The Spectator

About Last Night It was suggested that the BBC might ‘decolonise’ the Last Night of the Proms by removing ‘Rule, Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ made its first appearance at the Proms in 1902 (Edward Elgar’s march had been played the previous year without the words). Sir Henry Wood’s ‘Fantasia on British Sea Songs’ followed in 1905. But the Last Night in its modern form began only with the first televised Last Night in 1947. Twenty-two years later began another tradition: the BBC trying to remove patriotic songs from the programme. The move was defeated in 1969 and again in 1990, in the run-up to the Gulf War.

Home Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, made pupils wear face-coverings in school corridors. It didn’t take long for the UK government to follow suit in England, for secondary pupils in areas of high transmission. The chief medical officers of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales said that the fatality rate for those aged five to 14 infected with coronavirus was 14 per million, lower than for most seasonal flu infections. Sally Collier resigned as chief regulator of Ofqual, which had been caught up in the chaotic assessment of A-level and GCSE candidates. It was ‘vitally important’ for children to go back to school, said Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister.

The unclued lights were: 12 CORNI, anagram of Corin (As You Like It); 23 MANDIRA, Miranda (The Tempest); 27 LARDOON, Orlando (As You Like It); 38 GRADE, Edgar (King Lear); 1D SIROC, Osric (Hamlet); 8 HAMPERING, Erpingham (Henry V); 21D EUTROPHIC, Petruchio (The Taming of the Shrew); 34 ANGER, Regan (King Lear). Title: anagram of ‘the Bard’. First prize Mrs F.A.

Home The government seemed to be taken strangely unaware by the frenzy of recrimination that came its way when results were announced from a system put in place as a substitute for A-levels, cancelled in March. Schools had been told to present teachers’ assessments, to which Ofqual applied an algorithm supposed to iron out anomalies. Almost 40 per cent of teachers’ assessments were downgraded, but even so the proportion of A and A* grades was higher than ever. Yet anomalies abounded, and schools that had performed less well in recent years saw bright pupils penalised; black children and those from poor backgrounds were said to be hard hit. While candidates lamented lost places at medical school, the government did nothing.

Pink and twisted Bernard Matthews, which stopped making Turkey Twizzlers in 2005 after criticism about unhealthy school dinners from Jamie Oliver, announced it is reintroducing the product. It will contain up to 70% turkey, compared with 34% originally. — Bernard Matthews came up with the idea of making twisted pieces of turkey, allegedly as an accidental by-product from a machine which stamped out imitation drumsticks from reconstituted turkey meat. — The name ‘Twizzler’ was also used by a Pennsylvania confectionary company, Y&S Candies, from 1929. The product, still sold in the US, is made from corn syrup, flour and sugar, with strawberry flavouring. Covid courage How brave have the British public been feeling over Covid-19 in the past week?

Some like it hot Are heatwaves becoming a devalued currency? Last year the Met Office defined a heatwave as three consecutive days when maximum temperatures exceed the 90th percentile maximum temperature for mid-July. In London that means when the maximum exceeds 28˚C. For the rest of the south-east, as far west as Hampshire and as far north as Nottinghamshire, the threshold is 27˚C. For Dorset, Somerset, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire it is 26˚C, and everywhere else, including the West Country, most of Wales, the north of England and Scotland it is 25˚C. In places it will mean a heatwave occurring in 30 to 50 per cent of years. Journeys by dinghy How far do migrants have to travel in boats?

The future of offices Sir: I agree with much of Gerard Lyons’s article about the future of the capital (‘London in limbo’, 8 August), but there is more to consider. Before the virus, many organisations considered having staff working from home. However, there were always objections: people needed to be at meetings; the technology wasn’t good enough; questions over whether workers would work their contracted hours. With the onset of the virus, working from home was forced upon many, and has proved to work better than could ever have been expected. Will these workers ever want to come back to the office?

The unclued lights, 3/34, 12/31, 26/1A/33, 35/9, 39 and 18 PEAKE (an anagram of the red highlighted letters), are six of the actresses who appeared in the recent BBC production of Talking Heads.