Molly Guinness

If all goes according to plan, the first baby with the DNA of three people will be British, and could be born next year. Mitochondrial transfer could end years of misery for some couples and prevent appalling conditions being passed on to the next generation. Some scientists have raised concerns that it’s such uncharted territory that the babies could be born with disabilities or genetic defects, but the majority are happy that the research has been through necessary reviews. Melanie McDonagh and Isabel Hardman have drawn attention to the breakneck speed with which MPs voted to legalise the procedure. Parliament should act as a national conscience, and we don’t want them essentially outsourcing complex decisions to experts.

This week’s wazzock spat hasn’t polarised people in the way that arguments about class often do; most of us have just enjoyed the spectacle of the pop star James Blunt and the Labour MP Chris Bryant exchanging insults. In case you missed it, Bryant said it was a pity the arts were dominated by public school boys like Blunt, who responded in an open letter to The Guardian by calling him a ‘classist gimp’ and a ‘prejudiced wazzock’, and Bryant wrote back to say that Blunt was being ‘blooming precious’. Blunt said he’d become a pop star despite his poshness, not because of it. In 1969, Nigel Nicolson met some girls at a private boarding school who were experiencing a similar kind of posh anxiety.

The recent BDO and PDA darts championships were undeniably glorious. Ronnie O’Sullivan is arguing that snooker needs to learn from darts by introducing shot clocks and power play to speed things up. Perhaps another way of boosting snooker’s status would be to bring in an element of hooliganism. John Wells was delighted when a Jamaican crowd started ‘lobbing bottles of Auntie Emily's Home Town Goulash at the soberly clad riot police’ at a cricket match in 1968. In carrying sporting violence into Test cricket they have triumphantly invaded yet another cherished sanctum of peace and fuddy-duddy ritualised conflict…Violence is here to stay.

There’s something so depressing about the newspapers’ tips for sticking to your New Year’s Resolutions that to shield yourself from boredom and irritation, you may decide not to make any at all. But they can be rather romantic; the diplomat Harold Nicolson had a tender affection for resolutions, much preferring them to Christmas. How far more delightful, how far less cumbersome, is the search for New Year's resolutions. No careful planning is required for this catalogue; the resolutions trip merrily along together, as gay as a group of children leaving school…One should realise that the ease with which they buzz and settle implies an equal capacity for being able, in the dark days of January, to flit away.

This week’s Senate Report on the CIA hasn’t settled the question of torture once and for all, as Bruce Anderson has pointed out. When we talk about the heroes of the Resistance, our deepest admiration is reserved for the fighters who didn’t give away their secrets under torture, so the claim that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques did not result in any useful intelligence is rather surprising: it’s too morally neat.

There have been some glorious celebrations of human flesh in the newspapers this week – who could resist poring over the pictures from the Victoria’s Secret catwalk show, or taking a few minutes to study Madonna’s page three shoot? Of course they’ve also spawned an awful lot of articles containing words like empowerment and objectify, so it’s refreshing to see how reasonable The Spectator has always been when it comes to nudity. Take this article from 1932, when local courts were occasionally fining people for walking to the beach in mackintoshes with nothing on underneath but their bathing suits.

The Shadow Education Secretary is suggesting that private schools provide qualified teachers to help deliver specialist subject knowledge to state schools. It’s depressing that they don’t all already have in-house specialists. Not surprising though, according to Terence Kealey, who argued in 1991 that the state should never have got involved in education in the first place: Ever since St Augustine had founded King's School, Canterbury in AD 597, charitable church schools had flourished. They were rarely short of sponsors. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, for example, was raising no less than £10,000 p.a in London alone in 1719. New societies continued to be formed… But the Commons did not believe that the free market could supply sufficient education.

The verse before Laurence Binyon’s ‘They shall not grow old…We will remember them’, is this: They went with songs to the battle, they were young, Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted, They fell with their faces to the foe. It’s reflected in an article that appeared in a 1917 Spectator under the headline ‘The Splendour of Youth’. We may not say that the development of the noblest qualities in the flower of the nation is a justification of war, but none can deny that it is a sustaining consolation. The war has shown of what British youth is capable. The young men did not know it themselves before; nor did their friends, nor even their fathers and mothers.

Good on David Cameron for refusing to wear that hideous T-shirt. Feminists these days spend an awful lot of time telling people what to think and what to wear. It’s easy to forget the heady days of feminism’s innocence, when it lobbied for freedom, the freedom for women to operate telegraphs, for example. The deft fingers of women were to set in action the wires of the telegraph with as much swift dexterity as they do those of the piano. They were to write messages about iron and steel and stocks and shares with the same easy celerity that they corresponded about the last new ribbon or baby's first tooth.

Ebola clinics in many parts of West Africa are full, so more and more people are being told to stay at home and take Paracetamol and fluids if they become infected. It means if someone in your family gets Ebola, you all have to stay in the house, which is effectively a death sentence. At the moment, the disease is killing 70 per cent of the people it infects, but that’s likely to go up. People who need other medical treatment can’t get it, and in Sierra Leone 40 per cent of farmland has been abandoned. Western governments are building secure military encampments for health workers, fearing civil unrest and angry mobs. In 1898, there were plague riots in India after authorities brought in sanitary measures, including quarantine camps.

University terms are getting started and this year’s Freshers may be glad to read that The Spectator has always staunchly supported the right to get drunk. In the late 19th century, the magazine took issue with the Permissive Bill, which would allow individual parishes to vote on whether or not to ban the liquor trade. ‘Unless the swallowing of alcohol is a mania in se, a positive offence against morals, then the advocates of the Permissive Bill have no logical standing at all, are simply trying to enable the majority to oppress the minority into acting on the majority's opinion in a matter of indifference.

It’s been a good week for old people. On Friday, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra celebrated his 100th birthday, and at midday people in Chile stopped whatever they were doing to read one of his poems. On his annual visit to Skegness, a 104-year-old man called Sid Pope was delighted when he was welcomed by local dignitaries and the town’s mascot (a jolly fisherman). Meanwhile at Sadler’s Wells, the over-sixties are limbering up for a dance festival for oldsters. And in Iraq aged Peshmerga warriors who retired years ago are returning to the army to help fight the Islamic State. Recent Spectator writers have been rigorously unsentimental about old people. Theodore Dalrymple was grimly intrigued when he met a truly evil woman in her eighties.

South Korea’s education system puts us to shame. Last year the BBC tested a group of 15- and 16-year-olds with some questions from a GCSE maths paper; they all finished in half the time allowed, four scored 100 per cent and the other two dropped one mark. It’s the kind of performance most British teachers and parents can only dream of, so at first it’s surprising that a London girls’ school has opened up a branch in South Korea. The North London Collegiate (NLCS) is one of Britain’s top schools, but it still looked like they were going to have a lot of competition on their hands when they chose South Korea for their first international franchise.