea change in British politics, a move away from representative democracy to something more direct.

The Labour MPs who want rid of Corbyn have threatened to form a breakaway group in Parliament if he’s re-elected, but I don’t fancy their chances if that happens. Pro-Corbyn activists, organised by the formidable Jon Lansman, founder of Momentum, will immediately set about deselecting them. Even those that manage to cling on — and how many will have the stomach for such an unpleasant fight? — will then struggle to get re-elected, given their outspoken support for the EU. In most Labour constituencies, between a third and a half of the party’s supporters voted for Leave.

In this brave new world, the political spoils will go those capable of forging a direct bond with tens of millions of people, most of them disillusioned with traditional sources of authority. That’s not Jeremy Corbyn, but it’s not any of his opponents either.

The post Labour: my part in its downfall appeared first on The Spectator.

Brits don’t quit,’ said David Cameron two weeks ago, to which the obvious rejoinder is: ‘Oh but they do!’ The list of quitters since the referendum seems to grow every day, the latest being Nigel -Farage. Everyone made the same joke when they heard he had resigned — ‘How long for?’ — but when I bumped into Suzanne Evans earlier this week she told me he was still in charge. ‘I think he was giving notice of his intention to resign, but hasn’t put a date on it,’ she said. She was paying close attention, given that she became the interim leader the last time Nigel quit and lasted precisely three days.

I hope it’s permanent this time, if only to disprove Enoch Powell’s famous maxim. To go out on such a high, having achieved the summit of your ambitions, is quite something. What other party leader in the modern era has departed at their moment of greatest triumph? It can’t be done in a normal democratic contest because to pull off a comparable feat you’d have to resign straight after leading your party to victory, which would be a bit odd. It’s only possible after winning a referendum.

The general view on quitting is that it’s a bit pathetic, but few would dispute Farage has made the right decision and a case can be made for the Prime Minister, too. -Leavers and Remainers are split on this. Some Leavers, like me, believe Cameron could have stayed on and, had he done so, minimised the panic caused by the result. It will all be all right, of course, but a sense of continuity after such a dramatic moment in Britain’s -history would have been a welcome -palliative.

Nonsense, say the Remainers, who insist he had to fall on his sword after losing a contest he’d staked his reputation on. They acknowledge it’s contributed to the chaos we -currently find ourselves in, but claim it was absolutely inevitable, just like every other negative consequence of -voting to leave, all of which they -foresaw with Nostradamus-like -clarity. -(Pro-ject Fear has become Project Told You So.)

What about Boris? He’s been the most widely criticised of the three big quitters. ‘He is like a general who marches his army to the sound of the guns and the moment he sees the battleground he abandons it,’ said Michael Heseltine. A tad unfair, given that it overlooks the actions of his chief adjutant, but then Heseltine is the Ayatollah Khomeini of the Republic of Remainia.

Could Bojo have fought on after the Gover had entered the race? -Possibly, but I suspect he doesn’t want to be leader at this particular moment. The ball has come loose from the scrum, but if he’d picked it up and ran with it he would have found himself in the same position as the ostrich in Bedknobs and Brooksticks, suddenly facing an oncoming horde of rhinos, crocodiles and -warthogs. Safe to say, Boris hasn’t given up on his dream.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that quitting isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness. You have to assess the likelihood of achieving your objective and weigh the benefits of hanging in there against the costs of withdrawing. Among those costs is being labelled a ‘quitter’, but it’s a hallmark of maturity if you don’t attach too much significance to that. I know this from bitter experience.

In 2005, Lloyd Evans and I wrote a sex farce set at The Spectator in which Boris was the central -character. Called Who’s the Daddy?, it was a big success, enjoying a sold-out run at the King’s Head in Islington and being named Best New Comedy at the -Theatregoers’ Choice Awards. Several producers offered to take it into the West End, but Boris begged us not to and he’d been such a good sport about the whole thing — not sacking us, for instance — that we -decided to do the decent thing. In any case, we thought, we’ll just write another.

Our second play was called A Right Royal Farce and in spite of the success of our first, we couldn’t find anyone willing to produce it. The -reason for this was -obvious, in -retrospect: it was terrible. But I refused to give up. Through sheer, bloody-minded persistence, I -managed to get it on and, not surprisingly, it was an unqualified disaster. The Evening Standard’s drama critic described it as the worst play to grace the London stage since the Blitz. Like Nigel Farage, I should have quit while I was ahead.

The post The art of the quit appeared first on The Spectator.

The departure of Andrea Leadsom from the Conservative leadership race was a blow to pundits who claim we’re living in an age of ‘post-truth politics’. According to Michael Deacon, the Telegraph’s political sketchwriter, she was an ideal candidate because she embodied the ‘anti-factual’ mood of the country. ‘Facts are negative,’ he wrote, parodying the attitude of Leadsom’s knuckle–dragging supporters. ‘Facts are pessimistic. Facts are unpatriotic.’

To be fair to Deacon, whose sketches are often very funny, he noted that ‘the war on truth’ is being fought as energetically on the left as it is on the right and singled out a group of die-hard Corbynistas who believe their man is the victim of a ‘Zionist’ conspiracy. But most commentators who wheel out the phrase ‘post-truth politics’ are on the left and use it to sum up their opponents’ cynical disregard for the norms of democratic debate. Indeed, it was coined in 2010 by an American pundit called David Roberts to describe the success of Republicans in Congress. They don’t try to win support for their policy positions by making evidence-based arguments — a form of grown-up debate that only Democrats engage in, apparently. No, they exploit the knee-jerk emotional responses and tribal loyalties of their followers. If the Democrats are in favour of a policy, then it is the duty of all good Republicans to oppose it, and to hell with the facts. Since Roberts coined the phrase it has become a cliché and scarcely a day passes without some left-wing sage attributing the rise of Donald Trump to this shocking debasement of political discourse.

