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In this week’s cook-in we tackle two troubling questions: How will we ever change our education system? And: Where is there to go after Gove? Here is my own whacky idea, which may shock my readers: I suggest we need an Old Etonian to lead us into more boarding! And I think we need one…
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There are sometimes when you can’t really say more – only a song will do it. Thanks to super-blogger Sally Fraser for turning me on to this brilliant piece of satire from Martin Waterhouse. One only wishes one didn’t have to employ this profound British talent for mockery, but sometimes the situation is too surreal for…
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The one place in Britain where politics is really on the edge, where identity and leadership is being reviewed in a creative way, is just across the border. Here is a land where there exist more than five million ‘semi-foreigners,’ 89% of whom were described in the 2011 census as Scottish. They now have a…
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Last week saw Londoners finding their travel even more difficult because of Thursday’s Tube strike. While the melting ice caps were drowning the countryside, the media’s focus on the inconvenience to travellers and the losses to business in the bustling capital was uninterrupted. The thing is, that in Britain we just don’t see the striking…
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First, the Secretary of State for Education and former journalist for The Times, Michael Gove seems determined to purge all non-believers in Govism from Offsted, next he makes a play for a return to the traditional values of punishment-based discipline, then he makes further noises picked up by his old chum at Canary Warf, the…
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You’ve got to hand it Boris. What mastery at linking his normalised bully style with the great old traditions of state and religion, learned at places like Eton! I remember a free moment in October 2011; I was skimming a copy of the Evening Standard, and there he was, ‘Boris’ (he doesn’t need a surname),…
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Brave of comedian Dom Joly to speak to The Guardian, about being a boarding school survivor. Not that he actually said those words: he was simply being interviewed for a column called My Family Values. He got it in pretty early, though and – of course – made a joke about it. But the sadness…
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It’s Pantomime Time again. What’s your favourite: Jack in the Bean Stalk, Cinderella or Peter Pan? They are all ways of approaching the mystery of childhood and the hold it has on our imaginations. Psychohistorically, Peter Pan is an important piece, I think. Boys are always destined to become men, but if the process is…
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The season of Christmas Merriment brings round once again the need to examine what is kitsch, what is tradition, what is ersatz. In Britain we have to borrow Yiddish and German terms, because we are can’t quite name these things over here. The preferred traditional childhood for our elite is to send them a way,…
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Just when you imagined that the capacity of our Wounded Leaders for self-deception had been exhausted, David Cameron issues his pronouncement on Afghanistan:  “Mission Accomplished.” What is going on? Has the man any sense of history? Does he not know that white hyper-rational culture has failed to tame these Afghans for two centuries? Only George…
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