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Tuesday

The Thinking Drinkers

A St Patrick’s Day guide to Irish whiskey

In the fifth century, Ireland suffered from a reptile dysfunction – it happens to the best of us. Pesky pagan snakes were everywhere, slippery anti-Christian evangelists making a nuisance of themselves, shedding their skin, swallowing hamsters whole and sticking their tongues out at everyone. But then the great Irish hero St Patrick came along. Except, Patrick, who had an Irish name (anglicized from Phádraig), was actually English. When he was 16, he was kidnapped and taken to Ireland as a slave, held there for six years before a brave escape back to England. Then, rather surprisingly given that ordeal, he decided to go back and preach Christianity. And now he’s

Monday

Fiona Mountford

Rebel Wilson’s crass humour was a bad fit for the BAFTAs

After the two oddest years in the history of the red carpet, when Covid restrictions saw stars accepting gongs from their sofas via Zoom, glitzy prizegivings as we (used to) know them are back. Last night’s BAFTA ceremony, from the Royal Albert Hall, marked the opening salvo of a two-week run-in of the biggies, as the Oscars follows at the end of the month. It was, reassuringly for fans and teeth-grindingly for detractors, the customary heady cocktail of self-absorption and virtue-signalling, along with acknowledgment of some very fine pieces of cinema. As well as Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. In recent years, awards ceremonies have tied themselves in all sorts of knots

Geoff Norcott Geoff Norcott

My dangerous flirtation with veganism

I have a confession to make to Spectator readers. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s time to come clean (no, I haven’t become a Labour voter – the Tories have been bad, but not that bad). I’ve been experimenting with using meat and dairy substitutes. Hear me out. I’m not proud of what I’ve done. As a right-of-centre comic, indulging in anti-woke sentiment, eating animal products is a badge of honour – the unspoken custom of our movement. Ceasing to do so is the kind of thing which could raise alarm within the ranks, like a bite on the neck in a zombie film. My main motivation for this possible

James Max

The home improvements that are shrewd investments – and what to avoid

Is the property market stagnating? According to the latest figures from the Nationwide House Price Index you could be forgiven for thinking that everything’s tickety-boo. Prices are up 1.7 per cent and annual growth now running at 12.6 per cent with the typical home up to 20 per cent higher than in February 2020. However, with inflation on the up, higher interest rates are on the way. Rising costs of living are seemingly out of control and there is increased market and economic uncertainty resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Whether the market remains competitive or stagnates, why move and go through all the hassle and expense when you could simply use the

Friday

Stephen Arnell

Refugees in film: a cinematic guide

The tragic ongoing events in Ukraine have highlighted the plight of refugees, with over 2m people (mainly women and children) fleeing the country since Russia invaded on 24 February 2022. Sadly, refugee crises have been occurring since the dawn of what may ironically be called ‘civilisation’, most notably the Biblical Exodus from Egypt and Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, which began when the Swiss Helvetii confederation, under pressure of Germanic tribes, sought to cross into Roman territory on their westward journey to safety. Movies concerning refugees range from the past (Exodus: Gods & Kings) to the dystopian future (Children of Men) and are international in scope, including the UK (Limbo), Bosnia and Herzegovina

Justin Doherty

Why taking cold showers could help Ukraine

I found myself in Berlin at the weekend gasping for breath in a cold shower, doing my bit for Ukraine. Berliners are a phlegmatic bunch but the arrival of a European war two hours from their doorstep is triggering memories of much darker periods of conflict and stirring not-so-dormant feelings of solidarity and direct action. Could cold showers be the answer? Last week the German government undid decades of foreign policy, announcing massive investment in German defence spending and sending anti-tank and air defence weapons to Ukraine. Chancellor Olaf Scholz called Putin’s invasion a Zeitenwende, a ‘watershed moment’ as he pledged €100 billion to upgrade German’s defence forces and committed

