I took my three boys for a cycle ride in Richmond Park on Sunday. Under normal circumstances, this would have been a good way to relax, but I had to be back home in Acton by 2.15 p.m. for my daughter’s 12th birthday party. Given that we didn’t leave the house until 11 a.m., and were relying on public transport, we were slightly up against it.

We got to the park at noon, which gave us about 75 minutes to complete a seven-mile circuit, allowing for an hour to get home. Just about doable, but only if all three boys went flat out and resisted the urge to get off and push when we were going uphill. The weakest link was seven-year-old Charlie, who still has the same bike he had when he was five. No gears and tiny wheels, so he has to pedal twice as quickly to keep up. There was something both heartwarming and comical about him as he powered forward, his little legs pumping like pistons. From time to time, I would swoop up behind him on my bike, place my hand in the small of his back, and give him a ‘turbo boost’.

He managed to keep going on some of the shallower inclines, but when we came to the really steep hill in the final stretch he slowed to a snail’s pace. By now it was 12.45 p.m. and we only had 30 minutes to complete the circuit and get back to Richmond station.

‘Come on you big Jessie,’ I said, giving him another turbo boost. ‘Give it some welly.’

‘I’ve got to have a rest, Dad,’ he said.

‘A rest? Don’t be pathetic. You’re usually so full of beans.’

‘I’ve run out of beans,’ he said, coming to a stop.

‘But you can’t let the hill defeat you, Charlie. You’ve got to keep going.’

‘IT’S DEFEATED ME,’ he said, hurling his bike to the ground.

To any passers-by witnessing this exchange — and there were several — I must have looked like a typical pushy parent. Worse, a bully. If anyone had intervened and told me to go easy on him, my defence would have been that I was trying to teach him not to give up when the going gets tough. Psychologists refer to this trait as ‘grit’ and there’s quite a lot of evidence that adults who possess it in abundance are likely to lead successful lives.

Of course, that wasn’t the only reason I was urging Charlie on. I was also worried about being late. But I do think it’s my duty as a father to teach my children the value of perseverance, just as my father taught me. Whenever we engage in a physical activity together I quickly turn into a sergeant-major type, exhorting them to try harder and hurling old-fashioned insults at them when they start flagging, such as ‘you big Jessie’.

Will this actually do any good? Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, wants schools to teach ‘grit’, along with other virtues like self-discipline and courage, and the think tank Demos has even suggested that Ofsted should amend its inspection criteria so schools are partly judged according to how well they teach ‘character’. In their view, all children would benefit from being taught these Spartan life skills — what public schools used to refer to as ‘muscular Christianity’.

In the past, I’ve expressed scepticism about whether characteristics like self-discipline can be taught. Numerous studies of identical twins separated at birth suggest that many of the ‘virtues’ that children are supposedly taught on the playing fields of Eton are partly inherited from their parents. Environmental factors have an impact, to be sure, but in complex ways we still don’t fully understand. Research by behavioural geneticists suggests that each child creates their own ‘microenvironment’ and it’s the features of these unique environments that affect personality development, not shared environments, such as families or schools.

Having said that, I don’t suppose I’ll alter my own parenting style. One of the benefits of passing on traits like ‘grit’ to your children via your DNA is that when they start to exhibit them, as they inevitably will, you can congratulate yourself on what a good parent you are. Talk to any father of a successful child for five minutes and you’ll catch him indulging in this vainglorious illusion and, if truth be told, I’m no different. After a minute’s rest, Charlie picked his bike back up, told me he’d got his beans back and then shot up the hill at breakneck speed. I immediately congratulated myself for having taught him a valuable lesson. We got home at 2.15 p.m. on the dot.

The post True grit and pushy parents appeared first on The Spectator.

Forgive me if I don’t get too worked up about Momentum Kids. For those who haven’t been following Labour’s internal politics too closely, Momentum is a Trotskyist faction within the party that was instrumental in getting Jeremy Corbyn elected last year and, barring an upset, re-elected this weekend. Momentum claims the main purpose of its new kiddie wing, will cater to three-year-olds and upwards, is to offer childcare facilities to women so they can get more involved in campaigning. But it also acknowledges that Momentum Kids will play an ‘educational’ role. ‘Let’s create a space for questioning, curious children where we can listen to them and give them a voice,’ says one of the group’s founders.

This initiative has been widely lampooned on Twitter and elsewhere because the notion of giving children as young as three a political education smacks of indoctrination and conjures up memories of Soviet school-children being forced to recite passages from the Communist Manifesto. And on one level, it is quite funny, not least because the hand-wringing leftists behind the group appear to be unaware of this historical baggage. It confirms the essential innocence of the Corbynistas, which, on another level, isn’t funny at all. It’s precisely because this new generation of left-wing idealists are so ignorant of history that they cannot foresee the potential dangers of trying to create a socialist utopia.

But the critics of Momentum Kids are also being naïve if they think the education children currently receive in this country is apolitical. In fact, nearly all children at state schools — and probably most at private schools, too — receive a daily dose of left-wing propaganda. Not the hard-left dogma of Momentum, but the understated, soft-left, liberal values that permeate most state-funded institutions, from the Foreign Office to the BBC. I’m thinking of cultural relativism (‘All cultures and belief systems are equally valid’), environmentalism (‘Man-made global warming is destroying the planet’) and an EU-inspired one world-ism (‘Nationalism leads to war and imperialism’).

To call the transmission of these ideas ‘indoctrination’ would be misleading, since the teachers responsible don’t think there’s anything controversial or even overtly political about them. As far as they’re concerned, they’re what every educated, responsible person believes. Indeed, if you accuse them of left-wing bias, they’re likely to become irritated and ask what values they should be teaching instead. For most of them, the only alternative to their wishy-washy secular humanism would be the kind of politics they associate with Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump. They cannot imagine a reasonable, intelligent person being a conservative because there’s no one remotely like that in their professional or social environments.

Even the Early Years Foundation Stage, mandating what children should be taught up to age five, embodies a progressive, left-of-centre approach to education. For instance, it insists that teachers take account of children’s different ‘learning styles’ and tailor the curriculum to each child’s needs. That probably doesn’t sound controversial to the layperson, but it’s based on a set of beliefs about education that date back to the Romantic movement and prioritise creativity and self-expression over knowledge and self-discipline. Not political with a capital ‘p’, perhaps, but political nevertheless.