It goes without saying that the losing side in the EU referendum are great believers in the ‘post-truth’ hypothesis. According to this theory, their factual arguments, complete with block graphs and pie charts, were no match for the ‘nativist’ pleas of right-wing politicians and ‘the Murdoch press’, which exploited irrational fear of ‘the other’. Exhibit A in the case for the prosecution is the following quote from Aaron Banks, the multimillionaire who bankrolled Leave.EU: ‘The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact. It doesn’t work. You’ve got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.’

It’s all nonsense, of course. Not the claim that conservatives are more influenced by emotional appeals than they are by rational argument, which is obviously true, but the educated elite’s conviction that they are only ever swayed by reason. It is a sign of their vanity and self-righteousness that they regard themselves as the embodiment of J.S. Mill’s democratic ideal, selflessly engaged in a search for the truth, when all the evidence — yes, evidence — suggests they’re even more tribal than those of us on the right.

This was the eye-opening discovery of Jonathan Haidt, professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author of The Righteous Mind. Five years ago, at a conference of several hundred social psychologists in San Antonio, he asked members of the audience to raise their hand according to which political tribe they belonged to. Eighty per cent identified as ‘liberal or left of centre’, 2 per cent as ‘centrist or moderate’ and 1 per cent as ‘libertarian’. None admitted to being ‘conservative’. These findings have been duplicated across the social sciences, but it’s not just the academic wing of the metropolitan elite who are prone to liberal-left groupthink. In general, people whom social psychologists categorize as ‘weird’ (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) are even more tribal when it comes to their attitudes and behaviour than those we think of as belonging to an inward-looking monoculture — Ukip voters, for instance. Contrary to the self-understanding of the Bremainers, being ‘outward-facing’ doesn’t mean being open to new ideas.

This unwelcome fact is an example of a well-established rule in social psychology, which is that the more knowledgeable you are, the more likely you are to suffer from ideological bias, whether left or right. That was the conclusion of Peter Hatemi and Rose McDermott in a recent paper for the Annual Review of Political Science. All the evidence suggests that those who place a high value on facts and see themselves as truth-seekers are no more likely to arrive at their political views through reason and analysis than swivel-eyed Eurosceptic loons. We are all post-truthers and probably always have been.

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Could grammar schools be about to make a comeback? That Theresa May went to one, and that the number of grammar-school-educated members of the cabinet has increased from three to eight since she took over, has fuelled speculation about a shift in education policy.

There are various forms this could take. The least politically difficult would be for Justine Greening, the new Education Secretary, to let England’s 164 grammar schools expand. Her predecessor, Nicky Morgan, approved an application by a selective girls’ school in Tonbridge to set up an annexe in Sevenoaks; it’s due to open next year. Greening could approve several more. The school in Sevenoaks has been described as England’s first new grammar in 50 years, but because it’s a branch of an older school it doesn’t run afoul of the 1998 School Standards and Frameworks Act, which prohibited the creation of any more selective schools. If May and her Education Secretary want more grammar-school places, this would be the easiest way to get them.

Alternatively, they could bite the bullet and introduce a new education bill. Could a Conservative government with a majority of 12 get that through Parliament? I’m not sure. One of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest regrets was that she didn’t save more grammar schools as education secretary from 1970 to 1974, but that wasn’t due to a lack of nerve on her part. Rather, it was because fighting a rear-guard action to preserve Britain’s two-tier public education system wasn’t regarded as a vote-winner by Conservatives at the time. An NOP poll in 1965 showed that half of Tory voters were in favour of comprehensives, partly due to fears that their own children wouldn’t get into selective schools. In a paper submitted to the shadow cabinet in the late 1960s, Edward Boyle wrote: ‘Far more Tories than we always realise have been genuinely worried about the implications of 11-plus selection for their children.’ Who’s to say those fears wouldn’t resurface if May tried to bring back grammars?

The argument that selective schools provide opportunities for bright working-class children certainly resonates with a lot of Tories. But the difficulty is that few of the pupils at England’s remaining grammars are from low-income families. Less than 3 per cent of entrants are entitled to free school meals, compared with a national average of 15 per cent, and a whopping 13 per cent of entrants come from outside the state sector, mainly prep schools. It would be ironic if an attempt to boost social mobility ended up saving middle-class parents money.

One way round this has been suggested by James O’Shaughnessy, David Cameron’s former policy director. Why not create a new generation of ‘super-grammars’ that only admit very bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds? I quite like that idea, and middle-class Tory voters would be less likely to object on the grounds that they might not get their children into them. They’d have no chance, obviously (too rich), but then neither would their friends, which would take some of the sting away. It would also go some way towards addressing the problem of underachievement among bright working-class children.

The problem is that disadvantaged children who didn’t qualify for places at the ‘super-grammars’ would probably have even fewer opportunities than at present. The bog–standard comprehensives available to them would attract fewer good teachers and, because they had fewer bright children, their exam results would plummet. If Theresa May wants to help white working-class boys, this wouldn’t be the way to do it.

A more attractive alternative, I think, would be to let schools designated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted set aside up to 25 per cent of their places for children of exceptional ability, provided they reserved the same percentage of places for children on free school meals. This would allow a degree of selection without the disadvantages of creating fully fledged new grammar schools. Among other virtues, it would address the problem that high-performing comprehensives admit less than half the average number of children on free school meals, but without the negative impact on neighbouring non-selective schools that ‘super-grammars’ would have. (You could call these partially selective schools ‘comprehensive grammars’.) Such schools would still require an education bill, but it might have a greater chance of being passed.

The post The best way to bring back grammar schools appeared first on The Spectator.

