The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

The Oxbridge Files: which schools get the most pupils in?

Oxford and Cambridge have released figures showing how many offers they gave to pupils from schools in the 2022 Ucas application cycle. We have combined the figures in this table. It shows how well state grammars and sixth-form colleges compete with independent schools. Over the years, both universities have increased the proportion of acceptances from state schools: 69 per cent, up from 52 per cent in 2000. Of the 80 schools, 33 are independent, 26 grammar or partially-selective, 18 sixth-form colleges and three are comprehensives or academies. (Schools are ranked by offers received, then by offer-to-application ratio. If schools received fewer than three offers from one university, this number has been discounted due to Ucas’s disclosure control.

The Spectator

School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools

Hurstpierpoint College, West Sussex Hurstpierpoint College – or ‘Hurst’ – aims to provide an ‘excellent all-round education’ that enables every child to ‘achieve their own personal bests’. The school is located in the West Sussex countryside, is co-educational and for pupils aged four to 18 years. Its 140-acre campus is impressive and, having abandoned full boarding in 2019, it offers flexible and weekly boarding from Year 9, along with a chaperoned weekly train service from Clapham Junction. The college was established in 1849, and claims to have the oldest Shakespeare society in existence and the oldest school magazine in the country.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Would Richard Wagner have approved of the Wagner Group?

Wagnerian exile Would Richard Wagner have approved of the Wagner Group? While he is believed to have harboured anti-Semitic views and his music later became an inspiration for Adolf Hitler, the young Wagner was a left-wing activist. In 1849, in spite of serving with the Saxon court in Dresden, he joined an uprising against Prussian rule. He is believed to have been involved in making and distributing grenades and to have acted as a lookout. Several of his associates were killed or arrested and sentenced to death after the uprising failed, but Wagner fled to Switzerland. His exile had a happier outcome than that of Yevgeny Prigozhin, and he was able to return to Dresden 13 years later when a ban on him was lifted.

The Spectator

British conservatism is lurching from one crisis to another

No. 10 quickly asserted that the meltdown at National Air Traffic Services was a technical issue rather than a cyber attack. This was presumably meant to be reassuring. It is anything but. It speaks, once more, of a Britain with creaking infrastructure, where national paralysis has become a regular occurrence. The highest tax revenues in peacetime history have not created a properly functioning country.  The breakdown was caused by a single mis-filed flight plan. That such havoc can result from one trivial event does little credit to the organisation entrusted with our airspace. This week’s event may not be a cyber attack, but hostile states and organisations will be taking note.

Graham Allison

Tea Party at the End of Empire

We smashed china cups, saucers, sugar bowls, plates, teapots on slabs of paved-over lawn – ripped apart bodies of teabags, scattered their unholy remains amongst the splintered finery – out of plastic kettles, we sloshed hot water, drenched the mess in pretend, ritual sterilisation – and then we boogied, in the latest footwear, on our cemetery site – boozed up, music blaring from shiny, postmodern sound devices.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Dorries finally quits, Braverman cracks down on crime and Prigozhin is confirmed dead

Home Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, told police that they must investigate every theft and follow all reasonable leads to catch criminals; the Police Federation of England and Wales said forces were already ‘stretched beyond human limits’. Home Office figures showed that only 3.9 per cent of residential burglaries resulted in someone being charged, and for thefts from the person it was 0.9 per cent. Hartwig Fischer resigned as the director of the British Museum and Jonathan Williams stepped aside as his deputy when it became clear that information about 1,500 or so missing objects had been wrongly dismissed; police continued investigations.

The Spectator

Letters: The Lucy Letby killings shouldn’t mean we lose trust in all NHS managers

Murder mystery Sir: I once made a diagnosis of a very rare condition too late to cure the patient. She was nevertheless grateful and thanked me, though my conceit evaporated when she asked: ‘What took you so long?’ I suspect the managers at the Countess of Chester Hospital must feel as I did (‘Hospital pass’, 26 August). Murder was not on the top of their differential diagnoses. Many senior clinicians who have had leadership roles in NHS hospitals bear the scars of conflicts with management, though perhaps not as deep as those of the Chester paediatricians.  We would nevertheless acknowledge that most managers are dedicated, conscientious professionals committed to the success of their hospitals.

Wednesday

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Portrait of the week: Scottish drug deaths, more strikes and the Lucy Letby verdict

Home The number of drug deaths in Scotland fell to 1,051 in 2022, the lowest since 2017, but still the worst record per head in Europe. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, who in March had pledged ‘to stop the boats once and for all’, said that ‘there is not one simple solution and it can’t be solved overnight’. On a sunny Monday, 661 migrants landed in Britain in 16 small boats; one man, on making landfall, made the Albanian eagle gesture popular among football supporters. England was defeated 1-0 by Spain in the final of the women’s football World Cup; the Spanish Prime Minister said that Spanish FA president Luis Rubiales kissing the forward Jenni Hermoso on the lips afterwards was an ‘unacceptable gesture’.