And that’s the point these critics of Momentum Kids miss — that how children are taught and what they’re taught is never going to be completely apolitical. Even describing current education as ‘apolitical’ is vaguely political, implying as it does that the liberal-left values permeating our schools are so universal and mainstream that anyone challenging them is a bug-eyed loon. The choice we face as a society is not between a value-laden and value-free education; it’s about what values we choose to teach. There’s nothing wrong with these Corbynistas wanting children’s education to be political. Their mistake is wanting it to be even more left-wing.

My preference, and I suspect that of most parents, would be to shift the political values children are taught back towards the centre. A bit more patriotic and pro-western, a bit less internationalist and anti-capitalist. Perhaps the root of the problem on most teachers’ part is the obligation they feel to be neutral when it comes to Britain and its enemies, particularly when confronted by children of different faiths and ethnicities. Trouble is, refusing to take sides is itself a political act.

The post What’s right about Momentum Kids appeared first on The Spectator.

I appeared on Radio 4 with Shirley Williams recently and as we were leaving I asked her if she thought Labour might split if Jeremy Corbyn were re-elected. Would the history of the SDP, which she helped set up in 1981, put off Labour moderates from trying something similar?

She thought it might, but suggested an alternative, which was a ‘non-aggression pact’ between all the left-of-centre parties. ‘We can unite around the issues we agree on and get the Tories out,’ she said. I didn’t have time to explore this in detail, but I think she meant some kind of tactical voting alliance whereby supporters of Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens — possibly even the Welsh and Scottish Nationalists — would agree to vote for the left-of-centre candidate in their constituency who had the best hope of defeating the Tory candidate at the next election.

I’m interested in this idea because I proposed something similar in 2014, except what I had in mind was an anti-Labour pact. It seems preposterous now, but back then I thought there was a real danger that Ed Miliband would end up as our next prime minister and launched a ‘Unite the Right’ campaign to try to avoid this ghastly prospect. The plan was to persuade Conservative and Ukip supporters to put aside their differences and vote for whichever right-of–centre-candidate had the best hope of winning in each seat.

After about a year of trying to get this campaign off the ground I-concluded it wasn’t going to work and I suspect an anti-Tory alliance would founder for the same reasons.

The best counter-argument, which was made to me by several senior figures in the Conservative party, was that a formal alliance with Ukip would be so toxic that any votes the party gained on its right flank would be more than offset by losses in the centre ground. The same objection could equally well be made by the Greens or the Lib Dems to any proposed alliance with Labour while Corbyn remains at the helm.

My response to this was that I wasn’t proposing a formal pact, but rather an informal one. A formal arrangement, whereby the two different parties actually stood down candidates in favour of their rivals, was a non-starter for a variety of-reasons, not least that it would be virtually impossible to persuade local candidates and activists to go along with it. What I had in mind was an alliance at grassroots level, whereby casual supporters of both parties would agree to vote tactically to keep Labour out. Not only would that bypass local candidates and activists, but the leaders of the Conservative party could justifiably claim it had nothing to do with them and thereby avoid the toxification of the party’s brand.

But here I encountered-another problem — which was that in order to build a grassroots movement I needed to persuade supporters of both parties that they had an equal amount to gain. And the difficulty here was that in 2010 there had been far fewer seats in which Ukip came second to Labour than those in which the Conservatives came second. That meant a tactical voting alliance would help the Tories far more than Ukip. The same problem would beset any attempt to forge a pact between Labour and the Greens, whether formal or informal, since the Greens came second in just four constituencies in 2015, all of which were won by Labour. Would Green party supporters really agree to vote Labour everywhere else in return for Labour supporters agreeing to vote for Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion, the Greens’ only seat? Almost certainly not. But Lucas couldn’t make a credible case for-supporting the Green candidate in any other constituency because in every case they would never be in a better position to defeat the Conservative candidate than either the Labour or Lib Dem candidate.

Even if these problems were surmountable, which they aren’t, there’s an even bigger obstacle, which is that many people feel a tribal connection to the party they vote for, and loathe all their rivals. Despite the repeated claims at the Labour conference, there isn’t far more that unites the left than divides it. On the contrary, most left-wing voters hate their internecine rivals even more than they hate the Tories. I’m afraid that what Freud called the-narcissism of small differences means an anti-Conservative alliance of the kind Shirley Williams has in mind is a complete non-starter.

The post I know an anti-Tory pact won’t work appeared first on The Spectator.

I’m writing this from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham where the mood is buoyant, to put it mildly. Everyone seems delighted with the new captain and completely unfazed by the perilous waters ahead. If anyone is sad about the demise of David Cameron and some of his key lieutenants they’re not letting on. It’s a case of Le roi est mort, vive le roi!

In my spare time I’ve been reading Craig Oliver’s referendum diary, Unleashing Demons, and reflecting on the events that led to Cameron’s demise. As a Remainer, Oliver is in no doubt about why his side lost: the mendacity of the Leave campaign. His lot were honourable men, constrained by the facts and their human-decency, while the other lot were despicable liars for whom no blow was too low. And the book has a villain, someone who embodies the immorality of his opponents. No, not Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson, neither of whom he takes particularly seriously. But Michael Gove. It is Gove wot won it, according to Oliver. He regards him as a sort of evil genius, lacing the Leave campaign with a combination of-‘brilliance and-poison’ that bewitched the British public. He is the demon that the-referendum unleashed.

Exhibit A in Oliver’s case is the assurance Sarah Vine supposedly gave to Cameron when the Goves were staying at Chequers last Christmas that Michael wouldn’t break ranks. He mentions this at least half a dozen times in the book, clearly regarding it as the height of dishonesty. Sarah, whom Oliver portrays as a Lady Macbeth figure, denies this, claiming she was deliberately vague when the subject came up in conversation. According to her, she may have said nothing to prevent Cameron jumping to the conclusion he did, but was careful not to say anything that could lead to subsequent accusations of deception.

What’s odd is that Cameron was so willing to believe it. After all, Gove has never made any secret of his Euroscepticism and strongly advised him not to hold the referendum. Did it not occur to Cameron that one of the reasons Gove didn’t want one was because it would lead to them falling out? My reading is that Cameron’s judgment was clouded by his position as the silverback gorilla in the relationship, as well as a touch of aristocratic hauteur. He just assumed Gove would defer to him because of his inferior status, both politically and socially. He was Thomas Cromwell to Cameron’s Henry VIII.

