I’ve finally arrived. No, I’m not talking about being in Who’s Who or going on Desert Island Discs. I’m talking about a stalker.
Okay, ‘stalker’ is a slight exaggeration. The woman in question hasn’t actually started going through my bins. She’s more of a cyber-stalker. For the past week or so, she’s sent me a message on Twitter roughly once an hour and, oh boy, are they abusive. I’m a ‘racist’, apparently, not to mention a ‘meeja tart’, a ‘half-rate novelist’ and ‘a joke’. And that’s just the stuff I can repeat in public. The extraordinary thing is, she writes for the Guardian and the New Statesman.
The whole saga started when the Evening Standard ran a story saying that the West London Free School had sent home an African-Caribbean boy because he turned up at school with an inappropriate haircut. He’d had a ‘number one’, which is explicitly forbidden by the school rules, just as it is in hundreds of schools up and down the country. No big deal. He was allowed back the following day and then we broke up for half term. But, somehow, the story ended up in the Standard and, inevitably, it was picked up by the Guardian where it was read by this left-wing loon.
She immediately fired off a message to me on Twitter: ‘Racist. Downright racist.’ I gently explained that it would have been racist to hold the boy in question to a lower standard because he’s black. As Katharine Birbalsingh pointed out at last year’s Tory party conference, it’s precisely because so many comprehensives don’t have the same expectations of African-Caribbean boys as they do of other children that they have a history of underachievement.
‘Completely and utterly racist,’ she replied. The only reason I could ‘pretend otherwise’ is because I was ‘blinded’ by my own ‘privilege’.
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