I appeared on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago to discuss the age-old question of whether political satire is dead. I don’t think it is, but it has lost a good deal of vitality in recent years and the role of satire in the general election campaign is a case in point. There has been no shortage of ‘satirical’ television programmes, but none of them have cut through. The only sign of life has been the flurry of photoshopped images on Twitter that have followed each misstep of the parties’ campaigns, such as Ed Miliband’s decision to carve Labour’s election pledges on to an eight-foot stone slab. If Stanley Kubrick was still alive he’d be suing people for illegally reproducing images from the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

What accounts for satire’s declining health? I don’t hold with the textbook explanation, which is that standards in public life have sunk so low that nothing a satirist could come up with could be as bad as the reality. This was what Tom Lehrer had in mind when he said political satire died when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. The trouble is, every generation thinks politics has hit rock bottom, but it just keeps on getting worse. In 2012, the Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union.

A more plausible theory is that political correctness has made satire much more dangerous. There’s no shortage of big fat targets for satirists to take aim at, but most of them are protected by a praetorian guard of professional offence-takers, ready to take to the airwaves at the slightest sign of disrespect and demand the arrest of the miscreant in question. Or if that doesn’t work, they come round to your place of work and shoot you. If Spitting Image was still on, would anyone involved dare to broadcast a sketch called ‘Miss Arab World’ in which the religious leader of Iran had to judge a parade of Muslim women in full burkas? I doubt it.

But I’m not sure you can blame the decline of political satire on these attacks on free speech. After all, some of the most celebrated works of satire have been produced under the most brutal, oppressive regimes. A case in point is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, an indictment of life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Admittedly, it wasn’t published until 33 years after Bulgakov’s death, but the fact that satire was considered so subversive by the Soviet authorities gave it a power and importance that it lacks in liberal democracies. Forcing satire underground keeps it alive.

No, I think the reason political satire has lost so much of its bite is because the status of politicians had declined in the past 50 years or so. Back in 1961, when the Establishment first opened its doors, the sight of Peter Cook on stage doing an impression of Harold Macmillan was genuinely shocking because the political class was still looked up to.

Not any more. Today, a satirist expressing a modicum of respect for a politician — Steve Coogan endorsing Ed Miliband, for instance — is front-page news, whereas a comedian showering the Prime Minister with insults goes unnoticed.

In terms of prestige, politicians and satirists have switched places. A successful satirist like Armando Iannucci is respected in a way that no current political leader is. As a result, he enjoys a degree of soft, cultural power that politicians can only dream of. He probably lives in a bigger house, drives a nicer car and earns a higher annual income than most of them, too. Hardly surprising, then, that The Thick of It ran out of steam. What gives a really good satire its seditious power is that it’s an attack of the weak against the strong. The Thick of It, by contrast, was an assault by a clique of rich and powerful satirists on an already beleaguered political class. Not so much slaying giants as tripping dwarves.

Yet I don’t think political satire is dead. I’m sure that it will blossom in the most unlikely of places — Isis-controlled Syria, for instance, or in an American Ivy League university, where any criticism of a protected minority is instant career suicide. The book I’m most looking forward to reading this year is Michel Houellebecq Submission,which is set in a dystopian future in which France has become an Islamic state. Great satire, like great journalism, speaks truth to power, and that means taking on the truly powerful, not mocking an already despised group of white middle-aged men.

The post Is satire a dying art? appeared first on The Spectator.

The dog days of July probably aren’t the best time to launch a new political movement, but then the people who campaigned for Remain in the EU referendum aren’t known for their media savvy. Consequently, Paddy Ashdown made a surprise appearance on Marr last Sunday to announce the creation of More United, a ‘tech-driven political start-up’ that takes its name from a phrase the late Jo Cox MP used in her maiden speech: ‘We are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.’

More United’s website doesn’t explicitly say that the organisation’s raison d’être is to overturn the result of the referendum. Rather, this is hidden away in a section called ‘Example policies’. One of the core principles that More United revolves around is that it’s pro-immigration and wants a close relationship with the EU and, as an example of what that might mean in policy terms, it says: ‘Campaign for Britain to return to full membership of the EU.’

Why bury this in the small print? After all, none of the people listed as the organisation’s ‘convenors’ (progressive speak for ‘celebrity backers’) have made any secret of their opposition to Brexit — Simon Schama, for instance. And, presumably, the reason for launching last Sunday is because it was exactly one month after the referendum result.

Perhaps this coyness is because rejecting the outcome of one of the largest democratic exercises in our nation’s history sits oddly with More United’s commitment to democracy, another core principle. To make matters worse, a second policy it recommends is reform of the voting system. So it wants to reverse the result of the AV referendum as well? Or maybe Paddy Ashdown and his fellow ‘convenors’ changed their minds about making opposition to Brexit the rallying cry of More United when they saw last week’s poll showing that only 29 per cent of the British electorate want a second referendum.

One of the most obvious objections to More United is that it’s not a genuine cross-party initiative, as it purports to be, but just the Lib Dems by another name, which brings me to the third democratic result Ashdown would like to overturn: namely, last year’s general election, which saw the number of Lib Dem MPs reduced from 57 to eight.

When Ashdown was first warned of this humiliation by David Dimbleby on election night, just after the BBC exit poll was made public, he said he’d eat his hat if it was true, and watching him on Marr, it was as if he wanted to wish away everything bad that’s happened to the Lib Dems since 2010. In this light, More United isn’t a political movement so much as an exercise in magical thinking. Its object is to will into being an alternative reality in which the Lib Dems entered into a coalition with Gordon Brown’s Labour party in 2010, won the subsequent referendum on AV and did well enough in 2015 to prevent the hated EU referendum taking place.

Not a few Labour voters would prefer that reality too, and it may be that the real purpose of More United is to lure them away from Jeremy Corbyn’s Trotskyist cult and towards the Liberal Democrats — a kind of gateway drug for disillusioned socialists. Ashdown says the organisation won’t field any candidates at the next election, but will urge its members to vote for those most closely aligned with its principles, which I imagine is code for ‘supports a second referendum’. Assuming Corbyn remains Labour leader, the only mainstream political party campaigning against Brexit in 2020 will be Ashdown’s mob. So vote for any candidate you like, provided they’re a Lib Dem.