Oliver claims to have spotted signs of Gove’s vaulting ambition that his boss failed to notice, such as the time they all went to visit a free school together and Gove asked Cameron about the difficulties presented by Boris’s return to the House of Commons. Wouldn’t that enable Boris to start building a power base on the backbenches? Cameron dismissed these concerns, saying it would be a problem for George Osborne, his putative successor, not for him.-Oliver writes: ‘I could see that, as the PM went back to his work, Gove looked crushed. It struck me at the time that he hated being dismissed as a potential leader by this casual comment —even though DC did not realise what he was doing.’

This view, that Gove always harboured leadership ambitions in spite of his avowals to the contrary, and his decision to campaign for Leave was at least partly motivated by this, is the central plank of Oliver’s case against Gove, but I don’t buy it. It requires us to believe that Gove’s decision to first become Boris’s campaign manager, then throw his own hat into the ring a few days later, was a fiendish, premeditated plot, when no plotter could possibly be that stupid, particularly not Gove. If he had always been clear in his head about wanting to be the leader, Gove wouldn’t have made all those avowals in the first place and would have declared himself as a candidate the day after the referendum. In those circumstances he would have had a decent shot. But the manner in which he entered the race guaranteed he would lose. His downfall was his failure to plot — a lack of serious ambition, not a surfeit of it. He didn’t realise he wanted the crown until it was too late.

The lesson of Oliver’s book, which is an entertaining read in spite of his loathing of Gove, is that mixing friendship and politics is dangerous. For Tories, loyalty to country will almost always trump loyalty to friends — and that can be heartbreaking, as Cameron has learned.

The post A good read… but I don’t buy the plot appeared first on The Spectator.

I’ve been thinking about poor Shami Chakrabarti and the drubbing she’s suffered since it was revealed she’s sending her son to Dulwich College. She joins a long line of Labour hypocrites who are opposed to grammar schools but choose to send their own children to selective schools. The list includes Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Crosland, Polly Toynbee, Diane Abbott, Harriet Harman and Seumus Milne.

My issue with these Labour grandees is not so much the double standards, although that does stick in the craw, obviously, but the stupidity. Why risk their political credibility and, for those that go private, beggar themselves, when there’s little reason to suppose that their children will do better at selective schools than they will at good comprehensives?

One of the more eye-catching revelations in the research on grammar schools published by the Education Policy Institute last month was that bright children do no better at grammars than they do at good comprehensives. That is, the GCSE results of the most able 25 per cent of children in the top quartile of comprehensives, measured according to the average amount of progress children make between the ages of 11 and 16, are just as good as the GCSE results of children at grammars. By definition, the children of these left-wing panjandrums will be among the brightest 25 per cent, since if they weren’t they wouldn’t have got into selective schools in the first place. From which it follows that if they’d gone to a good comprehensive instead, they would have done just as well. These supposedly clever, sensible parents — people who generally pride themselves on basing their decisions on evidence rather than prejudice — threw away their reputations for nothing.

Now, in Shami’s defence, there’s no similar body of evidence showing that bright children do no better at selective independent schools, at least not when it comes to their GCSEs. One reason is because the majority of children at these schools, unlike those in the Education Policy Institute’s sample, haven’t been to state primaries and therefore didn’t take KS2 SATs. That’s how the institute identifies the brightest 25 per cent of children, by looking at their SATs results. An alternative would be to sort children according to their performance in the standardised tests they take when they arrive at secondary school, such as the Cognitive Ability Tests. Plenty of children in both sectors take those tests, so if that data were publicly available it would be possible to compare the progress of bright children at private schools with that of their peers at non-selective state schools.

Trouble is, it’s not publicly available. Independent schools don’t publish theirs, which makes such comparisons impossible. We can only speculate as to why that is, but I suspect it’s because it would reveal that, as with grammars, bright children do no better at independent schools than they do at good comprehensives. Which wouldn’t be very good for business, given that it costs a lot of money to educate a child privately, particularly at a high-performing selective school. Dulwich College, for instance, charges £39,480 a year for full boarders. In fairness, Shami’s son will only be a day boy, so she’ll get away with £18,915, but that’s quite a lot if he’ll end up with the same GCSE results that he would have at a decent comprehensive. As a south London resident, Shami almost certainly lives near a comp that’s in the top quartile.

Of course, there are other reasons to educate your children privately apart from getting good GCSE results. Shami might reason that her son will make social connections at Dulwich College that he wouldn’t make at the local comp and these will stand him in good stead when it comes to his career. And there is some evidence to corroborate this. According to research carried out by the Social Market Foundation, a privately educated person will earn on average £57,653 more than a state-educated one between the ages of 26 and 42, controlling for family background and cognitive ability. Unfortunately, that’s less than the average cost of a private education and certainly less than the £132,405 it will cost Shami to send her son to Dulwich College for seven years. If her main concern is his financial security, she’d be better off investing that money in a flat for him. Then again, given that Shami’s house has been valued at £2.5 million, you probably can’t get much for £132,405 round her way.

The post Sorry, Shami, but you’re wasting your money appeared first on The Spectator.

On the face of it, there’s something quite appealing about driverless cars. It will be like having a chauffeur-driven chariot at your beck and call, except it will be no more expensive than owning a car. Indeed, it might well be-cheaper because you’ll be less likely to have an accident, so insurance premiums will be lower, and it will use fuel more efficiently. Not only that, but we’re told journey times will be shorter because driverless cars don’t need to keep more than a few inches apart, thereby reducing congestion. And they’ll be quicker still if the inner-cities are reserved for driverless cars only. No need for traffic lights, roundabouts or three-way junctions — just a seamless flow of traffic.

Needless to say, I’m not convinced. Will it really be cheaper to own one than a regular car? I accept that insurance premiums might fall, but what about the depreciation costs? With all that state-of-the art technology, it will be a bit like driving around in a giant iPhone and, as we know, there isn’t much of a market for second-hand iPhones. Indeed, out-of-date driverless cars might well be banned from the roads since the risks associated with them being unable to communicate properly with more recent models are potentially catastrophic.

Even if manufacturers can solve that problem, driverless cars will still age more quickly than regular ones given the pace of technological change — and hence depreciate faster.

