Philip Womack

If King Charles wants a ‘slimmed down’, low-calorie royal family, we can thank Queen Victoria for bequeathing us the plus-size version. Responding in horror to the antics of her naughty uncles, who raked about being unsuitable and having mistresses, she set herself and her nine children to public duty and procreation: go forth and multiply, indeed. Her grandson George V envisaged a vast, bemedalled horde, trotting all over the Empire. At one point in the early 20th century, you couldn’t move for minor royals. Oops – mind that equerry! Edinburghs, Waleses, Connaughts, Fifes: you couldn’t visit a hospital without witnessing a royal plaque unveiling. And they were popular, too. My great-great-grandfather named his boat after Princess Patricia.

Do you know what an anachronism is? They’re very clear in cultural terms: Shakespeare’s clocks in Julius Caesar, for example. But in historical terms, it’s a different matter. When His Majesty King Charles III was crowned, the online scoffers were quick to mobilise themselves. One enthusiastic Jacobin tweeted that the enthroned, orbed and sceptred sovereign was ‘insane’, an ‘anachronism’. Out the scoffers troop, reliably, at every State Opening of Parliament. (And quite right too: mockery is a vital part of a successful polity). ‘How Ruritanian!’ they sneer (not quite grasping that the Ruritanians were copying us. And also, er, fictional.) The jeerers usually finish by wondering why we can’t be a grown-up country, like that entirely stable republic, France.

Despite protestations from every quarter, Sir Keir Starmer will press on with his malicious plan to slap VAT on private school fees. I can only assume he’s doing this because he believes an excellent education, stemming from hundreds of years of tradition, is entirely undesirable. Look, there’s no question about it. Our private schools are the cat’s pyjamas. They attract discerning parents from all over the planet, even from New York, that bastion of elitism, where bankers and lawyers duke it out to hire Juilliard grads to teach their four- year-olds the violin. Recently, I met a financier from that city. So enamoured was he of London schools that he upped sticks and transferred his entire family. The spectre of an extra tax is as nothing to him.

Ucas, the organisation in charge of university admissions, has announced that it’s bidding bye-bye to a crucial teen rite of passage. It is killing the personal statement. No longer will admissions tutors beetle their brows over flowing paragraphs about when you built an orphanage in Malawi using only a spoon, or how really, really passionate you are about late medieval poetry. Instead, it has decreed that wannabe grads must now answer three dour questions. This move is designed to help those from disadvantaged backgrounds, who do not, in the eyes of a Ucas spokesperson, have access to teachers and family members able to help: and who could argue with that? Well, I think it’s not only a shame, but another sign of the creeping hand of cold and normalising bureaucracy.

Sometimes, it’s not just bombs, viruses and elections that make you worry about the future of humanity. A recent survey, commissioned by the National Literacy Trust, reveals that fewer than one third of eight-to-18-year-olds enjoys writing as a hobby. If you’re thinking that I’m being wistful about fountain pens (‘whatever happened to ink blots?’) you’re flat wrong: this also includes writing with computers. A mere ten years ago, 50 per cent of children delighted in writing. You can’t help but feel that since then something’s gone terribly awry. If the young’uns are not writing for their own amusement, then they are missing out on a fundamental tenet of humanity.

As predictably as the tides, as welcome as a pebble in your shoe, the bogus question of ‘who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays?’ is in the news again. Jodi Picoult, the writer, thinks that Emilia Bassano (aka Aemilia Lanier), the daughter of a musician, must have had a hand in them, because, she says, Juliet is 13 in Romeo and Juliet, and Bassano was forced to become a mistress at that exact age. This despite the fact that in the play Juliet isn’t forced to love Romeo, and that Bassano was in her late teens when she became Lord Hunsdon’s mistress. Not convinced? In Othello, Desdemona’s servant is called  – wait for it – Emilia! I don’t know about you, but that clinches it for me.

As citizens of an orderly state, we allow ourselves to be taxed. We fork out for council tax so that local services function. When it comes to income tax, some may grit their teeth, but we hope it gets funnelled towards the greater good. We accept, though perhaps dislike, ‘sin taxes’ on cigarettes and booze. We don’t pay VAT on virtuous things, such as books, private healthcare and opera tickets, because these should be available to the widest possible audience. This Very Annoying Tax will put a child’s French lessons on the same level as a packet of Benson & Hedges  Which brings me to school fees: what could be more virtuous than educating your child in the best manner possible? Well, that’s not the thinking of the Labour party.