Ross Clark

They have enviable results in the classroom and on the sports field. They command substantial fees and send large numbers of pupils to top universities. So why have leading private schools found it such heavy going transferring their success when sponsoring state schools? It seemed the ideal solution to help break down the great barrier between state and private schooling, as well as to address the charge that private schools were not doing enough to justify their charitable status: a leading private school takes a struggling state school under its wing, lends it some expertise, allows it to use some of its facilities and even shares some of its teachers. Results surely cannot fail to be impressive.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thenextrefugeecrisis/media.mp3" title="Simon Barnes and the Sea Watch Foundation's Dr Peter Evans discuss whales" startat=1400] Listen [/audioplayer]Imagine if a bunch of Bollywood celebrities turned up in Britain to protest outside steak houses, lie down in front of abattoir trucks as they tried to leave beef farms and started describing Britain as ‘barbaric’ for killing cattle. You have just got an idea of what it must be like to be a Faroe Islander trying to go about your business harvesting whales from the Atlantic. As has become clear over the spate of stranding at Skegness and Hunstanton, whales have become our sacred species, as Simon Barnes points out in an article in the latest issue of The Spectator.

An Oxford College has done something really offensive, and it doesn’t involve a statue of a white supremacist. Lady Margaret Hall has appointed Benedict Cumberbatch as a visiting fellow. It gets worse. It has elected Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys and Emma Watson from the Harry Potter films to the same post. Why they didn’t go the whole hog and appoint Giles Fraser as college dean and Jamie Oliver as steward I don’t know. Oxbridge is gradually being drowned in celebrity appointments. The latest were the brainchild of one himself: former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who became Principal of Lady Margaret Hall last September.

In 2007 Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of EDF’s UK arm, made the now-infamous promise that by Christmas 2017 we would be cooking our turkeys using energy generated at Hinkley C nuclear power station. That has already been put back to well into the 2020s. But if you are making plans for Christmas 2025 it might be an idea to base them around eating cold turkey sandwiches by candlelight around a wind-up gramophone. The French newspaper Les Echos reports today that an EDF board meeting about Hinkley has been postponed, amid fears that EDF is having more problems funding the project. EDF has already looked to China’s Nuclear Power Corporation, which last October agreed to take a one third stake in the project.

The whole purpose of parliamentary select committees was supposed to be to help inform policy-making. Instead, they have sunk to becoming rather vulgar kangaroo courts used by wannabe barristers of the backbenchers to boost their egos. It took about five minutes at today’s session of the Commons Home Affairs Committee to establish that neither G4S nor Jomast (the landlord which provides properties in Middlesbrough for the housing of asylum-seekers) have a policy of deliberately painting front doors red in order to help identify the occupants as asylum-seekers. Only 59 per cent of properties in the town occupied by asylum-seekers are red, it turns out. Moreover, the doors have been painted red for 20 years – long before they were used to house asylum-seekers.

Retail empires, like the political and military kind, are tragedies. They grow from modest beginnings, pushing all others aside until they reach their apogee when all competitors seem to have been vanquished. Then they collapse from within.  The only difference is that instead of leaving us magnificent cathedrals and palaces they leave us enormous tin sheds. For the past 20 years Ikea has carried all before it. Positioning itself as a mass-market Habitat, at MFI prices, it has all but extinguished the market for traditional furnishings and antiques, which now are sold for peanuts by increasingly desperate auctioneers. In 2005, 4000 people turned up when the Swedish chain opened its new store in Edmonton.

The Today programme often has one choking on one's porridge, but this morning's edition had an item even more infuriating than usual. A barrister who had represented one of the men accused in last April's Hatton Garden raid -­ in this case acquitted -­ was invited onto the show to speak of his 'grudging admiration' for the men who have just been convicted. 'They were clever, they were brave, they were elderly,' he began, suggesting that the raid had 'captured the imagination' of all of us. He was then followed by a crime writer who likened the gang's takings to a 'lottery win', and suggesting that it had cheered us all up at a time when many are struggling with their own finances.

The tragedy of Sir Philip Dilley’s short reign as chairman of the Environment Agency, which ended when he resigned today, is that until he chose to stay in Barbados rather than travel back to Britain to take control of the response to the floods, he was unusually well-qualified for the job. With his appointment in September 2014 we finally had an engineer in charge of the nation’s flood defences. Prior to that the quango had been led by a long line of chairmen and chief executives who seemed to have little grounding in water management or any kind of construction. Baroness Young of Old Scone, chief executive between 2000 and 2008, had come to the job from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

To adapt Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous dictum on the failure of the Germans to tackle Hitler, 'First they came for the smokers and I did not speak out because I was not a smoker…’ How right the smoking lobby was when it warned that once the health Nazis had banned smoking in enclosed public spaces they would target the rest of us. Red meat, cured meat, sugar – all are the subject of increasingly belligerent health campaigns. Today the Chief Medical Officer has upped the ante on alcohol.  No amount of alcohol intake is safe, she says. We risk cancer with every sip we take.   The recommended maximum for men has been reduced from 28 to 14 units a week and for women from 21 to 14 units.