What about the shorter journey times? I’m sceptical about that, too. If driverless cars really are all they’re cracked up to be, we’ll see a shift away from public transport towards more car and lorry journeys. Elderly people won’t stop using cars when their eyes and other-senses deteriorate, freight will shift from railways to automated lorries and workers will be more likely to use cars for the daily commute if they can recline in the back seats with their laptops. Dr Zia Wadud of the-Faculty of Engineering at the University of Leeds estimates that once-driverless cars become fully operational, in about 20 years, we will see a 60 per cent increase in road usage. ‘If you can relax in your car as it-safely drives itself to a meeting in another city, that changes the whole equation,’ he says. That will mean longer-journey times, not shorter.

Even if cities become driverless car zones, congestion won’t fall. After all, if the risk of being hit by a car is significantly reduced, as the evangelists of this new technology claim, people will be more likely to cycle or walk from A to B. And that in turn will mean more congestion, not less. No doubt some trains will still run, including the London Underground, and that will be one of the-quickest ways to get around. But if fewer-people are using them they’ll be-unaffordable to all but the superrich. It’ll be trains for the managerial elite and driverless cars for the rest.

And that is my main concern about this new technology — it will exacerbate existing inequalities. I’m not just thinking about the tens of millions of people who earn a-living as taxi drivers in the developed world, most of whom will lose their livelihoods. I mean that existing-inequalities will be embedded — and exaggerated — by driverless cars.

Suppose the only cars allowed in central London are driverless ones. Do you really think the regulatory authorities will insist they all travel at the same speed? Maybe in Stockholm or Copenhagen, but not in London. More likely, the algorithms will be set up so you’re either in a slow car that never exceeds 20mph or a fast one that gets you to your destination as quickly as possible. You’ll be able to switch from one algorithm to another, probably in the course of a single journey (provided you’re in the-latest model), but only if you’re willing to pay through the nose. It’ll be the equivalent of Uber’s ‘surge’ pricing. You’ll be crawling towards an important meeting, becoming-increasingly anxious about being late, when a message will pop up on the dashboard offering to get you there in half the time for an extra £50. You’ll curse yourself for not getting the Tube, then remember that a single journey in Zones 1 and 2 costs £75.

So forget all this hogwash about a utopian, accident-free future in which you’ll be whisked from door to door in air-conditioned comfort at virtually no cost. That’s for the birds. Driverless cars will be slower, more expensive and socially divisive. We should nip this technology in the bud.

The post Driverless cars will make your life worse appeared first on The Spectator.

I’m baffled by the reaction to Zac Goldsmith’s decision to resign as the Conservative MP for Richmond Park. It is being interpreted, even by MPs on his own side, as an act of opportunism, a chance to rehabilitate himself with the metropolitan elite after his bruising defeat in the London mayoral election. Surprisingly few people seem willing to entertain the idea that he might be acting on principle.

Exhibit A in the case for Zac’s defence is the fact that he’s the MP for Richmond Park in the first place. Zac could have applied to be the candidate in any number of safe Conservative seats in 2010 and, given his profile, easily have been selected. Yet he chose a seat that was held by a Lib Dem with a 3,731 majority. His friends and political allies told him he was insane. Even if he won, they pointed out, he’d then face the prospect of having to defend a marginal seat. Not only would that mean he’d have to spend every spare moment in the constituency, but his political career could be unceremoniously cut short, as Michael Portillo and others have discovered. Nevertheless, he stuck to his guns because Richmond was the area he’d lived in all his life.

Then there’s the fact that he kept his promise to seek the consent of his constituents before entering the London mayoral race. MPs break promises all the time, but you’d be hard pushed to find an example of Zac doing that. Indeed, the reason he’s resigning and re-fighting his seat is because he promised the voters of Richmond Park that he would do precisely that if the government decided to expand Heathrow.

Some people have uncharitably claimed that he’s risking very little. He won the seat in 2010 with a swing of 7 per cent and increased his majority in 2015 to 23,015, although in pointing that out his critics are inadvertently acknowledging that he’s been an exemplary constituency MP. In fact, he could lose. Ladbrokes currently has the Lib Dem as the-favourite.

For one thing, Zac came out for Leave during his mayoral campaign and Richmond Park voted Remain in the EU referendum by a margin of two to one. Incidentally, his support for Brexit is another example of his integrity. He knew it would hurt him in the London election, but to have done anything else would have been a betrayal of his long-standing Euroscepticism as well as his father’s memory.

Don’t forget, he’ll be running as an independent, not a Conservative. Yes, he has a large personal following in the constituency, but will it be enough to beat the Lib Dem if he doesn’t have the imprimatur of being the official Tory candidate? Politicians don’t usually take those sorts of risks unless they care deeply about an issue.

Zac’s defeat in the mayoral election won’t help either. That Zac fought a ‘dog-whistle’ campaign has now become almost universally accepted as hard fact, but I beg to differ. He didn’t brand Sadiq an extremist or at any point imply that because he’s a Muslim he sympathises with Islamist terrorists. Rather, he pointed out that Sadiq had shared platforms with Islamists in the past in order to-ingratiate himself with activist circles in Tooting, just as he endorsed Corbyn in order to secure the mayoral nomination before ditching him. It was Sadiq’s naked opportunism that Zac was drawing attention to. If he was guilty of anything it was of being too high-minded, not taking the low road. He then became the victim of a clever smear campaign by Labour,-successfully spinning his attack on Sadiq’s flip-flopping as ‘Islamophobic’. Few smears are more effective than accusing your opponent of smearing you.

I’m sure that Zac feels aggrieved at being misrepresented in this way, not least because his own sister at one point sided with his critics. But that doesn’t mean that he’s using Heathrow as an excuse to withdraw from politics in a blaze of glory, knowing ahead of time that he’ll lose. That, too, has been suggested by his critics — often by the same people who claim he’s risking nothing by triggering the by-election. If he wanted to give up his political career, he’d just resign and have done with it. No, Zac is that rare creature in contemporary politics — a man of principle. He’s not a friend of mine and I don’t agree with his stance on Heathrow. But I take my hat off to him.

The post In defence of Zac Goldsmith appeared first on The Spectator.

I’ve just spent a day looking after our one-year-old vizsla and, to be blunt, I have some sympathy with Michael Heseltine’s decision to strangle his mother’s alsatian. Not that my wife is out of town. Rather, I’ve just got a new job as director of the New Schools Network, a charity that helps groups set up free schools, and Caroline argued that because I’ll now be spending so much time away from home I am morally obliged to take on the lion’s share of dog duties before I start.