To be fair, it’s possible that the EU won’t be an issue at the next election and More United will have evolved by then into a tactical voting advisory service for members of the centre-left who want to know which candidate is best placed to beat the Tory in their constituency. I launched a similar initiative in 2014, but with the aim of urging Conservative and Ukip supporters to vote tactically to beat Labour. I abandoned it a year later, partly because it was so impractical.

Persuading Tories to vote Ukip, and vice versa, proved nigh on impossible and I suspect the same applies to Labour, Lib Dem and Green supporters. Politics is tribal. The sad truth is that there’s more that divides us than unites us, and always will be.

The post Paddy Ashdown’s magical thinking appeared first on The Spectator.

I spent last weekend at Port Eliot in Cornwall, the only summer festival I’d pay to attend. Indeed, I ended up paying through the nose. Not only did I rent a teepee so that we wouldn’t have to lug our bell tent from the car park to the campsite and back, but I bought Caroline and our four children special wristbands so they could use the ‘posh loos’. I thought she’d get a particular kick out of swanning off with them to do their ablutions in the morning in the lap of luxury while I had to queue up to use one of the Portaloos.

For those who’ve never had the pleasure, Port Eliot is a literary and music festival that takes place on the estate of the Earl of St Germans in the last weekend of July. It’s intimate and charming in a way that few other festivals are, partly because so many of the punters seem to know each other. To give just one example, there were at least half a dozen families there with children at the same primary school that my two youngest go to in Shepherd’s Bush. Even strangers don’t remain strangers for very long. I overheard one woman saying to another, ‘So which part of west London are you from?’

The event I was looking forward to the most was an interview with Bruce Robinson, the writer and director of Withnail and I. The 70-year-old legend was going to reflect on his fascinating career, which began with acting in Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet in 1968, saw him rise to become one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Britain and, after a fallow period, reinvent himself as book writer. He was at Port Eliot to promote They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper, a work that took him 15 years to complete and which, according to him, definitively solves one of the greatest mysteries of the Victorian era.

By the time I arrived at the marquee it was standing room only, so I had to loiter at the back. Rather bizarrely, the person tasked with interviewing Robinson was Noel Fielding, a stand-up comedian best known for having co-created The Mighty Boosh and captaining a team on Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Being a bit of a curmudgeon, I thought that was a mistake. Surely, the best person to interview Robinson was a -professional journalist — hint, hint — not some attention-seeking ‘personality’?

But within five minutes, any suspicion that I could have done a better job than Fielding completely vanished. Not because he turned out to be a brilliant interviewer, but because Robinson was such a difficult interviewee. By his own admission, he’d been drinking red wine beforehand and he’d clearly had one too many. He’d reached that stage of inebriation where it had become difficult to speak and every attempt by Fielding to engage him in conversation was met with slurred, single-sentence answers or an explosion of righteous indignation accompanied by a torrent of abuse. To be fair, the indignation was hammed-up, as if Robinson was playing the part of an obstreperous drunk rather than just being one, and, for the most part it was quite funny.

The bits I didn’t enjoy were when, apropos of nothing, Robinson started effing and blinding about Brexit, the Tories and the Daily Mail, not least because I voted for Brexit, am a member of the Conservative party and write for the Mail. Every time he made one of these outbursts it was met with a huge cheer and, at first, I thought he was sending up the left-wing pretensions of the entirely white, mostly privately educated, west London audience. But I reluctantly concluded that a writer I’ve long revered as the neglected genius of the British film industry is actually a full-blown Corbynista.

Fielding handled the whole business extremely well. It can’t have been easy to sit in front of 600 people and try to sustain an hour-long conversation with a man who is almost speechlessly drunk, but he somehow carried it off. What was so impressive is that he managed to do it without ridiculing Robinson or even seeming to mind very much that he’d put him in this impossible situation. I came away disappointed that I hadn’t got to hear Robinson tell any seditious anecdotes about famous actors and filmmakers, but also convinced that I’d just witnessed something extraordinary — a tragicomic piece of performance art. On reflection, that ‘interview’ alone was worth the price of admission.

The post From cosy to crazy appeared first on The Spectator.

By rights, I should be one of those Tories who is passionately in favour of grammar schools. After all, I went to one myself. My attachment to them should be particularly strong because before arriving at William Ellis in Highgate I went to two bog-standard comprehensives and failed all my O–levels apart from English Literature, in which I got a C. The only other qualification I left with was a grade one CSE in Drama. William Ellis was the making of me. Had I not got in, I doubt I would have ended up at Oxford.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not a passionate opponent of grammar schools either. I wouldn’t want to deny to other children the opportunities I had and would like my own children to have — a form of hypocrisy that’s widespread among critics of selective education. But I’m not so naive as to think that bringing back grammars would boost social mobility. Rather, they’d be more likely to impede it.

My own story is a case in point. At 16, after five years of comprehensive education, I was on a steeply downward trajectory. My father ran a sociological research institute in the East End and my mother was a novelist, yet after my abysmal O-level results the most I could hope for was skilled manual work. Consequently, I joined a residential workfare programme in South Devon and tried my hand at different trades. As a hedge, I retook three O-levels so I’d have just enough (the grade one CSE in drama was the equivalent of a C) to get into a sixth form if things went pear-shaped.

Needless to say, I was no better at site management and motor mechanics than I had been at physics and biology. Certainly not good enough to get a job in either field. A career as an unskilled labourer loomed and, if not for my place at William Ellis, I might now be a dustman or road sweeper. If we assume social mobility is a zero-sum game, my disappearance from the professional/managerial class would have created a vacancy for a bright working-class lad. He could have got my place at Oxford and carved out a career for himself in the media. But thanks to my second chance, that poor lad is doing a similar job to his father and his father before him, while my income and status is comparable to that of my parents. A good grammar school helped to preserve the English class system.

