The Times Companion to 2017: The best writing from The Times. Ian Brunskill

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СКАЧАТЬ in selective areas may not fare as well academically — both compared to local selective schools and comprehensives in non-selective areas.” The rest of the document is then an attempt to salvage selection from the jaws of this yawning disaster. The upshot will be that the conditions imposed on schools before they can opt to select will be so severe by the time the bill limps through parliament that there will be little incentive to do so. Most of the large academy chains have no need of selection. Mrs May’s speech on meritocracy was a grand vision saddled to a sorry policy.

      The fabled popular demand will dissipate too. Grammars were not abolished by Tony Crosland in a fit of socialist envy. They were closed by Margaret Thatcher because of middle-class parents complaining to local authorities that their children were not getting in. Young put the politics of grammar schools perfectly: “Every selection of one is a rejection of many.” Meritocracy has the unfortunate effect of making aspiration a zero-sum game. My very stupid children (well, not mine, yours), with all their good fortune, will have to fall down a snake while your bright poor child climbs a ladder. No ordinary middle-class parent is going to stand idly by while that happens. It therefore follows that the policy meritocrat will have to commit to some policies even more unpalatable than grammar schools.

      There is in fact a Meritocracy Party in Britain, which demands that the Queen abdicate and that only those with relevant experience, which would presumably include the Queen (Tory), be permitted to vote. They want inheritance tax at 100 per cent. I may have earned the money but my children have not and if advantage can be purchased, which it can, then the transfer from me to them impairs the principle of merit.

      Advantage goes back a long way. In 1693 John Locke wrote a parenting guide, Some Thoughts Concerning Education. The best recommendation was that children should eat no vegetables but the rest has worn well. Locke points out that good citizens are created by good parents and it’s still true. Educated parents are marrying their own kind and talking to their children. High-income parents talk with their school-aged children for three hours more per week than low-income parents. By the age of three a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words at home than one from a professional family.

      It matters. How children perform in tests when they are three and a half is a strong predictor of how well they do at school years later. The best way to predict a person’s social position at the age of 19 is attainment at 16, which in turn is best foretold by attainment at 11. And you can tell who is going to do well at 11 simply by looking up who did well at seven. A meritocracy would therefore withdraw resources from the later years of life and spend earlier in the life cycle. The only government member I recall taking this seriously is a little-remembered person by the name of Andrea Leadsom.

      The regime in Young’s Rise Of The Meritocracy collapses when the government takes the children of the poor into care to ensure equality of opportunity. Every politician wants the soft version of meritocracy in which the poor do well but nobody suffers. It’s a fantasy and that is why the pertinent response to Mrs May is not hysteria about a return to the 1950s but simply this: is that all you’ve got?

JEREMY PAXMAN: ‘I’M NOT ASHAMED TO SAY I’VE SUFFERED DEPRESSION’

       Interview by Janice Turner

      SEPTEMBER 24 2016

      JEREMY PAXMAN relished “war-gaming” interviews, a former Newsnight producer tells me: debating the research, plotting manoeuvres, setting bear traps into which ministers would tumble. So how do you war-game a man who knows all the moves? After his famous question about whether he prayed with George W Bush, Tony Blair cavilled at his intrusiveness and Paxo threw up his hands in faux innocence: “But prime minister, I’m just trying to work out what kind of chap you are.”

      What kind of a chap is Paxman, beneath the suits, the elaborate disdain, the position in our culture — vacant since he left Newsnight two years ago — as the scary tutor/imposing father who sees through our dissembling and flaws? His memoir, A Life in Questions, abounds with great hack yarns about Diana, Princess of Wales, and the Dalai Lama, war reporting, political scuffles and BBC crises, yet personal detail is sketchy. He has declared his three children and partner, Elizabeth Clough, absolutely out of bounds. Indeed, no girlfriend gets more than a single line. While Paxo the man — what he feels, whom he loves — emerges rarely and fleetingly from his carapace of high snark.

      So in 300-plus pages we glean that he sits on the toilet shooting squirrels out of the bathroom window, he’s happiest fishing and (thanks to an anecdote about Orthodox Jews) that he is uncircumcised. Yet those who know him well speak of a complicated man roiling with self-doubt who “struggles with existence”. Ask about his father, they say, whose approval he sought in vain. Ask about his depression. Ask Paxman if he is happy.

      We meet at Galvin La Chapelle in east London and I have bagged us a table alone on the mezzanine high above the shiny City lunch crowd. Paxman is late, caught in cross-town traffic from his Notting Hill flat where he lives three days a week rather than commute from his family home near Henley, Oxfordshire. I watch him walk very slowly up the stairs. He wore out his knee running, is considering replacement surgery and is clearly in pain. (Later, when I see him wincing and offer to carry his suit bag, he splutters and tells me to f *** off.) Otherwise he looks splendid for 66: lean apart from a slight bay-window belly; thick, almost white hair; fine skin with that rich man’s holiday burnish. His azure linen jacket with elaborate stitching is very natty.

      Old age, however, seems much on his mind and appears to revolt him. His most recent headlines were for blasting the magazine Mature Times for its stairlift ads and portrayal of people his age as “on the verge of incontinence, idiocy and peevish valetudinarianism”. (He has a rather Alan Partridge-esque vocabulary, calling party conferences the “gallimaufry of our democracy”.) I note that his memoir is rather ageist: he refers to “whiffy old wrinklies” and tells an unkind story about John Gielgud needing help to go to the loo. He writes that old people who don’t pay “direct” taxes (ie aren’t working) shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

      Does he use his free bus pass? The eyebrows shoot up.

      “I don’t have one.”

      Why not?

      “Because I’m still earning and I’m very happy if people want to give you a discount because you’re over a certain age. But I’ve just done four weeks filming a series about rivers. The week after next I’m in Washington. Why should I expect others to pay my Tube fare?”

      Why do you believe you should be allowed to vote but people who’ve retired from jobs you can’t do in old age — roofers, say — should not?

      “I did not say that!”

      You said no representation without taxation.

      “Yes. And there will come a point of course when no one asks me to do anything. It happens to all of us.”

      So in the meantime you should be allowed to vote but they shouldn’t?

      “Sometimes, life is like that, Janice. Unfair.”

      For the first 20 minutes, after Paxo has ordered “heritage tomato” salad (scorn about what “heritage” means), mutton (scorn about how much “lamb” is really mutton) and a glass of white wine (which he believes doesn’t count as real booze), the interview comprises me asking a question and him knocking it down. It feels like a bizarre stress dream in which I’m on Newsnight playing Jeremy Paxman while the real Jeremy Paxman harrumphs and sneers. He calls me (humorously, СКАЧАТЬ