More from life

Everybody has their glory memory from Cheltenham this year. Some celebrate the extraordinary seven victories for the quietly confident Willie Mullins, together with such versatile horses as Douvan and Annie Power. Others will forever remember a misty-eyed Nicky Henderson greeting Sprinter Sacre after his Champion Chase victory enabled the most handsome idol in training to leap back onto his pedestal after two injury-dogged years. Then there was the Rolls-Royce supercharger effort that saw Thistlecrack surge clear of his field in the World Hurdle. I carry one other image, an image conjured up for me by the great French trainer François Doumen, who won a Gold Cup with The Fellow in 1994 after two agonisingly close defeats.

As someone who believes in limited government, I feel conflicted about universal academisation. I’m a fan of the academies policy because it reduces the involvement of politicians and bureaucrats in taxpayer-funded education, but there’s something a little Stalinist about the state forcing all local-authority schools to become academies. It’s using socialist methods to bring about a conservative goal. It reminds me of that paradox first-year philosophy students struggle with — is it right to force a slave to be free? Jeremy Corbyn and the teaching unions have decided that this is a good issue for them and are planning a national campaign against ‘forced academisation’.

Writing a Turf column before the Cheltenham Festival, as the Spectator schedule requires, which you are reading only after the four-day jump-racing bacchanal has concluded, was a problem. I could neither revel in the moments of glory some equine fighter pilots will have enjoyed nor reveal hard-luck stories behind others who did not make it. But after a frozen morning near Newmarket last week, watching one batch of Festival combatants going through their paces, I had one hope above all others: that before the Festival ended the words ‘Trained byJ. Ferguson, Cowlinge, Suffolk’ would have entered the official record beside at least one winner’s name. The great David Nicholson took 18 years to train his first Festival winner.

It was like being on the set of an inspirational Hollywood film about a visionary teacher who transforms the lives of disadvantaged African-American and Hispanic children in a run-down part of Los Angeles. The young woman leaping about at the front of the class, who had somehow got a group of 12- and 13-year-olds speaking fluent French, looked a bit like Emma Stone. If this was a film, she’d be a cert for an Oscar. But this was no movie and I was in Wembley, not LA. The French class I was observing at Michaela Community School — a free school opened in 2014 by Katharine Birbalsingh — was the most impressive I’ve ever seen, and I’ve visited dozens of schools across the world, including some of Britain’s top public schools.

Richard Johnson, possibly the nicest man to occupy a saddle and certainly the most modest, once said of his Irish rival Ruby Walsh, ‘Ruby never seems to fight horses. It never looks forced with him, he never throws the kitchen sink. But I do — metal ones and porcelain if necessary.’ There weren’t too many of us there to see it but there was a trademark kitchen-sink job in Warwick’s third race last Friday, the Listers Audi Novices’ Handicap Steeplechase, worth just £2,972 to the winner. Johnson’s mount Cheat The Cheater shared the lead much of the way but before the last turn the nine-year-old was passed by three horses who appeared full of running. Most jockeys would have given up then and waited for another day.

On Tuesday night I went to a birthday party for my father at the House of Commons. Hosted by the Labour MP Rushanara Ali, it was an enjoyable affair, full of left-wing journalists and maverick social entrepreneurs. I chatted to the Independent’s Andy McSmith, Prospect founder David Goodhart and the newly ennobled Lord Bird of Notting Hill, who set up the Big Issue. My dad wasn’t there, unfortunately. He died in 2002 and this was an event organised by the Young Foundation, a sort of incubator for social enterprises that he set up in 1954 and which is still going strong. It was to celebrate the centenary of his birth and I couldn’t help but wonder what he would have thought of me if he were still alive.

There are now two Kings of the Marlborough Downs. Leading jumps trainer Alan King has long trained top horses at Barbury Castle but since summer 2014, to the confusion of delivery drivers, he has had a new neighbour, the former Newmarket trainer Neil King. The only surprise is that Neil did not come sooner: driving with him up and down the gradients and gulleys of Upper Herdswick Farm was — if his wife Clare will forgive the comparison — like witnessing the consummation of a love affair. He eagerly showed off his refurbished woodchip gallop, his fine schooling grounds and the laurel bushes that will in time provide cross-country obstacles, his loose school and the ponds he has established to benefit local wildlife.

At first glance, Emma Thompson’s intervention in the Brexit debate earlier this week didn’t make much sense. Asked at the Berlin Film Festival whether the UK should vote to remain in the EU, she said we’d be ‘mad not to’. She went on to describe Britain as ‘a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, a cake-filled misery-laden grey old island’. She added that she ‘just felt European’ and would ‘of course’ vote to remain in the EU. ‘We should be taking down borders, not putting them up,’ she said. I think I get the bit about Britain being ‘rainy’. That’s true, obviously, and some people dislike our islands for that reason.