And my story is in no way exceptional. At their peak in the 1950s and 60s, when around a quarter of Britain’s schoolchildren in state-funded secondary education were at grammars, the main beneficiaries were the sons and daughters of the middle class and lower-middle class. According to the 1959 Crowther Report, around 36 per cent of the sixth-form pupils at grammar schools were classified as members of the ‘professional and managerial’ class, 18 per cent as ‘clerical’, 36 per cent ‘skilled manual’, 7 per cent ‘semi-skilled manual’ and 3 per cent as ‘unskilled manual’. Moreover, those in the last two categories were unlikely to go to university. Another report (Gurney-Dixon, published in 1954) revealed that two-thirds of the children of semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers at grammars left without two A-levels.

Today, grammar schools do even less to help the children of the least well-off. The Department for Education defines ‘disadvantaged pupils’ as those eligible for free school meals at some point in the last six years, a measure known as ‘FSM Ever 6’. In all of England’s state-funded secondary schools, 29 per cent of children are in this category; in England’s 163 remaining grammars, it’s les s than 5 per cent. On average, grammar schools admit four times as many children from fee-paying prep schools as children on free school meals.

If the government really is intent on creating new grammars, there are various things it could do to encourage them to admit more children from low-income families, but sharp-elbowed parents will always find a way to game the system. The main beneficiaries, as in my case, would be children of the middle class.

I’m not saying the policy would therefore be wrong. I’m sympathetic to the argument that if parents of bright children want them to be educated alongside other bright children, they should have that choice. It shouldn’t be an option confined to those who live near one of the remaining grammars or who can afford exorbitant private school fees.

But let’s not pretend bringing back grammars will boost social mobility.

The post The problem with grammar schools appeared first on The Spectator.

After the misery of going abroad for the summer holidays for the past few years, I’m now happily back in Cornwall. Caroline took some persuading. We used to come every year, but the combination of bad weather and cramped accommodation became too much for her. After a bad experience in a mobile home three years ago, she vowed ‘never again’ and we spent a week in Portugal in 2014 and then ten days in France last year. That was purgatory. The last straw was being un-able to order fresh fish at a seaside restaurant in the Languedoc.

To get Caroline to reconsider, I had to splash out on a luxurious ‘chalet’ overlooking Gwithian Beach near St Ives. I say ‘luxurious’ but in Cornwall that translates as furniture from Ikea rather than MFI and, in truth, it’s more of a hut than a chalet. Still, there’s enough room for all of us, provided the youngest sleeps on the sofa, and its proximity to the beach means we don’t have to faff around looking for somewhere to park each day.

The other factor that persuaded Caroline to return to Cornwall is that it meant we didn’t have to put our dog in kennels for a week. I was rather dreading Leo coming with us — he’s a one-year-old Hungarian Vizsla with the temperament of a show pony — but it has turned out to be a blessing. Dogs are only allowed on Gwithian Beach before 8 a.m., so he’s forced Caroline and me to get up at 7 a.m. every day to take him for his morning walk. Watching him run around with the other dogs in the lovely dawn light, jumping in and out of rock pools, has been a-heartwarming sight.

As we’re on the north coast, the main leisure activity here is surfing, and three of my four children have enrolled at Gwithian Academy of Surfing. I went along on the first day to keep an eye on Freddie, who’s only nine, and had a go myself. That was a mistake. Not only did I fall off the board, much to my children’s amusement, but I landed awkwardly in the shallow water. The following morning I woke up with immobilising chest pain and, for a few moments, thought I was having a heart attack. At 52, I think I’m too old to take up surfing.

One of the nicest things about the Cornish seaside is that it’s genuinely classless. You’re as likely to bump into David Cameron as you are a van driver or an insurance salesman, although this does mean you’ve got to be careful not to come over as too posh. I slipped up on this front when I bumped into a friend from Oxford who happens to be a local landowner at the Jam Pot, our nearest café. Unlike most of his fellow Cornishmen, Martin is a bug-eyed Europhile and, to tease him, I launched into a parody of the Remainers’ arguments for ignoring the referendum result. The votes of younger people should be weighed more heavily than those of older people because they’ve got longer to live, as should the votes of Oxford and Cambridge graduates because they’re the only people intelligent enough to have understood the issues.

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, which I mistook for a sign that my satirical arrows were finding their target. I continued, but with even greater volume. Affecting the insouciant drawl of a member of the Notting Hill set, I launched into a tirade against the ‘Cornish dimwits’ who’d failed to grasp that, as residents of England’s poorest county, they are beneficiaries of the EU’s largesse to the tune of £60 million a year. ‘I suppose they think that Boris, that people’s champion, will come down here and start handing out £50 notes after he’s masterminded our exit,’ I said. ‘Poor deluded fools.’

At that point, a kerfuffle broke out at a neighbouring table. I glanced over and saw a red-faced man glaring at me, being restrained by his wife. Other members of his party were looking over, too, none of them friendly. ‘I think perhaps we ought to leave,’ said Martin.

‘No, no,’ I protested. ‘They’ve clearly misunderstood. I should go over and tell them that they’re quite right to resist the EU’s dishonest attempt to bribe them with their own money.’

‘No one’s misunderstood you,’ said Martin through gritted teeth. ‘I know that man. He’s a neighbour of mine. He works for the Financial Times.’

We did leave, but I hope next year we’ll return to Cornwall. Nowhere on the Continent can compare to this beautiful part of England.

The post Hurrah for Cornish holidays! appeared first on The Spectator.

The BBC has published a list of the 100 best films of the 21st century, compiled after consulting academics, cinema curators and critics — and, as you’d expect, it’s almost comically dull. The list contains numerous turgid meditations on the spiritual void at the heart of western civilisation by obscure European ‘auteurs’ and not a single Hollywood comedy. It’s as if the respondents mistook the word ‘best’ for ‘boring’.

