Patrick West

Dame Helen Mirren has called for a 'huge investment' in the arts, warning that the UK's theatres are only weeks from collapse. The theatre, she said on the Today programme, is central to the 'identity of our nation' and 'embedded in what it means to be British.' With live performances banned since lockdown, most people will share her concern about the future of Britain's theatres. But the implication that theatre is intrinsic to the national character doesn't ring true today. The only genres of live acting that have widespread popular appeal in Britain are musicals and pantomime. Otherwise, theatre is a decidedly middle-class affair these days, and a left-wing one to boot (with rare exceptions such as the playwright Tom Stoppard).

The latest victim in this summer's mania could be the name of one of London's best-known and wealthiest areas: Holland Park, in the west of the capital. A monument in the park itself, of the 19th-century politician Henry Vassall-Fox, the third Baron Holland, was splattered with red paint on Wednesday. After, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea suggested that the park, underground station and entire district could end up being renamed. The park and neighbourhood was named after Henry Fox, the first Baron Holland. His descendent, the third Baron, technically owned slaves and dozens of plantations in Jamaica through his wife's estate. Hence this weeks' desecration, with a cardboard sign left perched in the bronze statue's arms reading 'I owned 401 slaves.

Teenagers are no longer reading Harry Potter books in their legions, it emerged this week, as J.K. Rowling’s series dropped out of the top ten favourite books for secondary school pupils. Instead, teens are reading books aimed at primary school children. This is disquieting news. Of all the books teenagers can access, they should be reading the Harry Potter books. They're not perfect, of course. For one, the storylines are derivate: orphan raised by aunt and uncle encounters a bearded old man, goes on an epic journey with his buddies, undergoes tasks and magic training, and defeats ogres before encountering the dark lord in his lair. Our hero emerges victorious! Star Wars anyone? Lord of the Rings?

The Brexit party and Conservatives have more in common than they might like to admit. Yet their similarities haven't stopped the bickering, as Claire Fox argues on Coffee House this morning. On the one hand, we have a party which believes it more important to have some form of exit deal from the European Union. On the other, we have those who believe the UK should pursue total secession. The internecine warfare between soft and hard Brexiteers has been rehearsed many times, as immortalised in Monty Python’s Life of Brian with the feuding between the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front. And the current clamour over which kind of Brexit we want brings back historical parallels to an area still contested in this matter: Ireland.

To the undoubted dismay of pedants worldwide, it seems the war against the misplaced, omitted or unwanted apostrophe has been lost. The Apostrophe Protection Society, founded in 2001 to campaign for the proper use of the punctuation mark, is no more. Its founder, John Richards, 96, declared at the weekend that he was ending his crusade. Or, rather, surrendering. 'With regret I have to announce that after some 18 years, I have decided to close the Apostrophe Protection Society,' he declared on his website. 'We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won!

One of the main concerns about HS2, apart from its vast cost and disruptive effect on the countryside, is that in shortening distances between London and the North, it might lead to the capital further draining talent and money from other regions. Not so, says an official HS2 review leaked to the Times this week. The draft report by Doug Oakervee, a former HS2 chairman, says that 'some of the greatest changes to connectivity are the non-London connections' north of Birmingham, and concludes that cities in the North and Midlands are more likely to benefit from the project than London. He’s right – and Kent’s HS1 shows why. The line from St Pancras to Ebbsfleet in Kent faced similar objections in the 1990s, before it was fully completed in 2007.

It is often said that Western culture worships youth. Yet this cult of youth worship has started to mutate into something a bit weirder, as it increasingly seems that ours is a society that now worships children. This year, for instance, has seen the rise to global ascendency of the 16-year-old Swede, Greta Thunberg. She has become the child-saint icon of the environmental movement, whose apocalyptic scorn is fawned over by liberal politicians and woke-conscious big business. Her teenage acolytes bunk school, with the blessing of their teachers, to raise awareness as to the plight of climate change. Elsewhere, we are told that it is imperative to hold a second Brexit referendum 'for the sake of the children' (and even, to make the point clearer, 'our children's children').

Children of doctors are 24 times more likely than their peers to become doctors. Children of lawyers are 17 times more likely to go into law, and children of those in film or television are 12 times more likely to enter these fields. The same pattern is repeated in architecture and in the performing arts. These are the revelations announced in a new book, 'The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged', by Sam Friedman, a professor at the London School of Economics, and Daniel Laurison. The book sets out to explore the "helping hands" that allow the well-connected middle-classes to retain their domination in elite professions. Dr Friedman calls some of these figures "staggering". But are they really? Historically, they are nothing of the sort.

All roads lead to Rome, the saying goes. Well, all roads except for the Roman road of Watling Street, which at one end takes you to Dover (Dubris) and at the other Wroxeter (Viroconium) in Shropshire. I was always only vaguely aware of this thoroughfare but the name began, in recent years, to nag on my weekly visits to Canterbury (Durovernum Cantiacorum). When approaching the city centre from the station, I would see a street sign bearing the name on the side of a branch of Boots. It took some time to dawn on me that this was the very same Watling Street I had been told about in school history classes. The street sign in Canterbury isn’t unique, though: ‘Watling Street, EC4’ is affixed to a wall a few minutes’ walk from London Bridge station.

Outside of London, the area in Britain that has seen the greatest settlement of eastern Europeans since 2004 has been Kent, for obvious geographical reasons. And to cater for their needs and provide creature comforts, a multitude of shops sprang up in the years that ensued. But a strange thing has started to happen here in east Kent: all the Polish and Baltic shops are starting to close down. This struck me during a visit to Canterbury last week, when I noticed that the premises of the 'East European Food' store in Burgate Lane has now been vacated and lays empty. This represents a trend.