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

How to bake a no-chocolate chocolate cake

This week’s recipe is for a chocolate cake that is not a terribly traditional chocolate cake. But that is its charm. It uses only one egg, no butter and, most magically, absolutely no chocolate. Instead, it uses cocoa powder and boiling water: the boiling water releases a deeper, rounder flavour from the cocoa, which is enhanced by vanilla, a little strong coffee, and a pinch of salt. The cake’s flavour is a little like that of a packet mix of brownies – which is not to diminish it, but to signal its fudgy darkness. Feel free to swap the sugar for whatever you have: caster, granulated, even dark brown sugar would

Thursday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The hidden victims of lockdown: an interview with the Children’s Commissioner

When schools were closed during lockdown, it wasn’t only education that suffered. The classroom can offer an opportunity to identify children in danger of abuse, with tens of thousands of pupils on the at-risk register. Take away schools and this safety net vanishes. Now and again, stories emerged of just how badly things went wrong: for example, the murder of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes at the hands of his stepmother. ‘If that little boy had been in school, I do believe there would have been an extra chance to hear him,’ the Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza, tells me, when we meet at The Spectator’s offices to discuss her mission to

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The enduring appeal of school name tapes

I hadn’t thought about Cash’s name tapes for many years. My mother used to sew them into clothes I planned to take to school. Occasionally I find one in a sock or a threadbare T-shirt and feel wistful for the years past. My name tapes were white, with a navy, serif typeface. The other day, I discovered a pair of tights in the bottom of a drawer which belonged (or perhaps still belong) to my school friend Alice. Her name tapes were woven in green, with a sans serif typeface that looked like the Johnston one used on the London Underground. How did our mothers decide what typeface and colour

Kat Pierce

Why handwriting still matters

I work in learning support at a prep school in the South-East and have started teaching my pupils handwriting. It seems that the future of education, especially for children with special needs, is digital. But why should those who struggle to write legibly be given a laptop instead of extra lessons in handwriting? Faced with the obvious decline in the quality of handwriting, what are teachers to do? When in doubt, consult the English national curriculum. The handwriting curriculum for Key Stage 2 (aged eight to ten) is divided into three levels: working ‘towards expected standards’, working ‘at expected standards’ and working ‘at greater depth’. Students at the first level

Elisa Segrave

School trip: My déjeuner sur l’herbe

In 1966 we were 17 and about to do A-levels and leave our convent school for ever at the end of that summer term. Two girls were having a lesbian affair, another had been tempted to sleep with a boy, dramatically confessing this to our head nun, Mother Benedicta, in Mother B’s terrifying private room halfway up the staircase. Our head girl, Vanessa, had an older sister who would roar down to the school on the back of her boyfriend’s motorbike along with his friends, known as ‘leather boys’. Vanessa was worried about her sister living in sin. ‘The sins of the flesh are not the worst sins my child,’

Gerri Peev

The curious social backlash that comes with private education

‘If this is the top of the class, I would hate to see the rest of them.’ That was the withering verdict of the woman I had just handed over hundreds of pounds to on a hunch that my child wasn’t doing as well as I was being told. Gloria (name changed) is what misogynists would call a battle-axe. Officially, though, she was a formidable retired head of a highly selective pre-prep. She shared her townhouse with a pet chihuahua that was as terrifying. My then seven-year-old had just undergone a battalion of tests in her pristine kitchen. His ‘only’ potential, apparently, was that he had a reading age three

Harry Mount

From the brainiacs to the bluffers: a guide to public school stereotypes

A Wykehamist, an Old Etonian and an Old Harrovian are in a bar. A woman walks in. The Old Etonian says: ‘Fetch her a chair!’ The Wykehamist gets it. The Old Harrovian sits in it. It’s the oldest public-school joke in the world — and it still has the ring of truth. (Though you might add these days: ‘And then the Old Etonian becomes prime minister.’) But what about the other public schools? Here are the classic characteristics of our most famous schoolboys — and schoolgirls. Charterhouse Artistic, literary, louche, political and on the make… the received wisdom about Old Carthusians was set in stone in the Alms for Oblivion

