Ignore the ‘good grammar’ crowd and your prose will be better for it

‘Few things,’ says Toby Young, ‘are more likely to provoke the disapproval of the bien-pensant left than criticising someone’s grammar.’ I haven’t consulted all my colleagues in the Metropolitan Media branch of the bien-pensant left so speak for myself. Young is wrong. I have no objection to criticising someone else’s grammar, and I’m a zealot for English language teaching in schools. What I won’t do is cede that field to people whose complaints are unwarranted and – on matters of fact, not opinion – untrue.

That category includes purported traditionalists who have secured the undeserved attention of Michael Gove, lord chancellor and former education secretary. NM Gwynne, author of a pamphlet commended by Gove called Gwynne’s Grammar, modestly asks (and he is ‘only partly joking’) if his didactic piece of fluff is ‘the single most important book in print in the English language today’. I can answer that definitively: it’s not.