To give you an idea of just how absurd the list is, it doesn’t include any of the billion-dollar blockbusters from Marvel Studios — no, not even Guardians of the Galaxy — but does have two movies by the impenetrable Danish director Lars von Trier. Nothing featuring Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Bradley Cooper or Robert Downey Jr, but three films starring Joaquin Phoenix (although not Gladiator, obviously).

Jennifer Lawrence, the number one box office star in the world, doesn’t get a look-in, while Michael Haneke, the miserable Austrian director, appears three times. If an actual cinema confined itself to showing just the films on this list, it would go bust within a month.

Don’t get me wrong. I know commercial success isn’t a guarantee of quality — look at Mamma Mia!, for heaven’s sake — but nor is it the mark of Cain. The cineastes who’ve compiled this list have fallen into the old trap of assuming that any film that makes over $100 million at the American box office must be garbage. It’s the same snobbery that’s responsible for the dismissal of genre fiction — even though literary novels are every bit as formulaic as historical romances and spy thrillers — and primetime TV shows. The view that popular equals bad is no more defensible than popular equals good. Genuine artistic value is as likely to be found on ITV2 at 4 a.m. as it is at the Royal Opera House. It’s a random variable.

To be fair, some commercial filmmakers have been allowed to sneak on to the BBC’s list. But they are the usual suspects: Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese. And in every case, the panel of experts haven’t chosen their best films. Tarantino, for instance, gets the nod for Inglourious Basterds, which isn’t a patch on Django Unchained, and Christopher Nolan is recognised for Memento rather than The Dark Knight Rises. As for Scorsese, only someone completely inured to the low, visceral pleasures of moviegoing would choose The Wolf of Wall Street over The Departed. I’m surprised that Hugo, a self-congratulatory paean to the craft of film-making, didn’t make it into the top ten. Not enough tracking shots, perhaps.

As George Orwell said, the only test of artistic merit is survival, from which it follows that we can’t possibly know yet what the best films of the past 16 years are. The BBC implicitly acknowledged this in the guidance it issued to its judges, asking them to choose films that would ‘stand the test of time’. But how can they predict which will and which won’t? The whole point of that yardstick is that merit is revealed only after several decades have passed. If you could confidently say today that a film made in 2014 — such as Boyhood, fifth on the list — will be remembered as a classic in 100 years’ time, then ‘the test of time’ is meaningless.

If you’re not convinced of this, I’d recommend digging up the reviews of some genuine, indisputable classics, such as Bringing Up Baby, the 1938 screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. ‘To the Music Hall yesterday came a farce which you can barely hear above the precisely enunciated patter of Miss Katharine Hepburn and the ominous tread of deliberative gags,’ began the review in the New York Times by Frank S. Nugent, one of the most celebrated critics of his day. He dismissed it as a forgettable assemblage of clichés that would appeal only to those who’d never been to the movies before. I doubt he would have included Bringing Up Baby in a list of the best films of 1938, let alone the 20th century. It took 50 years for it to be recognised as a glittering jewel of Hollywood’s golden age.

I can’t finish without offering my own ten best films of the 21st century, pointless though such lists are. They are, in no particular order: Iron Man, Knocked Up, The Incredibles, The Hangover, The Bourne Identity, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Michael Clayton, American Hustle, Apocalypto and, of course, Guardians of the Galaxy.

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E .D. Hirsch Jr., the American educationalist and author of Cultural Literacy, has a new book out that may throw some light on why France has such a problem integrating its Muslim population. Called Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories, it’s a comprehensive attack on the progressive approach that has done so much harm to schools in the West. Hirsch identifies three ideas in particular: that education should be ‘developmentally appropriate’, with the emphasis on learning through discovery; that it should be ‘child-centred’, taking account of different ‘learning styles’; and that the overarching aim of education should be the cultivation of ‘critical thinking’ skills.

I’ve spent the best part of a decade fighting these ideas. One of the main reasons I’ve helped to set up four free schools is to demonstrate that a more traditional education, with all children learning a core body of subject-specific knowledge from an early age, is more effective. I don’t just mean that children taught in this way will leave school knowing more than their peers. I mean they’ll perform better in standardised tests and be more-likely to go to good universities. This is particularly true of those from low-income families.

Having read Why Knowledge Matters, I now realise that my efforts may be in vain. Not because progressive educationalists are impervious to reason (although they are) but because the case against their wrong–headed approach has been conclusively-proven in France. Chapter 7 of Hirsch’s book is devoted to documenting the catastrophic effect of a 1989 law brought in by Lionel Jospin, then the socialist education minister. The loi Jospin abolished the notoriously rigorous elementary school curriculum, which embodied the ideas set out by Condorcet in his 1790 pamphlet ‘A Common Education for Children’, and instead directed primary schools to develop their own, locally determined curriculums instead. They were to pay particular attention to students’ individual interests and, in a sop to multiculturalism, not prioritise traditional French values over those of other cultures and ethnicities. Out went the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ and in came The Rainbow Fish. ‘In other words,’ writes Hirsch, ‘the French decided to completely Americanise their school system overnight.’

Thanks to the fondness of French bureaucrats for record-keeping, we know just how disastrous this was. Officials have conducted many studies comparing the performance of children taught the pre-1989 curriculum with those taught the progressive one since, and the results are unambiguous. They are particularly damning because nearly every factor is the same:-teacher quality has remained stable, school buildings haven’t changed, budgets didn’t go up or down, etc.

‘They reported an astonishingly steep decline in achievement in each demographic group,’ writes Hirsch, summarising the findings. ‘Each group was academically harmed by the new system, and the harm became ever greater as one went down the economic scale. The children of the unemployed declined most of all. Achievement decreased. Inequality increased dramatically.’