James Kirkup James Kirkup

The march of the middle-class apprentices

Tony Blair used to joke that he could announce the start of a war during a speech on skills policy and no one would notice. Like all the best jokes, it contained more than a grain of truth. Britain — or rather educated Britain — has never been interested in the parts of our education and training system that don’t involve doing A-levels and going to university. Blair did a great deal to entrench the social and cultural dominance of university with his aspiration that half of all school leavers should go into higher education. That was, on aggregate, the right policy for the country and its economy: the expansion

Jim Knight

We need more technology in classrooms – not less

The government has rightly identified that improving education will help ‘level up’ Britain. Higher-quality teaching is one tool to get there, but with roughly a third of teachers leaving the profession within five years of qualifying, better teacher training won’t be a quick enough fix to turn things around within its eight-year target. What’s needed is a massive roll-out of educational technology to provide teacher support. When I was a schools minister, I oversaw an agency that advised and procured technology. We had a school rebuilding programme that embedded effective technology in its design. We also managed to get half a million of the most disadvantaged children online at home

Debbie Hayton

The confused language of gender identity ideology

‘I think I might be transgender!’ How should schools react to such revelations? By the time they find out, the child may already be convinced that their identity lies on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. Probably with its own multi-coloured flag. But while social media influencers are quick to dispense answers, schools are left to cope with the consequences, with little understanding of what is really going on. Stonewall and Mermaids — large publicly funded LGBT+ charities — would have us believe that we all have an innate gender identity that determines whether we are men or women, or perhaps neither. But that’s all it is — a belief. However, gender identity

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

The dark art of ‘off-rolling’ unwanted pupils

Sometimes a school wants to exclude a child but can’t. The student might have difficult needs that are costing money or taking too much time to deal with. Or their exam results might be looking likely to damage the school’s standing. But children can’t lawfully be excluded for getting bad grades or for needing more attention. Schools, though, have a way to get them off their books. They ‘off-roll’ them, a practice which is illegal. In 2017, in the first widely reported case of off-rolling, St Olave’s grammar school in London told 16 pupils that their places in Year 13 had been withdrawn because they did badly in their AS-level

Andrew Adonis

The case for state boarding schools

My philosophy of education has always been simple and I believe it unites right and left: namely, what wise parents would wish for their child, so the community should wish for all children. It’s a paraphrase of R.H. Tawney, who — being a socialist — said ‘state’ rather than ‘community’. I much prefer ‘community’ since it is an injunction to us all, including to local government, charities and social organisations, as well as to the state and its servants. I feel this intensely personally, since the community — in the form of a local authority, Camden council in London — was my legal parent for the whole of my childhood.

Peter Hitchens

No screens, shared bathwater and ugly food: my life in a 1960s prep school

We were allowed one phone call, faint and crackling along the many miles of copper wire which connected Hampshire with Dartmoor. In those days (this was the early 1960s) the operator had to connect it. I had watched those wires, swooping alongside the train which had borne me all that way, wisps of smoke and steam drifting past the window. Now, with the September evening coming on, there was time for a few stilted words in the headmaster’s study with my parents. It would in many ways have been better not to bother, as it only emphasised the distance and the separation. Then it was term. I don’t want to

The Spectator

Schools portraits: a snapshot of four notable schools

Colville Primary School Based just off Notting Hill’s Portobello Road, Colville Primary School occupies a Victorian Grade II-listed building that was once a laundry. Today, it accommodates pupils up to the age of 11 who are taught under the school’s ‘three key values’: respect, aspiration and perseverance. Colville also says it believes in the British values of democracy, individual liberty and tolerance. The school’s performance has shot up over the past decade: three years ago, it was rated ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted. Despite its setting in the heart of London, there’s plenty of area for play — the playground facilities are new, and there’s also a large ball court and running