My responsibilities began with a walk in Gunnersbury Park. Now, to be fair, this isn’t a monumental chore. Gunnersbury Park is one of Acton’s hidden gems. Indeed, it’s so glorious that the people who live within a thousand-yard radius of it deny that they live in Acton and claim to be proud residents of ‘Gunnersbury’. Of course, no such place exists outside the imagination of estate agents, but if I lived nearby I’d make the same boast. It’s a good size for a dog walk — about 200 acres. A brisk stride around the perimeter takes approximately an hour.

In other ways, though, it’s less than ideal. It contains 17 listed buildings, all in varying states of disrepair, and until last year the whole Gunnersbury estate had been largely neglected since it was sold to two neighbouring local councils by the Rothschild family in 1926. That ownership split meant neither side took responsibility for its upkeep. But last December a joint, £40 million restoration project was unveiled by the leaders of Hounslow and Ealing councils, and since then the park has been a hive of activity. Great news for local residents, but not so good for us dog owners since it’s now a giant building site, with plenty of opportunities for mischief.

For instance, there’s a fenced-off area containing a stagnant muddy pool and preventing Leo from squeezing through a gap in the fence and immersing himself in this disgusting primordial soup is next to impossible. It doesn’t help that the local dog walkers — the professionals, who walk half a dozen dogs at once — actually encourage their charges to jump in the pool, presumably because they don’t have to give them a bath afterwards to get rid of the foul stench. That job falls to the owners who have been foolish enough to hire them.

OK, so that wasn’t too bad, apart from Leo ending up smelling like a fishmonger’s underpants. It was the second walk that was the tricky one. Yes, that’s right, Leo is so high–maintenance that he requires at least two walks a day and preferably three. And the word ‘walk’ is misleading because he spends most of his time running at full pelt, usually as far away from his owners as possible. If he does less than three hours of exercise a day, he runs round the house instead, leaving a trail of broken glass in his wake. You think I’m exaggerating, but a couple of weeks ago he ran into the bunk room on the first floor where two of my sons sleep, saw a squirrel in the garden and tried to leap through the sash window. Unfortunately, it was closed at the time. The cost of getting it replaced was slightly under £200 — one of Leo’s less expensive weekends.

So the second walk was on Wormwood Scrubs — another beautiful green space not far from my house. Trouble with the Scrubs, though, is that horses are regularly ridden down its footpaths. For Leo, that means plenty of lovely horse poo for rolling in, and I mean proper, down-and-dirty rolling so that scarcely an inch of his fur remains uncontaminated. But that’s a mild irritation compared with what happens if he actually sees a horse. He launches himself at it like a missile fired from a tank and immediately tries to engage it in a species v. species death match. Invariably, the horse just ignores him, as it might some irksome little gnat, at which point he goes completely bananas. Anyway, on this day it ended as it usually does with Leo being launched several feet into the air by a sharp kick to the ribs. Unfortunately, the brute is completely indestructible. Even ‘Tarzan’ Heseltine might have difficulty putting him down.

On one level, I admire Leo’s indomitable spirit. The eagerness with which he hurls himself into every adventure, no matter how dangerous, is sort of admirable. But on the other hand, he takes up an unbelievable amount of time. It’s like having five-year-old triplets. Thank God it will be Caroline’s turn soon.

The post Looking after Leo appeared first on The Spectator.

I give an after-dinner speech occasionally called ‘Media Training for Dummies’. That may sound condescending, but the dummy in question is me. It’s a compendium of anecdotes about my disastrous media appearances, each more humiliating than the last. At some point I’m going to turn it into a PowerPoint presentation, interspersing the talk with clips so the audience can see that I’m not exaggerating.

Until recently, my most embarrassing moment was in New York in 1995, when I took part in a spelling bee broadcast live on the radio. I was the first contestant and my word was ‘barrette’. I’d never encountered this before — it’s the American word for hairclip — and asked the quiz-master if he meant ‘beret’. I said ‘beret’ in a thick French accent to advertise just how cosmopolitan I was, but he was unimpressed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The word is “barrette” and I’m pronouncing it correctly.’ A few seconds later I was leaving the stage, tail between my legs.

I now have an experience even more humiliating than that: my appearance on a television programme called Pointless Celebrities last Saturday. Now, if you’re unfamiliar with this I can hear you thinking: ‘Why would you agree to appear on something called Pointless Celebrities?’ But it’s not actually a programme in which D-list nonentities struggle to explain to a panel of people who’ve actually achieved something why they should have heard of them — although, come to think of it, that would be quite funny. (‘Hi, my name’s Jeremy and I’m the leader of the Labour party.’)

No, it’s the ‘celebrity’ version of a quiz show called Pointless in which the contestants are asked to come up with the most obscure answers they can to general knowledge questions. To judge how obscure your answer is, the same questions are asked of a hundred members of the public beforehand and the best possible answer you can give – a ‘pointless answer’ — is one that none of them have thought of.

The reason I was invited on the programme was because it was a special edition featuring journalists, although none of us are exactly household names. I was originally supposed to do it with Rachel Johnson — the contestants are divided into teams of two — but she withdrew at the last minute. The producer called me in a panic, asking if I could think of a replacement, and I suggested Melissa Kite. In retrospect, I should not have named a fellow Spectator journalist. It meant that when we appeared together we were billed as ‘the Spectator team’. We weren’t just representing ourselves. We were ambassadors for the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language.

There were eight contestants in total and the first thing we were asked was to think of words ending in ‘ord’. I was up first and the best answer I could think of was ‘smorgasbord’. But I didn’t dare risk it because I wasn’t sure it didn’t have an ‘e’ on the end and if you give an incorrect answer you automatically score 100 points. So I played it safe and said ‘fjord’. The presenter triumphantly announced that 19 members of the public had also come up with ‘fjord’ – not exactly a ‘pointless answer’ — so I scored 19 points.

Poor Melissa then had to wait until all the other contestants had had their turn before she was in the hot seat. Being journalists, the other three teams had all done well and the highest combined score was 31. This meant that for us to stay in the game Melissa had to come up with an answer that scored 11 or less. I cursed myself. If I’d been a bit smarter, Melissa wouldn’t have been landed with such a difficult task. In the end, the word she came up with just missed the mark and we were eliminated in the first round. To compound my sense of shame, the presenter then gleefully listed all the words that would have been ‘pointless answers’ and top of the list was ‘smorgasbord’. If only I was better at spelling!

