Harry Mount

And so, with a stroke of a pen, a deeply romantic corner of the law, stretching back to the Normans, has disappeared into thin air. The Chancery Division of the High Court has just come to an end, after nearly 1,000 years at the heart of the English legal system. The dreary powers that be have renamed it the Business and Property Division – supposedly because it's easier to understand.  Yes, chancery law is about business and property. But why should names be boiled down to their simple, constituent parts? Why should a word that summons up the tangled, Anglo-Norman roots of our law be reduced to a description David Brent might have dreamt up on a particularly slow day at Wernham Hogg?  It gets worse.

Sex, tragic, premature death, adultery, frenetic plotting for the throne, exile, obsession with status and security, lust for money… If you think Charles Spencer’s new dissection of the Royal Family is pretty gory, try watching I, Claudius.  50 years ago, on September 20, 1976, the first of 12 episodes were aired in the BBC’s adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934). They’re all on BBC iPlayer now. The Windsors have got nothing on the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the first Imperial dynasty of the Roman Empire. The first five emperors - Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero - are made for TV.

Surprise, surprise! The study of classics at Oxford is dominated by the privately educated. The latest figures from the university show that just 41.9 per cent of those studying Latin and ancient Greek are state-educated. Meanwhile, psychology is the Oxford subject most dominated by comprehensive school pupils. Of the students admitted to these degrees, 84.8 per cent were from the state sector.  The classics numbers are sad – but inevitable. Greek and Latin A-Level have almost entirely disappeared from comprehensives. Grammar schools – cruelly cut by Conservative and Labour governments – are the last redoubt of state classical education. Even there, though, the subjects are in their death throes.

Sir Christopher Wren did it all. 51 City Churches after the Great Fire of London. St Paul’s Cathedral. Hampton Court, Greenwich Hospital, Royal Hospital Chelsea… But he never built an English country church. Or did he? This weekend, I went to an enchanting service at St Mary’s, Ingestre, Staffordshire, to celebrate its 350th anniversary. There is only one document connecting Wren to the church – his design for ‘Mr Chetwynd’s tower’. The Chetwynds built the neighbouring pile, Ingestre Hall. Their descendant, Aaron Chetwynd, lives in the neighbouring stables and kindly asked me to give a talk on Wren at the Ingestre Hall orangery after the church service. Walk inside St Mary’s and it's spine-tinglingly moving.

Ancient Greek, once central to a western European education, is on life support. Last summer, 206 pupils sat an A-level in ancient Greek. Of those, only a handful were state-educated. So it’s farewell to the language taught in our schools since the 16th century. Farewell to the language of the New Testament; the language Roman nobles revered and the emperors spoke. Julius Caesar’s last words weren’t ‘Et tu, Brute?’ They were ‘Kai su, teknon?’ – ‘You too, my child?’ As A.N. Wilson recently wrote: ‘Someone once said that all western philosophy is just footnotes to Plato. All western literature is just footnotes to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Homer.

When the cops came calling to arrest Peter Mandelson this week, he was already lawyered up. And he’s secured the services of the best – and most expensive – lawyers in town. Mandelson is now staring down the barrel of a legal bill running into the hundreds of thousands of pounds – very possibly the millions, given the mammoth number of documents in the Epstein Files his lawyers will have to trawl through. Add in the forensic examination of government emails swapped in the build-up to Mandelson’s catastrophic appointment as British Ambassador to Washington – and the lawyers’ tills will be cheerfully ringing away.

In the strange, arcane world of school mottoes, it’s fitting that the most famous one of all belongs to a fictional school. Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus – ‘Never tickle a sleeping dragon’ – is the motto of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. J.K. Rowling brilliantly realised that children aren’t put off by boarding schools and the ancient rituals that go with them. They’re gripped by these peculiar places, their roots twisting back through the mists of time. And no school custom is as ancient or beguiling as the Latin motto. My motto, at Westminster School, was Dat deus incrementum – ‘God gives the increase’.