No sacred cows

If you were hoping to escape the bilge that’s been pumped out by supposedly neutral organs of the state during this general election campaign — the BBC, schools, the NHS — I don’t recommend going to see a pantomime. Gramsci’s long march through the institutions has finally reached the last redoubt of political incorrectness. Say goodbye to bum-pinching, boob-squeezing and irreverent, smutty gags about holier-than-thou political figures; say hello to anti-austerity scripts, racially sensitive casting and three-hour lectures on climate change. You think I’m making it up? Oh no I’m not!

Like many people, I watched Prince Andrew’s Newsnight meltdown with mounting disbelief. Why had he agreed to do it? It wasn’t as if the general public was clamouring for an answer about what he was doing on the night he’d been accused of having sex with a 17-year-old victim of Jeffrey Epstein. And if he was going to give a television interview, why choose Emily Maitlis? That’s like booking yourself into Sweeney Todd’s for a short back and sides. Emily asked me to do an interview last year when I was forced to resign from the Office for Students over some embarrassing old tweets and, after humming and hawing for a bit, I declined. Clearly, one of my more sensible decisions. But my feeling of smugness at having sidestepped that landmine was short-lived.

Nicola Sturgeon, who claimed this week that ‘Scotland is rich enough, strong enough and big enough’ to take its place ‘among the proud, independent nations of the world’, is a slippery fish. She claims the case for Scottish independence will be strengthened by the UK’s departure from the European Union and yet she campaigned for Remain during the referendum and has done what she can to obstruct Brexit since. For instance, the 35 SNP MPs voted against Theresa May’s withdrawal bill three times. If they’d voted for it on the third occasion, it would have passed.

I’m writing this from the Conservative party conference where Boris’s attempt to ram home the message that he’s the only party leader capable of getting Brexit done is being drowned out by the claim by Charlotte Edwardes, a Sunday Times columnist, that he squeezed her thigh under the table at a Spectator lunch 20 years ago. In the #MeToo era, this is a bigger news story than our imminent departure from the EU. Or perhaps just a blessed respite from the relentless Brexit coverage. I didn’t help by making a throwaway gag on Monday at a fringe meeting organised by the TaxPayers’ Alliance where I was a panellist.

I cannot recall a week in which Britain’s private schools have received better PR. The Labour party has pledged to scrap them because of the huge advantages they confer on their pupils — including ‘lifelong networks for the powerful’, according to Owen Jones. Presumably that’s a reference to Jeremy Corbyn, who, thanks to his private school background, has risen to the top of the Labour party in spite of getting two Es at A-level. Laura Parker, the national coordinator for Momentum, welcomed Labour’s new policy on the grounds that ‘every child deserves a world-class education, not only those who are able to pay for it’. In other words, only private schools are able to provide a ‘world-class education’.

I don’t recall exactly when I first met David Cameron, but it must have been in Oxford in 1985 shortly after the beginning of Michaelmas term. I was a third year at Brasenose studying PPE and he was a first year, also doing PPE. I remember him being friendly and down to earth and canny enough to keep his political views to himself. At the time, Brasenose was dominated by a group calling itself the ‘left caucus’ and while it wasn’t social suicide to be identified as a Tory, it was a bit infra dig. After Cameron twigged that we were both ‘in the closet’, so to speak, he confessed to me that he was a Thatcherite. ‘Dry as dust,’ he whispered.

I think my colleagues on the pro-Brexit side of the aisle have been a little unkind in their response to John Bercow’s announcement that he’ll be standing down as chief referee in the House of Commons. Yes, he’s clearly done everything in his power to make life as difficult as possible for those MPs who want to implement the result of the 2016 referendum. Yes, his attitude to parliamentary precedent has been completely inconsistent, citing obscure, supposedly binding conventions to obstruct Brexiters one minute, then casually disregarding longstanding constitutional conventions the next. And, yes, the language he uses to express his contempt for any Conservative MP who so much as grimaces at one of his nakedly partisan rulings is unparliamentary, to put it mildly.

If there is to be an election before we leave the European Union, some kind of non-aggression pact between the Tories and the Brexit party is essential. Without it, the risk is all too obvious: that pro-Brexit voters will be divided, allowing pro-Remain candidates to win, even in some constituencies where a clear majority are in favour of leaving. A case in point is Boris Johnson’s constituency. Uxbridge and South Ruislip is in the London borough of Hillingdon, where 56.37 per cent of votes cast in the 2016 referendum were for Leave. But his majority in 2017 was only 5,034, and if the Brexit party fields a candidate against him — particularly if some of the pro-Remain parties decide to stand down in favour of Labour — there’s a chance he’ll lose.

The reluctance of the Conservative party to take credit for the success of its education reforms is a source of increasing bewilderment to me. With each passing year, the A-level and GCSE results of free schools and academies provide yet more evidence that liberating state schools from the dead hand of local authority control has had a transformational effect — and 2019 is no exception. Free schools such as the London Academy of Excellence in Stratford and Michaela Community School in Wembley have chalked up some of the best results in the country, while academy chains such as the Harris Federation and the City of London Academies Trust have cemented their places at the top of the league table. Yet, incredibly, education is still a vote loser for the Tories.