Fraser Nelson

The success of school reform in Britain seem to be worrying the private schools’ spokesmen. They’ve taken the unusual step of releasing a statement in response to my Daily Telegraph column yesterday, where I show that the top state schools outperform top private schools in A-Level league tables. I’m not sure why they’re so upset; I didn’t have a word of criticism for private schools. I think their success is admirable. I just argued that there is, now, just as much excellence in the state sector - and I produced data to back this up. Barnaby Lenon, chairman, Independent Schools Council, didn’t seem to that one bit.

Moaning about private education is an ancient British tradition; how can there be fairness in society when the rich can afford such great schools? Let’s count how many privately-educated judges there are, or Olympic athletes, or MPs! Open a cupboard in Cameron’s No10 and an Old Etonian falls out! What, is then asked, should be done to the private schools hoarding all of this excellence? It’s well-known that Britain’s private schools are world-class. But what’s less well-known is that our best state schools are, actually, better. I look at this in my Daily Telegraph column today. I started off looking into Grey Coat Hospital School, in which the Prime Minister’s daughter, Nancy, will enrol next month.

It’s a red-letter day for us here at 22 Old Queen Street. The latest circulation figures for British magazines have just been published and show that sales of The Spectator have broken through their all-time high. More people are buying the magazine now than at any time since we started publishing 187 years ago. Our last high was in the first half of 2006; since then, print publications have struggled to cope with the challenges of the digital age. Newspaper sales have fallen by 40 per cent and are falling still; ours bottomed out mid-2009. Different publishers have responded in different ways; some have full paywall, others no paywall at all.

To listen to Camila Batmanghelidjh on the Radio 4 this morning, you’d think that her upstanding charity had been mysteriously assassinated by a vicious media – and by nothing else. This sounded like a very different Camila Batmanghelidjh to the one who telephoned me after The Spectator first blew the whistle on the irregularities at Kids Company – she was apoplectic. Didn’t I know that journalists normally love Kids Company? Kids Company has now collapsed – and not because journalists had (finally) been allowed to start asking questions. It has collapsed because Camila Batmanghelidjh ran up financial costs that she was not able to cover. She ran the charity, the responsibility was hers – it’s odd to hear her suggest otherwise.

On Broadcasting House, one of my favourite Radio 4 programmes, was this morning discussing a report (pdf) from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty commission. It finds, amongst other things, that 'education at a private or a Grammar school is also associated with an increased chance of labour market success' amongst dim kids. Who’d have thunk it? During the subsequent R4 discussion, the Labour peer Joan Bakewell referred to a ‘two-tier education system’. It's a familiar phrase and a familiar idea: that British kids are somehow cast in a binary divide: the privately-educated and the state-educated. You hear this analysis all the time.

George Osborne’s Budget plan to raise the minimum wage to £9.35 for over-25s was a surprise – which means it has not yet been much scrutinised. Ed Miliband’s £8 by 2020 pledge was pretty much a non-pledge as inflation would probably have taken the £6.50 minimum wage to £8 by the end of the decade anyway. So it would not be controlling a greater share of the workforce; Miliband's apparent generosity was a trick of inflation. But Osborne goes far further; and this has implications. The chief question, to me, is: what share of the workforce will have their wages set by the government under the proposed National Living Wage (NLW)?

Reassuringly, not even anti-monarchists are making mischief out of today’s pictures of an eight-year-old Queen being shown by her uncle how to make a Nazi salute. It’s a striking picture, but as everyone knows, it simply did not mean then what it means now. It was taken in 1933, when the full horrors of Nazism had not begun. It's possible that the eight-year-old Queen was not following the rapidly-changing events in Germany very carefully. Hitlerism - with its uniforms, goose-stepping and other weird gestures – was seen by most Brits as a strange phase that Germany would soon grow out of. Hitler’s antics were looked upon with fascination and horror, but with mockery, too.

My Saturday morning would not be complete without Amanda Platell’s delicious put-downs in the Daily Mail, usually aimed at people who richly deserve them. But today she identifies a target that doesn’t. Her piece, “White Dee, and how the Left lost the war on welfare,” argues that Ch4 made Benefits Street to "provide a powerful argument for the deserving poor” but ended up awakening a nation to the abuses of welfare. She’s wrong: Ch4 knew what it was doing. And only Ch4 would have had the guts to do it. Benefits St was indeed a landmark in the debate; she’s right about that. But wrong to suggest that it somehow backfired on Ch4.

So much has happened in this Budget that it’s easy to overlook one of the most important announcements: that George Osborne will, after all, fit a lock on defence spending to make sure that it stays at 2 per cent of GDP until 2020. The Spectator has been calling for this for some time; I called for it again last week – and, to be honest, more in hope than expectation. But the Chancellor has delivered; his pledge is watertight. The MoD had thought that defence spending (as defined by Nato) was set to slip to 1.85 per cent of GDP within five years – and filling that gap would cost £3.23 billion. Osborne hasn’t given us the exact figures, but you can work them out (see graphic, above) - he has committed a cumulative £6.