Afterwards I told Melissa not to worry – no one we knew would watch it and certainly not anyone who worked at The Spectator. I was wrong. It was broadcast on BBC1 at 6.05 p.m. and seen by over four million people and when I went into the Spectator offices on Monday morning I was greeted with gales of laughter. This may be the last time you see my name in the magazine.

The post Oh, the shame of not being Pointless appeared first on The Spectator.

A few months ago I joined forces with Sir Anthony Seldon, the vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, to run an idea up the flagpole. Why not make it possible for senior managers from outside the teaching profession to retrain as heads? Anthony, who was a successful head himself, is in the process of setting up the Buckingham Institute of School Leadership to train the heads of the future. He proposed creating a mid-career and late-career entry track into this programme so successful managers in their thirties, forties and fifties can retrain as school leaders.

This idea was met with some scepticism by teachers and I can’t say I blame them. It rankles for the same reason that allowing people from outside the profession to set up free schools rankles, as well as encouraging people to teach who don’t have QTS (Qualified Teacher Status). It implies there’s nothing particularly valuable about the training or experience that goes into the making of a good teacher — any Tom, Dick or Harry could waltz in off the street and do what they do. It’s symptomatic of a failure to take the profession of teaching -seriously, which is an continuing source of resentment. If I were a teacher it would certainly annoy me.

For what it’s worth, my -experience of helping to set up free schools left me with a huge respect for the profession. None of the schools would have got off the ground without the involvement of experienced teachers as co-founders, and that’s true of most free schools — more than 70 per cent have been set up by teacher–led groups. In addition, the eagerness of free schools and academies to employ non-qualified teachers has been exaggerated. At our schools we take on non-QTS teaching staff only if they’re willing to become qualified in due course. That, too, is fairly standard.

Anthony and I are not saying business people with no teaching experience should get jobs as school leaders, which is how it has been interpreted by some. For instance, Dr Bernard Trafford, the headteacher of Newcastle and Tyne Royal Grammar School, wrote a piece for the TES last week attacking this straw man. ‘I take issue with the suggestion that leaders who have mastered the pressures and drives of commerce can similarly seize the reins of education and drive the chariot to success,’ he said.

No, our idea is that people with a strong record of managing organisations a bit like schools, such as publicly funded arts organisations, should have an opportunity to retrain as heads over two to four years. Much of the process would consist of shadowing school leaders, and trainees would graduate with QTS. This would give them credibility in their staffrooms, although they’d need to prove themselves on the job. We believe they would.

This idea has won support from two unexpected sources. One is the –Harvard Business Review, which published an article last month entitled ‘The One Type of Leader Who Can Turn Around a Failing School’. -Written by four academics, it analysed the impact of 411 English heads and concluded that the most effective ones are ‘Architects’ — leaders who take the time to work out how to improve a school, do it without alienating the staff and then stick around long enough to see those changes through. ‘Architects’ have a number of interesting characteristics — they tend to have studied history or economics at university, for instance — but the most -interesting is that most have spent between ten and 15 years working in another profession before retraining as teachers.

But the most unexpected endorsement comes from a group of teachers. Last weekend, a research paper called ‘The School Leadership Challenge: 2022’ was jointly published by Future Leaders, Teach First and Teaching Leaders and warned that by 2022 England may face a shortfall of between 14,000 and 19,000 school leaders. This is due to a lack of heads and deputy heads in the present system, the need for more leaders as more schools open to keep pace with a growing population, and the fact that many existing heads are approaching retirement age. Of the various solutions it suggested, one jumped out: ‘Expand the pool of leaders, including welcoming executives from outside the profession.’

At present, Anthony is on track to open the Seldon School of Headcraft and Wizardry in 2017. I hope some Spectator readers will think about becoming mature students. Your -country needs you.

The post A new path to the top of the teaching tree appeared first on The Spectator.

Last week, my 13-year-old daughter Sasha and her friend Tess were taken by her god-father, Sean, to see Catfish and the Bottlemen at the Wembley Arena. I bought the tickets myself on Viagogo, one of the biggest secondary ticketing websites, and had no reason to think they wouldn’t be valid. As a QPR season-ticket holder, I’ve used Viagogo in the past to resell tickets to home games and it’s worked fine.

Not on this occasion. I knew some-thing was wrong when I received a message from Sean asking me to email him a picture of my driving licence. The concert organisers were refusing to admit anyone who’d bought their ticket via a reseller, so if you couldn’t prove you were the person named on the ticket you couldn’t get in. The name on their tickets was ‘Shael Pilcher’ so a picture of my driving licence wasn’t any use. They were refused entry along with hundreds of others. Not wanting to disappoint Sasha, Sean bought three new late-release tickets at the box office and they were able to go to the concert, but others weren’t so lucky. He reported seeing dozens of teenage girls in tears outside the venue.

Sean paid half as much as I had because the reseller had listed them for more than their face value of £22, but Viagogo is only partially at fault here. I say ‘partially’, because the reseller chooses what price to sell the tickets at, not the website. On the other hand, the 2015 Consumer Rights Act says that sites like Viagogo have to publish the face value of the tickets being resold and they didn’t do that in this case.

In addition, Viagogo charged me a £29.97 ‘booking fee’ and a £9.95 ‘delivery fee’, both of which are astronomically high. Then again, I was aware of those charges when I clicked ‘buy’, so it’s hard to get up on my high horse about that.

Do I blame Viagogo for the fact that the three £22 tickets I’d spent £151.48 on turned out to be invalid? Up to a point. The concert organisers had announced in advance that ticket holders would need to prove that they were the people named on the tickets, and Viagogo are obliged by law to list all the terms and conditions attached to tickets, including the fact that they’re non-transferable if that’s the case. But is it reasonable to expect them to police their own site, given how many resellers are using it at any one time? In fairness, the terms and conditions on the back of the ticket don’t say it’s non-transferable.

Where Viagogo is definitely at fault, however, is in making it next to impossible to claim a refund. In the ‘Help’ section of their website it tells you what to do if an event is ‘cancelled or postponed’, but not if your tickets are invalid. I dialled the customer service number, followed the instructions and entered my ‘Order ID’, only to be told my tickets had been successfully delivered and ‘no further action is needed’.

After exploring the dialling map for about an hour, pressing different numbers and failing to get through to anyone, I gave up.

