Sam Leith

This week’s unexpected public smackdown is... vicars versus wedding photographers. What a time to be alive! The latter have hoisted a petition on the website change.org, which has already attracted more than 900 signatories, demanding that vicars be nicer to them.     'Not all church leaders are problematic, but a LOT are – and those that are problematic are not only hindering professional video/photographers from doing the job they've been paid to do, they're more often than not rude, humiliating, aggressive and abusive.' An example is given as a link: a TikTok of an extremely unsmiling bald clergyman telling the photographer to get the hell out of the way or he’s going to stop the ceremony.

There’s a lot of talk in the papers about the importance of banning smartphones from schools. Quite right too. The privacy issues, the cyber-bullying, the airdropping of dickpics, the kids filming themselves taking ketamine in morning break... all those dismaying differences from the conkers and ink pellets and innocent tuck-shop japes we remember from our own youth. More than that, smartphones are extraordinarily distracting. How are the children to learn if they’re surreptitiously WhatsApping one another under the desk?  But this focus on smartphones in schools seems to me to ignore another issue: what happens outside school.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the Royal Society of Literature (founded 1820) might be one of those institutions that chugs on benignly year in year out with nothing to disturb the peace of its members. But on Thursday morning, a letter in the Times Literary Supplement, got up as I understand it by Jeremy Treglown and signed by 14 more distinguished writers (among them Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Fleur Adcock), calls on the leadership of the RSL to refer itself to the Charity Commission. That is, as charitable foundations go, something like demanding that they turn themselves in to the cops.

'If you can take the lift, why go through the hardest route?' a recruitment officer representing four Russell Group universities asked an undercover reporter for the Sunday Times. He boasted that 'foundation' course pathways onto undergraduate courses at Russell Group universities are much easier than the entry requirements for British applicants: overseas applicants 'pay more money [...] so they give leeway for international students [...] It’s not something they want to tell you, but it’s the truth.'  And how. The paper reports that 'overseas students wishing to study an economics degree using one of the pathways needed grades of CCC at Bristol; CCD at Durham; DDE at Exeter; DDE at Newcastle; and just a single D at Leeds.

Katharine Birbalsingh is back in the papers again. The head teacher at Michaela, a free school whose outstanding academic record and ultra-strict behaviour policy have made it a culture-wars lightning rod, tells the Sunday Times that she and her staff have been getting death threats ever since her board of governors imposed a policy banning any form of prayer on school grounds.  Until not all that long ago, the story runs, pupils were permitted to pray in the playground at break. This policy of tolerance worked fine for a bit, but only because none of the kids wanted to. It was a purely theoretical rule. But last March, a girl knelt on her blazer to pray during break time, and 30 other pupils joined her. Miss Birbalsingh says that at once, 'the culture' of the school changed.