Rachel Johnson

Some people dream of Palladian mansions in Wiltshire, of third homes in undiscovered parts of Puglia, of ozone pools in the basement. Others dream less majestically of mansards and conservatories and allotments. I, however, have a more modest fantasy. I work from home: a semi-detached dwelling I share with three children, an au pair, a husband and a dog. If I did not need an au pair, I could work in her romantic top-floor bedroom with its sweet verdant views over the communal garden.

Mexico City/Punta Ixtapa This summer my family have done a life-swap. Every day we eat a large breakfast prepared by the cook, Isabel, in our residence in Mexico City, while Gaby, the maid, tidies our bedrooms. A brace of gardeners in cowboy hats, José and José-Luis, arrive shortly thereafter to fish out bougainvillea blooms from the fishpond. Another José, the driver, awaits our instructions. A beach house in Ixtapa (which means white sand in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs) is also at our disposal, with a cook and a maid. Not speaking the language, I talk to the staff in pidgin Latin and they reply in fast Spanish. It seems to work as well as any other form of communication. In return, Jaime and Patricia Riestra receive our cramped house in London.

For my son’s eighth birthday, I invited all 18 of his classmates (according to diktat) to his exciting climbing party at the Westway sports centre. I sent a round-robin email to the parents. I pointed out how very easy it was to reach the sports centre from north London. I said that all their sons would be coming home from school that day with invitations to this exciting event. I should, for honesty’s sake, admit that I gave everyone only a week’s notice. ‘As you must know, Saturday is the day of atonement,’ said a mother, as she declined. Out of the 18 boys I asked, 17 had copper-bottomed reasons regretfully to have to say no. I began to feel a bit swivelly-eyed about the party situation.

Rachel Johnson on why so many children’s books are about sex (or ‘shagging’) and hard-core social issues ‘I sit on the toilet, pushing it all into my hand, and then I paint the walls brown. Brown to wash out the white of my anger. Brown to make them hate me. Oh, how they hate me. Back in my room, I tear off my pyjamas and rip them to shreds....’ Well, it’s not nice, this extract from a children’s book called Georgie by Malachy Doyle, I know. I’m sorry to share it with you. I do hope you’ve already eaten.

Acts of brutality are carried out in the name of ‘reasonable chastisement’ but, says Rachel Johnson, banning smacking will only encourage children to believe that they have a right to behave as they please Well, this promises to be a fair old punch-up. In the anti corner, we have some 350 parenting and counselling organisations, 180 MPs and peers, the Methodist and Catholic Churches, the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, the Lib Dems, 71 per cent of the general public (according to our old friend Mori Z. Poll), Penelope Leach, a roster of the great and the good from David Aaronovitch to Benjamin Zephaniah, and the late Dr Spock.

Rachel Johnson wonders whether Earth has anything to show more fair than 15 beefy rugby players, especially when it’s raining. But lawyers take a more calculating view of the game The Rugby Football Union lot stuck down in Twickenham (Dee, Dave, you’ve been a great help, cheers) have, I know, been looking forward to receiving their copies of this week’s Spectator with more than their usual anticipation.

He may have caught your eye at the Freshers’ Fair for first-year undergraduates, held in the examination schools on the High Street. He was signing up for the rugger club and the law society; he was a tall, athletic student wearing a navy jersey, chinos and black loafers. Or he may have caught your eye elsewhere over the past three decades, for the tall figure at the Freshers’ Fair was none other than the Hon. Sir Oliver Bury Popplewell, the High Court judge who pretended ignorance of what Linford Christie was packing in his ‘lunchbox’, and decided that Jonathan Aitken’s sword of truth was not so simple after all.

So how many did you get this summer?' I ask. 'Six hundred and fifty,' answers Lucy Townsend at Cazenove, the stockbroker. 'More than 400,' says Caroline Dawnay, a literary agent at PFD. 'About two dozen a week,' moans Ann Sindall at The Spectator. And one of them, who was only 14, should have been at home, in Ann's frank opinion, reading Jackie magazine. Even I got four requests to supply work experience to students or sixth-formers – a whole generation drawn, like moths to light, to offices over the summer. There they flutter until the darkness of autumn falls and they can go back to school or campus armed with a trophy reference and another impressive line on their CV. 'Here's what I really hate,' one senior fiction editor confided.

If dons don't churn out books and articles – whether they want to or not – they will lose funding. Rachel Johnson wonders whether that's what education is about Our rendezvous is the new laptop-and-latte bar on the first floor of Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford. The history don is a few minutes late and this gives me time to reread an extraordinary document, which reveals that he (and thousands like him all over the country) is being subjected to a production quota for published work that makes Stalin's five-year plans look positively market-driven. The document, circulated to 'postholders' in the faculty of Modern History, concerns the nationwide process called the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

If you read only the Daily Mail, you would think the Labour government was taking the middle classes, like the mountain gorillas of Uganda, to the brink of extinction. 'Middle Britain could be forgiven for feeling under siege from a government that remorselessly stakes new and higher claims on its income – while treating its children as some sort of privileged elite which must be put in its place,' boohoos a Mail leading article. Steady on. It is true that taxes have gone up, but the value of the housing stock has risen by much more. Interest rates – at 3.75 per cent – are at a historic low. Inheritance tax is crippling, but not if you can persuade your parents to contemplate what Carmela Soprano calls 'estate planning'.

John Prescott's plans to erect hundreds of thousands of new homes on - I'm going to use that disgusting word - 'brownfield' sites has not, so far as I know, caused a further outbreak of nimbyism in my neighbourhood. In Notting Hill, there is an embarras of new building already. Aubrey Square in W8, by St James Homes, is one of several 'high-end' developments nearing completion. I've wanted to snoop round this for ages. One, it forced the closure of my old tennis club, Campden Hill (that didn't bother me, though I did resent being told off for not wearing 'regulation tennis socks' by a spotty male member of the committee - you know who you are).

'You once said something I remind myself of at least twice a day,' Alan Rusbridger said to my excitement, over our lunch at Fl.

Things have to come a pretty pass, eh, when an institution as self-consciously august as the University of Oxford has to headhunt a perjuring philanderer to be its next chancellor; even if the felon happens to be the President of the United States (there are no former presidents, of course, just as alumnae of St Paul's girls' school are Paulinas till their dying day). Not since the Albanians asked C.B. Fry, the English cricketer, to be their king has there been so dismal an admission of the lack of home-grown talent. So whom do we have so far? Are any of them going to set the world on fire? The in-house candidate is the distinguished lawyer Lord Neill of Bladen, a former warden of All Souls, former vice-chancellor of Oxford, and former sleaze watchdog.

Tom Hill, a 19-year-old Marlburian (and son of parents with deep pockets, we hope), is suing the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA exam board (commonly known as OCR) that marked his A-levels for damages of up to £100,000. Now here's an odder thing. If many more follow suit - and there is evidence they will - Oxbridge would have a good case for countersuing the Secretary of State for Education for undermining its own balance sheet and damaging its reputation. Isn't the law fun! Yes. Believe it or not, Oxford and Cambridge are enjoying what the City calls a 'Ratner moment', unique in their long and gilded history, and all because the introduction and marking of the new A-levels was an absolute horlicks.