The Spectator

Ulez expansion has gone ahead in defiance of evidence

London’s Ulez scheme has been expanded. A new network of cameras filming the traffic movements of millions of Londoners is now switched on. Old cars and vans, often used by sole traders, will be charged £12.50 a day if they pull out of their driveways. Keir Starmer had asked the London Mayor Sadiq Khan to ‘reflect’ on the policy after Labour lost the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election. Khan duly did, and concluded that he would stick to plan A. With 4,000 Londoners dying of air pollution every year, he said he had no option. But if that figure is correct, why has air pollution been mentioned in only one death certificate in four years? Nationally, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels have fallen 75 per cent over the past three decades, thanks to cleaner car engines.

The Spectator

Are whole life orders becoming more common?

Bank on it Does the August bank holiday actually celebrate anything? – When bank holidays were first established in 1871, the August bank holiday fell at the beginning of the month, allegedly because it was an important week for cricket in Yorkshire, the home county of MP Sir John Lubbock, who introduced the parliamentary act creating bank holidays. – It was moved to the Monday after the last Saturday in August as an experiment in 1965, largely because early August coincided with the annual factory closure, and many workers were on holiday then anyway. – In 1968 and 1969 the holiday fell in September, so in 1971 it was fixed as the last Monday in August. Except, that is, in Scotland, where it remains in early August.

The Spectator

Letters: Hollywood owners have ruined Wrexham FC

Wild abandon Sir: As upsetting and pointless as is the National Trust’s cancelling of the fishing lease on the River Test at Mottisfont Abbey (Letters, 19 August), it is all of a piece with the way the National Trust is going. On the 13,000-acre Wallington Estate in Northumberland, the Trust has recently spent a small fortune elaborately fencing off 50 acres to release beavers on one of the two farms they have recently taken out of agricultural production. They trumpet their intention to create ‘Wild Wallington’ by abandoning it to nature and planting trees on as much of the estate’s farmland as they can.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: Inflation falls, Hawaii burns and Oxford Street is raided

Home The annual rate of inflation fell to 6.8 per cent in July, from 7.9 per cent in June. Wages in the period of April to June were 7.8 per cent higher than a year earlier, according to the Office for National Statistics. GDP grew by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter, after growth of 0.1 per cent in the first quarter. The number of people inactive because of long-term sickness rose to more than 2.5 million, 400,000 more than at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unemployment rose from 3.9 per cent to 4.2 per cent. Food prices were 12.7 per cent higher in the four weeks to 6 August than a year earlier, according to Kantar, a research company. Wilko, the homeware chain with 400 outlets, was for sale after going into administration.

The Spectator

The government can’t be trusted with our data

This week Norfolk and Suffolk constabularies confessed that, replying to a freedom of information request, they had managed to release the personal details of 1,200 victims and witnesses of domestic abuse. The information was not readily visible but could be accessed by those with technical skills. The protection afforded by ID cards is only as good as the security of the system This came just a week after the Police Service of Northern Ireland admitted that it had similarly released, again in response to an FOI request, the names and ranks of its officers, along with the offices in which they were based. It is hard to think of a more damaging leak of private data. For years during the Troubles police officers in Ulster were being picked off, sometimes shot on their doorsteps.

The Spectator

2615: Bronze pile – solution

Unclued lights are some laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics. There were two CURIEs (35). The clued name was Max BORN (8). The title is an anagram of NOBEL PRIZE. First prize Sid Field, Stockton on Tees Runners-up David Carpenter, Sutton Coldfield G.

The Spectator

Where were the longest A&E waits?

The bare platform A 112-space car park built to serve the railway station in the Cambridgeshire village of Manea was used by just three cars in its first week. — The station, formerly a ghost station with one train a week, has been revived but even so is only served by two trains every hour. — Yet had it not been for the Civil War, it could have been the capital of England. Charles I planned an English Versailles there, surrounded by a great city called Charlemont – all built on land reclaimed from the fens. Thanks to the war, however, nothing ever got built. — The name Charlemont lives on as a cul-de-sac in the village (population 2,000) where you can buy a modest four-bedroom detached house for £400,000.

N.S. Thompson

View from a Window

1979 Break time. Out of the staff room window through             The fug of pipes and cigarettes The landscape of industrial decline             Has empty smokeless chimneys signal debts To history that never will be paid             Except by demolition. Cleanliness Of plate glass far prefers the playing fields             Whose straight white lines mean to impress. But as exhaust-filled smog rolls in, it seems             The goalposts move. What do we hear? ‘She’s right, the country needs...’ What, modernise?

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: The Crooked House fire, Liz Truss’s honours and a Commonwealth Games flop

Home The first of about 500 asylum seekers were taken to live on the Bibby Stockholm barge on the Isle of Portland, north of the prison and linked to the mainland by one road. The arrival of 339 migrants by small boat across the Channel at the weekend brought the year’s total to 15,071. The government declared it would increase enforcement action against lawyers who ‘coach illegal migrants to lie’ in making claims. Fines were to be tripled for employers and landlords who allow illegal migrants to work for them (up to £45,000 per illegal worker for a first breach) or rent their properties, the Home Secretary announced. The 18th-century Crooked House pub, near Dudley, was gutted by fire a fortnight after being sold, and the next day reduced to rubble by a mechanical digger.

The Spectator

2614: Monkey Business – solution

The key word is GIBBON (highlighted). 1A, 1D and 28D are types of gibbon; 16D is by 18A 29A Gibbon; 32D Gibbon wrote The History of the 13A 38A of the Roman Empire. First prize Anne Clements, Bromley, Kent Runners-up Janet Baines, Winchester, Hants; L.