No sacred cows
A web of fear
Even in my shed at the bottom of the garden I can hear the screams coming from the house. Shrieks…
Free schools are victims of their own success
For the founders of the West London Free School, of which I was one, last Thursday should have been a…
The stories that are too good to check
Last weekend, Rolling Stone ran a story about an interview an emergency room doctor had given to a local news…
Gove has got his groove back
I was pleased to see pictures of Michael Gove at a nightclub in Aberdeen last weekend. According to press reports,…
It’s fun up north
Given how difficult it is to arrange an overseas holiday, I thought I’d take Charlie and Freddie, my two youngest,…
The Orwell Foundation has let Orwell down
George Orwell would not have been surprised by the brouhaha surrounding Kate Clanchy. Two years ago, Clanchy published Some Kids…
My marital own goal
The fighting started just as Caroline turned right on to the Uxbridge Road after emerging from QPR’s stadium on Loftus…
A time to live, a time to diet
I hadn’t noticed how much weight I’d put on during lockdown until I went out for a business lunch a…
Tried and tested
Rather miraculously, my daughter managed to leave the country last week to go on holiday with a group of friends.…
Knee-jerk reactions
Before the television presenter Guto Harri took the knee live on air — which cost him his job at GB…
Football’s never coming home
I failed a moral test last weekend. A friend offered me a free ticket to the Euro 2020 final and…
My life as a dogsbody
Even a small dog can be quite high maintenance. No, I’m not talking about Mali, our one-year-old cavapoochon, but Bertie,…
My problem with the Euros
I’m struggling to work up much enthusiasm about England’s progress in the Euros. I know, I know, Tuesday night’s victory…
Sense and sensitivity
‘Whatever you do, don’t call them snowflakes,’ Caroline said the last time I spoke to Oxford students. ‘That’s not a…
We’re all in favour of lockdown, darling
I’ve just written an essay for the People’s Lockdown Inquiry, a new collaboration between Buckingham University, the Institute of Ideas…
Dartington, the utopian experiment
I spent last weekend in south Devon at Dartington, the former estate of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, and now a…
Relative merits
Meritocracy, a word coined by my father, gets a bad press these days. Two recent books — The Meritocracy Trap…
Where free speech is a matter of life and death
Last August I wrote a column in The Spectator’s US edition urging Donald Trump to take a leaf out of…
Reading between the lines
Scarcely a day passes without a major British institution announcing it is ‘decolonising’ itself. Most recently it was the turn…
I’ve paid the price for the supplementary voting system
Some 114,201 ballots were rejected in the first round of the London mayoral election, approximately 5 per cent of the…
Time to dust off my old records
In the introduction to an anthology of his jazz record reviews, the poet Philip Larkin imagines his readers. They’re not…
Dramatically wrong
‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.’ Those were the words that Kenneth Tynan, the most celebrated drama critic of…
Let me out
Has it ever been more difficult to plan a family holiday? At the time of writing, it is illegal to…
A certifiable plan
As I’ve written before, the thing I’ve missed the most in the past 12 months is going to see QPR…
The facts about race and education
Judging from the reaction to last week’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, you’d think it had been written…