The difficulty of obtaining a refund is hard to excuse, given that my daughter’s experience isn’t uncommon. In the summer, people who’d bought tickets on Viagogo for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child were turned away for the same reason. According to Adam Webb, the campaign manager for a music industry organisation that is lobbying for more regulation of secondary ticketing websites, Viagogo are notoriously bad at policing their own site.

‘Viagogo are the worst of the worst,’ he says. ‘The other sites will do the bare legal minimum to comply with the law, but Viagogo plainly disregards the law.’

In the end, I managed to contact the company via Twitter, and they promised a full refund plus a gift voucher for £75, but I’m not sure non-journalists would get the same treatment. Something plainly needs to be done to stop ordinary fans getting ripped off. Several MPs have taken up this cause, including Sharon Hodgson and Nigel Evans, but it’s not a question of changing the law so much as enforcing it, and that’s the responsibility of Trading Standards.

In Viagogo’s case, the situation is complicated by the fact that it’s headquartered in Switzerland and its servers are based offshore. Will the market prove to be self-correcting, with unhappy customers boycotting the site until Viagogo raise their game? I hope so, but I doubt it.

The post My ticket to a £150 rip-off appeared first on The Spectator.

Last week I was asked to give a talk about generation snowflake. This was at a breakfast organised by a recruitment company called GTI Solutions and the idea was that I would provide an urban anthropologist’s take on this new tribe for the benefit of their corporate clients, most of whom are thinking about how to recruit them and, once they’ve got them, how to keep them happy. This has given me an idea about a new consultancy service I could provide.

The main challenge thrown up by employing these new graduates, it seems to me, is that they won’t be particularly good at communicating with members of other generations in the workplace. One of the hallmarks of the ‘me, me, me generation’ is that they’re marooned in a kind of no man’s land between adolescence and adulthood. I say ‘no man’s land’, but perhaps ‘safe space’ is a better description because they clearly like being there. Why do they refuse to take the final step into adulthood? Partly because their immersion in social media since the year dot has accustomed them to just communicating with their peers. It’s difficult to grow up if you have no idea how to talk to grown-ups.

That, at any rate, is the theory of Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardises Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30).

‘Never before in history have people been able to grow up and reach age 23 so dominated by peers,’ he told Time magazine. ‘To develop intellectually you’ve got to relate to older people, older things: 17-year-olds never grow up if they’re just hanging around other 17-year-olds.’

Quite plausible, and it means that when these ‘kidults’ arrive in the workplace they will have difficulty making themselves understood. Indeed, they probably won’t be able to fully grasp what it is their seniors are saying to them either. It’ll be like the United Nations, except without the simultaneous translation. And the snowflakes will be speaking Esperanto.

So how can I help? Well, that isn’t a million miles from my experience working for Vanity Fair in the Condé Nast building on Madison Avenue in the mid-1990s. As a youngish Fleet Street hack surrounded by middle-aged Americans, I often found myself talking at cross purposes to my workmates. That was particularly true if I ever tried to make anyone laugh.

For instance, on my first day at work I was in the lift waiting to be transported to the 11th floor when an attractive Vogue fashion editor standing next to me tried to hold the doors open for her friend. They slammed shut, almost trapping her hand, and I turned to her and said, ‘They’re fashion sensitive. If you’re not wearing Prada or Gucci they will take your arm off.’ She gave me a baffled look: ‘But I am wearing Prada.’

After I’d made a couple more of these unsuccessful attempts at flirtatious banter, someone left a copy of Condé Nast’s ‘Sexual Harassment Policy’ on my desk. ‘It has long been the policy of Condé Nast to maintain a professional working environment for all its employees, free of any form of discrimination or harassment,’ it said. The next bit was underlined in red felt-tip pen: ‘A joke considered amusing by one may be offensive to another.’

I found out just how true those words were when I hired a strippergram to surprise a male colleague on his birthday on what turned out to be Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Talk about cultural miscommunication. Anyway, the point is that my experiences in the Condé Nast building in the 1990s, struggling to make myself understood to the generation immediately above me, will be similar to that of snowflakes in the workplace, except it won’t just be members of generation X they’ll have to work alongside, but boomers as well.

The situation is complicated by the fact that I kept giving offence, whereas generation snowflake will take offence. Instead of them worrying about saying the wrong thing to people my age, it’ll be middle-aged men like me worrying about saying the wrong thing to them. We’ll be sandwiched between a disapproving older generation and an even more disapproving younger generation. Which, come to think of it, is a bit like being a parent.

So that’s my consultancy idea: I’ll advise corporate clients, at vast expense, how to manage the miscommunication that’s bound to occur when these Peter Pans turn up in their offices. Any takers?

The post Snowflakes in the workplace appeared first on The Spectator.

Last week I went to a screening of Steve Jobs, the new biopic about the co-founder of Apple directed by Danny Boyle, and I was impressed. It’s structured like a three-act play, with each act set backstage at the launch of a new product — in 1984, 1988 and 1998 — and then unfolding in real time. Superficially, the film is about the gradual ascent of Apple (and Steve Jobs) as the dominant force in the personal computer industry, but beneath the surface it’s about much more than that. As portrayed by Michael Fassbender, Jobs isn’t just a common or garden perfectionist. He’s neurotic, obsessive, driven, ruthless and almost inhumanly oblivious to the needs of others, including his own daughter. For Jobs, the perambulator in the hall isn’t an enemy of promise, as it is for most ambitious people. He simply doesn’t notice it.

Tim Cook, the current chief executive of Apple, has criticised the film for portraying his predecessor in an unflattering light, but that’s only half true. One of the subplots of Steve Jobs revolves around his complicated relationship with Steve Wozniak, the other co-founder of Apple, who — in the film, at least — resents the fact that his childhood friend attracts more attention than he. Wozniak questions Jobs’s contribution to the development of Apple’s products — ‘What is it that you do, exactly?’ — and accuses him of hogging all the credit for an essentially collaborative enterprise.

But this doubting Thomas never convinces. As played by Seth Rogen, Wozniak is a whiney beta male, a discarded lover of Fassbender’s Sun King. No, the film leaves you in little doubt that Steve Jobs was an out-and-out genius. In every scene he battles to protect his vision of what the ideal desktop computer should look like, right down to the tiniest detail.
Everyone around him thinks he cares far too much about this trivia, but he will stop at nothing to realise his dream. And by the end of act three, with the unveiling of the first iMac, he’s proved right.