Could this misguided experiment in progressivism and multiculturalism have contributed to the decline in allegiance to the secular values of the republic among French youth, particularly Muslims? According to a 2014 ICM poll, 27 per cent of France’s 18- to 24-year-olds have a positive view of Isis. That’s much higher than in Britain or Germany, and while that’s partly attributable to France’s larger Muslim population — it’s home to approximately five million Muslims, with around half under 24 — it also reflects higher levels of disaffection with the values of liberal democracy. A Pew Research poll in 2007 revealed that 83 per cent of German Muslims and 70 per cent of British Muslims thought suicide bombing and violence against civilian targets was never justified, while among French Muslims that figure was only 64 per cent. So 36 per cent think it’s justified, at least occasionally. That’s 1.8 million people, and it’s a safe bet that most are under 24. That’s the legacy of loi Jospin.

This is not a tenuous connection. If French schoolchildren are no longer taught the democratic values that underpin their society, how can they be expected to respect them? It would be ironic if a law passed by a Socialist government in 1989 led directly to the election of Marine Le Pen in 2017.

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Few things are more likely to provoke the disapproval of the bien-pensant left than criticising someone’s grammar. The very idea that one way of speaking is more ‘correct’ than another is anathema to them. Under the guise of being helpful, it asserts the supremacy of the white educated bourgeoisie and seeks to rob the working class and ethnic minorities of any pride in their own culture. It’s a form of ‘linguistic imperialism’.

This explains the tidal wave of hostility that engulfed Michael Gove earlier this week after he issued some letter-writing guidance to officials in the Ministry of Justice. Typical Gove, eh? First he tries to impose his -narrow, right-wing view of British history on the nation’s schoolchildren and now he’s telling senior civil servants they should all write exactly like him. Time to stick his head in the stocks again and reach for the rotten -tomatoes.

I first became aware of Gove’s latest ‘outrage’ via the reaction on -Twitter and googled his memo expecting to find a detailed enunciation of grammatical principles so archaic they hadn’t been in use since the outbreak of the second world war: ‘The particle “to” and the infinitive form of the verb should not be separated…’ etc, etc.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover that the vast majority of Gove’s ‘rules’ weren’t grammatical at all, more of a beginner’s guide to how to write good English. For instance, he counsels against using too many adverbs, which ‘add little’. Nothing controversial about that. Indeed, it reminded me of Elmore Leonard’s third and fourth rules of good writing: ‘Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue’ and ‘Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”… he admonished gravely.’

Gove also says that, when responding to letters, civil servants should maintain a polite tone, use the active and not the passive voice and try to spell correspondents’ names correctly. That doesn’t strike me as unreasonable either. If I’d written to a minister at the MoJ, I would be quite irritated if the functionary tasked with replying misspelt my name.

One thing Gove’s critics don’t appear to grasp is that it’s common practice for incoming ministers to write to their departmental officials letting them know how they’d like them to respond to letters. Why? Because more often than not, the civil servants are writing on their behalf and the letters bear their signatures. If I were lucky enough to have an assistant doing a similar job for me, I would send him or her a style guide the size of a telephone directory.

OK, Gove did include a couple of grammatical pointers. He advised against beginning a sentence with ‘however’, ‘therefore’, ‘yet’, ‘also’ or ‘although’ and suggested that, strictly speaking, those words should appear after the verb. He also asked his officials not to use ‘impact’ as a verb. It was this unbelievable effrontery that prompted Oliver Kamm, Britain’s leading anti-grammar Nazi, to launch a fusillade against Gove in the Times. ‘It is one thing to have style preferences,’ he thundered. ‘For a minister to require civil servants to follow his own when these have nothing to do with “correct grammar” and impede good prose, and for him to have escaped public derision for it, is -singular.’

Putting aside the fact that Gove didn’t escape public derision — which would have been ‘singular’, you pompous fussbudget — it’s nonsense to say that his guide impedes good prose. On the contrary, nearly all of Gove’s rules can be traced to George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’, an essay that’s generally regarded as the best guide to writing good English that has ever been produced. To give just one example, Orwell’s fourth rule is ‘Never use the passive where you can use the active’. Kamm singles this out for condemnation in his Times article, apparently unaware that it was first set out by the finest prose stylist of the 20th century.

There’s one final reason why it was sensible of Gove to set out these rudimentary principles. I’m absolutely certain that for every Oliver Kamm who bridles whenever these old–fashioned rules are observed, there are 10,000 Toby Youngs who feel almost physically assaulted when they’re ignored. If I received a letter from a secretary of state using ‘impact’ as a verb, I’d scrunch it up into a ball and hurl it at the wall. Given that Gove is in the business of winning friends and influencing people, annoying one person instead of 10,000 is good politics.

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What’s wrong with you?’ That was the question an American broadcaster asked Anthony Weiner when his New York City mayoral campaign went up in flames in 2013. Weiner, the subject of a feature-length documentary released earlier this year, had just become embroiled in a second sex scandal, the first having derailed his political career in 2011. The extraordinary thing about the second scandal is that his efforts to rehabilitate himself as a public figure, helped by his wife’s decision to stand by him, seemed to be working. He was topping the polls when the scandal broke, which demands the question: ‘Why risk it all again?’ You’d think his experience would have taught him a lesson, but apparently not. And since the documentary was made his aberrant behaviour has continued. Last month he was caught out for a third time and his wife, a prominent aide to Hillary Clinton, finally ditched him. So what is wrong with Weiner? And could it be the same thing that’s wrong with Keith Vaz, the Labour MP for Leicester East who resigned as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee on Tuesday after some scandalous revelations in the Sunday Mirror?

