Alec Marsh

The latest official lists of the 100 most popular boys and girls’ names in England and Wales confirm the dominance of the Old Testament as well as the Edwardian ascendancy in the hearts of our nation’s newest parents. With the Calebs, Jacobs, Noahs, Samuels, Alfies and Freddies, the names given to boys in 2015 read like a rustic mash-up of Moby Dick and The Importance of Being Earnest. I have no objection to the Old Testament, nor late Victorian or Edwardian names  – indeed to borrow the Telegraph’s gag, it’s super to see Doris getting her day again – but I do wonder why people choose names that so frequently lead the most popular lists.

‘Super-rich foreigners are “forcing” the old money elite out of London’s prime postcodes.’ So declares London’s Evening Standard newspaper – confirming what the rest of us knew anyway. Indeed it was in the Spectator three years ago that I pointed out that central London was turning into Venice – a zombie city devoid of actual life with absentee foreign owners undermining its identity. The lights aren’t on and no one's at home, because they’re in Monaco or Dubai or Shanghai. And now, thanks to a new report, we all – including even the Evening Standard’s property correspondent – know it’s true. According to Dr Luna Glucksberg of the International Inequalities Institute (good grief!

Unseemly as the public blood-letting between stand-up comic Joshua Howie and his apparently less-than-absolutely-fabulous mother Lynne Franks undoubtedly is, it nonetheless sheds light on a powerful tension at the heart of many of the nation’s families. Because whatever you think about self-proclaimed ‘Golden parent’ Howie’s motivation for decrying his ‘awful parent’ mother (not very much if you ask me, but he does have a radio show to promote), a critical point remains at stake. Were Baby Boomers bad, selfish parents, as he claims, and are their successors better? One thing everyone can agree on is that over the last forty years the position of children in society has changed dramatically.

In his essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell famously exhorted writers to be cautious of allowing ready words or prefabricated phrases to affect whatever it was he or she wished to articulate. ‘Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about,’ he wrote. Seventy years on, Whitehall Mandarins have spoken. ‘We promote the use of plain English on GOV.UK,’ writes one of their number from the Government Digital Service, announcing a new policy on which words cannot be used on government websites. ‘We advocate simple, clear language. Terms like eg, ie and etc, while common, make reading difficult for some.

[audioplayer src='http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_January_2014_v4.mp3' title='Alec Marsh discuss the death of the big middle class family'] Listen [/audioplayer]The future Mrs Marsh and I wait outside a small Victorian terraced house for an estate agent. It’s a familiar Saturday scene, especially in W7 — the last London postcode before you reach Middlesex and an area I formerly classified as the dark side of the moon. Hanwell is where estate agents are fanning the flames of a house-buying firestorm, like therapists prescribing amphetamines to hyperactive children. Here, as on the edges of so many British cities, middle-class buyers driven from even more expensive districts converge in a desperate bid to find a home.

Queuing to gain admittance to the pavement of Westminster Bridge on a ferociously hot Sunday afternoon recently, I found myself trapped. Pinioned by a road to one side, a stall selling models of Big Ben and snow-dome Buckingham Palaces to the other, and bordered by the great bronze statue of Boudicca, I was caught in a corralled mass of tourists and going nowhere fast. It occurred to me that the last time I experienced such a peculiar blend of urban misery was in Venice. This might have been the Rialto in August. But it wasn’t the Grand Canal that we were crossing, it was the Thames, and it started me thinking about the similarities of life in London and Venice.