So Tim Cook has nothing to worry about from a commercial point of view. By portraying Jobs as a once-in-a-generation wunderkind — the Picasso of personal computing — this film won’t do any harm to Apple’s reputation.

But what about Jobs’s standing as a human being? On that score, the film is more ambivalent. The central conflict is between Jobs and Joanna Hoffman, the PR woman who remained by his side in good times and bad. She’s played by Kate Winslet, although it takes a while to notice because her eastern European accent is so good. She’s the only person in the film capable of matching Jobs blow for blow, but every time she scolds him you also get a sense of how much she loves him, something Winslet puts across very well. Indeed, it’s because Joanna is so fond of him that she finds his monstrous treatment of his daughter Lisa so difficult to bear. Her effort to persuade Jobs to be a better father is the emotional heart of the film.

At first, Jobs denies paternity, disputing the results of a DNA test, and Lisa’s mother has to beg him for every penny of child support. Even in act three he’s refusing to pay Lisa’s college tuition fees, and at this point his Apple shares are worth hundreds of millions. When he finds out another Apple employee is secretly sending her money, he accuses him of doing it to spite him, to make him look small. But Jobs needs no help in that department.

The screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is careful to drop in little bits of backstory to explain why Jobs turned out the way he did — he was given up for adoption by his birth parents, but his first foster family rejected him, etc, etc — and he links these emotional scars to Jobs’s development of closed computing devices that weren’t designed to be added to or extended by the user. But Sorkin and Boyle are skilful enough to give the story a more universal resonance and we’re left wondering whether it’s possible to be as talented as Jobs was and to express yourself as fully as he did without being a bit of a sociopath. Could he have achieved greatness without that splinter of ice in his heart? The film provides a clear answer to that question, but I won’t spoil it by revealing what it is. I urge you to see it for yourself.

The post The vision of Steve Jobs appeared first on The Spectator.

I’m keeping my eyes peeled for one of those billboards saying ‘A dog is for life, not just for Christmas’ so I can gleefully point it out to Caroline. Regular readers of this column will know that my wife brought home a Vizsla puppy last December, her surprise ‘gift’ to the family, and that the cute little fellow has turned into a snarling, slobbering hound who has ruined my life.

Mealtimes in our household now resemble a scene from Jaws, with Leo circling unseen beneath the table then bursting out to grab a leg of chicken or a baked potato, or, if he can’t get hold of any food, just bite one of the children.

In our darker moments, Caroline and I have discussed how best to get rid of the beast. My initial thought was to return him to the breeder —‘Here, take him, no need for a refund’ — but the difficulty is that the children have all formed a strong attachment to him. Needless to say, they do next to nothing when it comes to the daily grind of looking after him, including three large meals, two hour-long walks, bathing him after he’s rolled in fox poo, which he does at every opportunity, and picking up a prodigious quantity of dog mess. (If only he were a pig, I could go into the silage business.)

No, the children would never countenance giving him back. My second idea was to ‘lose’ him, i.e., come back from a walk in Gunnersbury Park one afternoon and announce that he’d run off. This wouldn’t require much subterfuge since Leo does in fact run off all the time. Next time he disappears, I’d just refrain from spending half an hour looking for the bastard. Problem is, the children would never forgive me. Not only would they blame me for his vanishing act, they’d suspect I’d lost him deliberately since I’m always complaining about what a royal pain he is.

Then I had a more devious thought. What about getting one of the professional dog-walkers I always see in the park to lose him? Judging from how negligent they are when they’re supposed to be looking after their charges — they stand about gossiping while the dogs engage in a kind of mud-wrestling contest in the pile of manure by the BMX track — I don’t suppose it’s beyond their skill-set. I might not even have to submit the request. I could simply pick the most unreliable-looking one and entrust him with Leo’s care for the afternoon. It would almost certainly happen naturally.

But the risk is he’d simply be found. I could remove the address tag from his collar beforehand, but I stupidly had him ‘chipped’ when I was labouring under the illusion that I might want him back if he ever got lost. In fact, it’s quite probable he’d be returned to us that same day, given how famous Leo is among the dog-owners who frequent Gunnersbury Park — and I mean ‘famous’ in a bad way. He’s constantly chasing their dogs, pinning them to the ground and then trying to rape them.

Then I had a truly diabolical idea. Why not surreptitiously loosen his collar when I next drag one of the children along to Gunners, invite them to take possession of Leo while we’re waiting for the green man on the pelican crossing by the North Circular, then stand idly by as he slips free and runs into the fast-moving traffic? No way to blame me for that!

Trouble is, the poor child would be riddled with guilt for the rest of his or her life, not to mention being beaten half to death by their three siblings.

My final thought was inspired by reading A Very English Scandal, John Preston’s entertaining account of Jeremy Thorpe’s bungled attempt to have Norman Scott murdered. Readers of a certain vintage will remember that the man employed to carry out the deed ended up shooting Scott’s Great Dane, a scandal that prompted Auberon Waugh to form the Dog Lovers’ Party and stand against Thorpe in his North Devon constituency. Couldn’t I just pay someone to shoot Leo? It would be my Christmas ‘gift’ to the family for 2016.

OK, OK, I’m joking. Please don’t call the RSPCA. These dark fantasies are just my way of coping with being supplanted by another alpha male. In reality, I’ll continue to care for the bugger. And if something bad does happen to Leo, it’s nothing to do with me. Honest!

The post Who will rid me of this turbulent beast? appeared first on The Spectator.

And so it begins again. This time last year, I decided to see how long I could last without alcohol.…

See the full story of Do I hang myself out to dry again? on The Spectator.

After Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan completed their report on civil service reform in 1854, in which they…

See the full story of Why meritocrats are the new aristocrats on The Spectator.

In 1961, shortly after getting a job as a lecturer at Cambridge, my father had an idea. The faculty buildings,…

See the full story of Why we need more universities on The Spectator.

I had lunch recently with an assistant head of a leading independent school and he told me about their ‘growth…

See the full story of A myth that keeps growing and growing on The Spectator.

I feel a bit sorry for Piers Morgan. On Tuesday, Ewan McGregor was due to appear on the sofa with…

See the full story of Would I still hate actors’ rants if they all agreed with me? on The Spectator.

I feel conflicted about Jon Platt, the parent at the centre of the court case about unauthorised school absences. On…

See the full story of Rebel with a dodgy cause on The Spectator.