Toby Young explains his theory about Keith Vaz:

Weiner’s misdemeanour was fairly minor by British standards. He wasn’t caught paying for sex or having an extramarital affair. All he’s guilty of is sending pictures of his penis, and engaging in various forms of -telephone sex, with a series of attractive young women. In a sense, his faithfulness to his wife has been his downfall. Had he slept with a prostitute or had an affair, the evidence trail would have been less extensive and his chances of getting caught smaller. It’s because he wanted the thrill of sexual contact without technically being unfaithful that his life now lies in ruins. In the American media, the consensus is that Weiner suffers from some form of narcissistic personality disorder, the most popular diagnosis being ‘high functioning’ or ‘exhibitionist’. This subtype is interesting in that those suffering from it are often very successful. They combine an array of dysfunctional characteristics — being grandiose, attention-seeking, overly competitive and overly highly sexed — with some strengths — such as being articulate, energetic, socially agile, and goal-oriented. Exhibitionist narcissists tend to be arrogant and reckless with a compulsive need to show off. That’s a plausible diagnosis and seems to capture Keith Vaz’s personality type as well as Anthony Weiner’s. But I prefer an alternative, more radical theory: that they’re both psycho-paths. I use that term rather than ‘sociopaths’ because I believe their antisocial behaviour arises from some defect in their nature rather than childhood neglect or trauma. Psychopaths, like sociopaths, suffer from a lack of conscience and an inability to empathise with others, but unlike sociopaths they are often brought up by decent, loving parents who’ve done their best to teach them right from wrong. The late behavioural geneticist David Lykken had a theory about the defect at the root of this disorder. He believed psychopaths suffer from a ‘low fear quotient’. That is, their experience of fear and -anxiety from an early age is duller than other people’s and, for that -reason, they’re hard to socialise. ‘The basic idea,’ he wrote in his 1996 paper ‘Psycho-pathy, Sociopathy and Crime’, ‘is that because much of the normal socialisation process depends upon punishment of antisocial behaviour and because punishment works, when it works, by the fearful inhibition of those impulses… someone who is relatively fearless will be relatively harder to socialise.’ Fearlessness certainly seems to be a hallmark of Weiner and Vaz’s personalities; something they -exhibited in their political careers as well as their private lives. They also appear to possess what Lykken calls the -‘talent for psychopathy’, which is the ability to avoid fearful apprehension or a sense of shame or guilt associated with wrongdoing, whether in anticipation or after the fact, because they’re -unusually good at repressing unpleasant feelings. It’s often said by policemen that you can tell if a suspect is guilty by keeping him in the cells overnight. The innocent tend to be so consumed with anxiety they stay awake, while the guilty fall asleep. If Weiner has this ‘talent’, it would explain why he repeatedly committed the same sin in spite of the destruction it caused. Just a theory, but it seems to fit the facts. And I daresay it’s true of many other politicians, too.  

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‘It is highly unlikely the Prime Minister has read the book,’ my father harrumphed, commenting on the appropriation of the word ‘meritocracy’, which he invented to describe a dystopian society of the future in The Rise of the Meritocracy. That comment appeared in a 2001 article for the Guardian and the Prime Minister in question was Tony Blair, but I expect my late father would have been equally unhappy about Theresa May’s misuse of it in her education speech last week.

In fact, he probably would have been even more cross because the book, which was published in 1958, was a thinly veiled attack on grammar schools. Like his close friend and Labour party colleague Tony Crosland, my father was a lifelong opponent of selective education, mainly because he saw it as tool for perpetuating inequality. In a society where the brightest children are separated from their peers at the age of 11 and groomed for entry into the elite, the monopolisation of power and wealth by a tiny minority has the air of legitimacy. Perhaps not wholly legitimate, but certainly more likely to command popular consent than an aristocratic society. Not only that, but grammar schools also deprived the working class of potential leaders, plucking the most able children from their parents’ arms and turning them into Tories.

As a conservative myself, I don’t share my father’s hostility to meritocracy. It seems a little odd that he should have invented a future dystopia to advance the cause of socialism when there was an actual socialist dystopia staring him in the face in the form of Stalin’s Russia. To be fair, he and Tony Crosland weren’t apologists for the Soviet Union and were anxious not to jeopardise the institutions of parliamentary democracy in the course of building their socialist paradise. Indeed, Crosland came up with a blueprint for how this might be done in The Future of Socialism, which he published in 1956. But if such naivety was excusable in the middle of the last century, it’s less so today, when we have many more failed socialist experiments to learn from. It now looks as if Friedrich Hayek and others were right and that end-state equality can only be achieved at a terrible human cost, including the suppression of free speech, widespread starvation, the imprisonment of a significant percentage of the population and, in extreme cases, state-organised mass murder. If selective education really does act as a bulwark against this new Jerusalem, as my father believed, then that’s a reason to support it.

However, he also identified another problem with meritocracy — one that’s harder to dismiss. That’s the tendency within meritocracies for the cognitive elite to become a self-perpetuating oligarchy. This isn’t a criticism you’ll often hear of grammar schools, because it involves accepting that intelligence, or lack of intelligence, has a genetic basis and, as such, is at least partly passed on from parents to their children. That’s a live rail in the education debate, because once you accept it then various unpopular conclusions follow. For one thing, it means that a more meritocratic education policy won’t necessarily lead to greater social mobility. Perhaps in the past, when intelligence was more equally distributed between classes, it would have done. But in today’s Britain, where IQ is the single greatest predictor of socioeconomic status, the children of the better off are more likely to pass the 11-plus, and that would remain true — might even become more true — if you could design a tutor-proof test.

Admittedly, if you compare children’s IQ to that of their parents, there’s a reversion to the norm, but the decline isn’t steep enough to offset the built-in advantage that children of high-IQ parents have. It’s also true that people of below-average intelligence can have bright children, but, again, it doesn’t happen often enough to solve the problem of social ossification.

The unwelcome truth is that the underlying rate of social mobility in meritocratic societies is bound to be quite low — probably a big part of the reason it’s so low in contemporary Britain. Not that the UK is wholly meritocratic, but it’s meritocratic enough that any expansion of grammar schools would probably mean less social mobility rather than more.

In The Rise of the Meritocracy, the absence of opportunities for the vast majority to better themselves leads to a bloody revolution in 2033. We’re some way off that, but it’s still a big problem that successive governments have failed to solve. I applaud Theresa May for recognising it, but her solution may not work.

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